The Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO) has sponsored a two-week training session on writing local African languages in Arabic script.
The session was held by the Center of Arabic for Non-Arabic Speakers in cooperation with the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and the Yusuf Al-Khalifa Center for Writing Languages in Arabic Script at the International University of Africa (IUA).
The training session on writing local African languages in Arabic script was hosted at IUA headquarters and benefited over forty participants from twenty African countries.
The beneficiaries were introduced to the latest developments in language computerization and the educational strategies and technical steps for computerizing local oral languages and writing them in Arabic script. They then presented various research projects on local idioms, proverbs and stories, some of which they translated and wrote in Arabic script.
The training session, which was facilitated by experts in linguistics, language computerization and educational sciences, comes in the implementation of the terms of the cooperation agreement signed between ICESCO, IsDB and IUA, which is aimed at responding to the needs of Member States in preserving the local languages of Muslim African communities by writing them in Arabic script.