MILLEDGEVILLE - When it came time for Joseph Williams to choose a foreign language to fulfill a university requirement, he wasn’t interested in such offerings as Spanish or French.
Instead, he chose Arabic.
“I knew that right now, with the current climate in the world, Arabic might be useful if I wanted to choose a career with the FBI or government,” said Williams, a senior criminal justice major at Georgia College & State University.
Williams was one of the first students to take Arabic when it became available at the university this past fall. Georgia College is the only university in the midstate to offer Arabic.
“Arabic is a very important language worldwide,” said Roger Noel, chairman of modern foreign languages at Georgia College. “If we had more people who (could) deal with the culture and the language, we may be in better shape than we are right now, politically speaking.”
The instructor, Fatma Al Maamari, comes to the university from Oman through the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program.
Each year, Georgia College will receive a new instructor through the program, Noel said. The university plans to offer advanced levels of Arabic and eventually develop a certificate in Middle Eastern studies.
Arabic, spoken predominantly in 22 countries, is one of the fastest growing languages in higher education. Between 1998 and 2002, enrollment in Arabic courses nearly doubled, according to the most recent survey of foreign language enrollments by the Modern Language Association.
Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the association, said she expects the trend to continue at schools.
“If (Arabic enrollments) don’t double in our current survey, we’ll be pretty close,” she said.
Foreign language enrollments often are affected by what’s going on in the world, Feal said. After the Cold War and the launch of Sputnik, for example, interest in Russian increased, she said.
Kristin Bean, a senior at Georgia College, took Arabic in the fall because of its frequent presence in the media.
“You’ll be watching CNN or other news channels, and they’ll flash this script at the bottom,” she said.
She said she always wondered what the words meant, and now she gets excited when she recognizes words she learned in class.
Arabic is not an easy language to learn, Bean said.
“It’s kind of crazy at first because you write backwards, and it looks like a bunch of lines or dots or squiggles,” she said.
Not only is Arabic read right to left, but it also has a different alphabet, with 28 letters that change shape depending on their placement in the word.
Still, Al Maamari said she has received a lot of interest in her class. The first introductory class in the fall had about 15 students, and her current second-level class has seven.
She said about 30 people - students and community members - have expressed interest in the next introductory class this coming fall.
“Americans, they would like to know more about our culture,” she said.
Al Maamari is more than happy to oblige.
“Our message is to teach people how to use the language and to understand the culture,” she said. “Let others know that it’s not just the war.”
Tuesday, Al Maamari hosted Arabic Night, in which she taught more than 60 people about Arab culture and customs. She shared homemade Arab cakes with the group and held a fashion show of Arab dress.
Laura Brett Harshbarger, a junior at Baldwin County High School and a joint-enrollment student at Georgia College, attended and said she had been interested in the culture and language ever since she did a project about Saudi Arabia a few years ago.
She tried learning Arabic on her own by checking out books and taking online classes, but she said she needed the help of a native speaker and jumped at the chance to take Al Maamari’s class.
She said she hopes to have a job in the Middle East some day and plans on continuing her Arabic studies.
