ABU DHABI, 5th August, 2026 (WAM) -- The Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre (ALC) will publish the winning works from the fifth edition of its Research Grant Programme under the Basaer (Insights) Research Papers and Studies Series.
The initiative is part of the centre’s ongoing efforts to support specialised research in the Arabic language and its sciences, while reinforcing Arabic’s position as a language of knowledge and culture.
These publications will be unveiled by the centre at the forthcoming edition of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, scheduled to take place from 13th to 18th September 2026.
The winning works comprised seven research projects spanning a broad range of linguistic, literary and heritage studies.
These included The Arabs’ Discovery of Japan: From the Russo-Japanese War to World War II by Dr Reem Ahmed Saleh; The Dream, the Prison and Ibn al-Haytham’s Dark Room: A New Reading of Space in Arab Civilization by Dr Lina Jammal; Arabic-English Dictionary of Collocations by researcher Ramadan Mohamed Ahmed Bakhit; Dictionary of Postmodern Narrative by Ahmed Khreis; The Celestial Star in the French Conquest, authored by Yuhanna bin Yusuf Warsi al-Faransi and edited and studied by author and researcher Sheherazade Al-Arabi; and One Hundred and One Nights, prepared and edited by Dr Haitham Mahmoud Sharkawi, Naoya Katsumata and Ahmad Zein Eddin.
Dr. Ali bin Tamim, Chairman of the ALC, said, “The Research Grant Programme is one of the centre’s strategic initiatives, supporting scholarly research in the Arabic language. It encourages researchers to produce rigorous work that keeps pace with advances in knowledge and enriches Arabic scholarship with high-quality studies of lasting academic value. The programme also reflects the centre’s commitment to strengthening the position of Arabic as a language of science, knowledge and creativity."
The fifth edition attracted strong interest from researchers, receiving 516 applications from 36 countries. Following a rigorous evaluation and peer review process, seven research projects were selected to receive grants.
This growing level of participation reflects the programme’s increasing prominence as one of the leading initiatives supporting specialised research in the Arabic language and its related fields.
Recent figures confirm the programme’s continued growth and expanding impact. The sixth edition in 2026 received 623 applications from 34 countries, reflecting its growing standing among researchers and academic institutions within the Arab world and beyond.
The centre launched the Research Grant Programme in 2021 to encourage researchers specialising in the Arabic language to undertake original research projects that advance Arabic studies and strengthen the language’s standing in academic and cultural spheres.
The programme awards between six and eight research grants each year across the fields of Literature and Criticism, Arabic Lexicon, Academic Curricula, Teaching Arabic to Non-Arabic Speakers, Manuscript Editing, and Applied and Computational Linguistics. It also allocates a total annual fund of AED600,000 to support these grants.