Arabic for Fayeq Oweis is more than a mother tongue. It is his career and a passion.
Oweis, who taught Arabic in the US for many years, is seeking to strengthen Arabic's share in the technology arena. Through his current position as the manager of the Arabic localisation team at Google, Oweis strongly believes that Arabic is a thriving language and can be adapted to modern technology.
"Personally, I think there are three main threats to Arabic in Arab countries," said 49-year-old Oweis. "The first is the danger of using foreign terminology despite the fact that there are Arabic synonyms. Secondly, the danger of writing Arabic in using foreign letters, and thirdly the inclusion of different dialects in the content or the sentence."
"One of the things that I would like to do is to move away from these three dangers, and use proper and correct Arabic in the technology field, " he said.
"Our language is beautiful. It can be adapted to technology. So why not use it?"
Oweis agreed that introducing some expressions and phrases is a natural phenomenon in the development of a language. He adds, "in some cases [only], but should [it] not have all expressions in English".
Before joining Google, Oweis taught Arabic language and culture at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University in California. He also worked for many years as an Arabic specialist and as a consultant for major technology companies in Silicon Valley.
At Google, he was responsible for localising many products into Arabic, including Gmail, YouTube and recently Google+.
Oweis was born in the West Bank city of Ramallah and has spent the last 25 years in the US. He is a visual artist and has designed the exterior entrance way murals and the calligraphy of the dome at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, as noted in his biography provided by Google.
He has also co-designed and directed the first Arabic/Islamic mural in San Francisco, and was a lead artist for the cultural mural honouring Dr Edward Saeed at San Francisco State University.
He is the author of Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists, an award winning book featuring 100 Arab American visual artists.
