The world celebrates on the eighteenth of December each year the World Arabic Language Day, which was designated by the United Nations to celebrate the Arabic language. The Arabic language has crossed a long path until it became among the global languages used in the United Nations, after strenuous efforts made by Arab countries to use Arabic in various international organizations affiliated with the United Nations, especially since the Arabic language is an essential pillar of human cultural diversity throughout history with the millions of books it has produced in various fields of knowledge and civilization. Not only (400) million Arabs speak it, but it is circulated by nearly 2 billion Muslims around the world in practicing the rituals and obligations of Islam. 

Arabic is characterized by its ability to arabize and contain words from other languages under specific precise conditions. It has the property of synonymy, opposites, and verbal homonyms. It is also characterized by a set of stylistic and aesthetic phenomena and the phenomenon of metaphor, antithesis, alliteration, comparison, rhyming prose, and simile. And by the arts of speech such as eloquence and its rhetorical flourishes. The saying of the poet Ahmed Shawky is indeed fulfilled in it:

He who filled the languages with merits... made beauty and its secret in the Dhad (Arabic). 

The Presence of Arabic:  

Arabic speakers are distributed among the Arab region and many other neighboring regions such as Turkey, Chad, Mali, Senegal and Eritrea. Arabic is of utmost importance to Muslims, as it is a sacred language (the language of the Quran), and prayer (and other acts of worship) in Islam are not performed except by mastering some of its words. Arabic is also a major ritual language for a number of Christian churches in the Arab region, where many of the most important Jewish religious and intellectual works in the Middle Ages were written in it.

The Arabic language allows entry into a world full of diversity in all its forms and images, including the diversity of origins, backgrounds and beliefs. It has also created, in its various oral and written, formal and colloquial forms, and its various calligraphies and prose and poetic arts, wonderful aesthetic signs that capture hearts and minds in various fields including, but not limited to, engineering, poetry, philosophy and singing. Arabic prevailed for long centuries of its history as the language of politics, science and literature, thus exerting a direct or indirect influence on many other languages in the Islamic world, such as: Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Urdu, Malay, Indonesian, Albanian and some other African languages such as Hausa and Swahili, and some European languages, especially Mediterranean ones such as Spanish, Portuguese, Maltese and Sicilian.

Arabic poetry constitutes the peak of dealing with Arabic, followed by artistic prose, Arabic Maqamas, stories and tales, from a creative point of view. The Arabic language also carried all the elements of knowledge from the analysis of poetry and rhetoric and the interpretation of the Holy Quran.

In addition, it represented a stimulus for the production and dissemination of knowledge, and helped to transfer Greek and Roman scientific and philosophical knowledge to Europe in the Renaissance. It also allowed the establishment of dialogue between cultures along the land and sea routes of the Silk Road from the coasts of India to the Horn of Africa.

Arabic in the United Nations: 

In the context of supporting and promoting multilingualism and multiculturalism in the United Nations, the United Nations Department of Global Communications adopted

a resolution on the eve of the celebration of the International Mother Language Day to celebrate each of the six official languages of the United Nations. Accordingly, it was decided to celebrate the Arabic language on December 18, being the day on which General Assembly Resolution 3190(D-28) dated December 18, 1973 was issued concerning the introduction of the Arabic language among the official and working languages in the United Nations.

After efforts made since the fifties of the last century, which resulted in the issuance of UN General Assembly Resolution No. 878, Ninth Session, dated December 4, 1954, which permits written translation only into the Arabic language, and limits the number of pages to four thousand pages per year, on condition that the requesting state pays the translation costs, and that these documents are of a political or legal nature of concern to the Arab region.

In 1960, UNESCO took a resolution to use the Arabic language in regional conferences organized in Arabic-speaking countries and to translate basic documents and publications into Arabic. In 1966, a resolution was adopted to promote the use of the Arabic language in UNESCO, and it was decided to provide simultaneous interpretation services into Arabic and from Arabic into other languages within the framework of plenary sessions. In 1968, Arabic was gradually adopted as a working language in the organization, with the start of translating work documents and verbatim minutes and providing simultaneous interpretation services into Arabic.

Arab diplomatic pressure continued, in which Morocco stood out in cooperation with some other Arab countries, until they were able to make Arabic used as an oral language during General Assembly sessions in September 1973. After the League of Arab States issued a resolution in its sixtieth session to make the Arabic language among the official languages of the United Nations and its other bodies, General Assembly Resolution No. 3190 was issued during the 28th session in December 1973 recommending making the Arabic language an official language of the General Assembly and its bodies. As for the issue of using the Arabic language as a working language in the sessions of the Executive Board, it was included in the agenda in 1974 at the request of the vernments of Algeria, Iraq, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Kuwait, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Tunisia, the Arab Republic of Egypt, and Lebanon.

In October 2012, at the 190th session of the Executive Board of UNESCO, it was decided to devote December 18 as World Arabic Language Day, and UNESCO celebrated this day for the first time that year. 

References: 

• https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/

• https://www.un.org/ar/observances/arabiclanguageday