Surfing the shabaka

THE Arab world from Rabat to Baghdad likes to surf. The proportion of Arabs online grew 30-fold between 2000 and 2012. Shaking off their stuffy image, 41% of Saudi internet users are on Twitter, the highest rate in the world. But Arabic speakers have far less content in their native language than others do. By some estimates, fewer than 1% of all web pages are in Arabic.

Back in the early days this was because the internet could only support Roman scripts, so Arabic-speakers had to transliterate into a web language using a combination of letters and numerals. But by the late 1990s that had been fixed. In 2000 Maktoob, an Arabic internet-services firm founded in Jordan but now owned by Yahoo, launched the first Arabic e-mail. Facebook added an Arabic-language interface in 2009. But content in the world’s fifth-most-spoken tongue is still patchy, as is quality. Searches in Arabic often lead you to a forum rather than a well-designed website.

The reasons for Arabic’s lag are many. For international companies, English is an easy lingua franca, while the burgeoning Chinese- or Spanish-speaking markets are a higher priority than the Arab world, much of which is still poor. Even in the Middle East, Arabic was not always the number one choice. Bloggers frequently chose to write in English to reach a bigger audience abroad or to try to evade censors at home. Five of the 14 countries where Freedom House, a lobby group based in Washington, considers the internet “not free” are Arab states; in no country in the region is the web fully uncensored.

As more Arabs go online (and get richer), enthusiasm for creating Arabic content is rising. Beirut and Amman have become regional tech hubs. Entrepreneurs are creating Arabic e-books and search-engines, as well as Arabic smartphone apps to find local restaurants or a dentist. Some reckon more bloggers are now opting for their native tongue.

But Arabic-speakers’ “second-class experience of the internet” will end only when users can navigate their way around websites in Arabic script too, says Yasmin Omer of Dot Shabaka, a company that aims to do just that; shabaka means network in Arabic. Since February, companies can now buy addresses that end in “dot shabaka”—in Arabic script—rather than, say, .com or .org. International hotel chains are among the first to have signed up.