SPH-LENS: A Socio-Political-Historical Framework for Early Warning of Arabic Language Attrition as a National Security Threat

Abstract

Arabic is widely celebrated as a “living and powerful language” – boasting over 400 million speakers and official status across 22 Arab states – yet evidence of its declining societal role reveals an underappreciated security risk. This paper reframes the erosion of Arabic not as a cultural footnote but as a first-order national security challenge. Building on the Socio-Political-Historical (SPH) conceptual foundation, the paper integrates sociolinguistic capital theory and linguistic hegemony to illustrate how Arabic language attrition – manifesting through domain losses and prestige decline – can unravel social cohesion. The paper critique conventional language vitality indices (e.g., UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages and Ethnologue’s EGIDS) for their static, lagging indicators that deem Arabic “Safe” and argue they fail to capture dynamic early-warning signs of shift. In response, the paper present SPH-LENS (Socio-Political-Historical Language Early Warning and National-Security System), a new framework that operationalises Arabic attrition risk monitoring. SPH-LENS comprises three core dimensions – Socioeconomic (S), Political (P), and Historical (H) – each justified theoretically and populated with concrete, measurable indicators from existing global data (e.g., UIS, OpenAlex, WIPO, W3Techs, Wikimedia, EF EPI, Constitute Project, Freedom House, World Bank GTMI, and UNESCO media statistics).