Every brand publishing video in this region eventually faces the same meeting: do we make this in Arabic, in English, or both? The answer usually gets decided by habit or by whoever is loudest in the room. It deserves better, because the numbers behind the question are genuinely surprising.
We are Fine Line Production in Beirut. We script and produce in Arabic and English, so we have no language to sell you. What we have is the data, and a portfolio of both, which makes this an honest place to work the question through.
The strangest gap on the internet
UNESCO describes Arabic as used daily by more than 400 million people. Yet according to W3Techs' continuously updated survey of website content languages, Arabic is the content language of just 0.6% of websites, while English accounts for 49.5% (figures as of late July 2026).
Read those two sentences together: one of the most spoken languages on earth has almost no proportional presence in online content. For brands, that gap is not a problem, it is an opening. English content competes with half the internet. Arabic content competes with almost nobody, for an audience of hundreds of millions.
People buy in their own language
The commercial evidence is old news in the localization industry and still ignored in marketing meetings. CSA Research's "Can't Read, Won't Buy" survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information in their native language, and 40% will never buy from websites in other languages at all.
Video sharpens this further, because spoken language carries accent, humour and trust in ways text does not. A viewer who comfortably reads your English caption may still feel that a brand speaking their Arabic is speaking to them, and a brand speaking English is speaking near them.
Where your audience actually is
The audience this decision concerns is young and lives on social platforms. ASDA'A BCW's 15th annual Arab Youth Survey (2023, 3,600 face-to-face interviews across 53 cities in 18 Arab states) found 61% of young Arabs get their news from social media, and no single platform dominates: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and TikTok all matter within a few points of each other.
That fragmentation is a production fact: whatever language you choose, you are producing versions, vertical and horizontal, long and short, per platform. Which means the Arabic-or-English question is really a versioning question, and versioning is exactly where the answer gets easier.
The honest answer: it depends on who the film is for
There is no universally right language, there is only your audience. A rough guide from our own work:
- Arabic first when the audience is the public in Lebanon or the region: awareness campaigns, TVCs, social content meant to travel. Our mental health broadcast spot for Embrace and the Ministry of Public Health lives inside a Lebanese living room in Arabic, because that is where its audience lives: Step by Step TVC.
- English first when the audience is international: donor reporting, investor content, global launches.
- Both, planned from the start, when the film must do two jobs. When the Embassy of Canada commissioned I Am Strong, a documentary about Lebanese women after the 2024 war, it was delivered in English, French and Arabic versions, each carrying the same structure to a different audience.
Regional dialect is a real decision inside "Arabic" too. We have scripted campaign films across regional Arabic dialects, and delivered fully bilingual work, including a COVID-19 awareness animation for UNIDO made in both languages. Lebanese Arabic, Gulf audiences and formal fus'ha are different choices with different effects, which is a conversation to have at the script stage, not the subtitle stage.
Versioning is cheap, retrofitting is not
The practical takeaway: decide languages in pre-production. A shoot that knows an Arabic and an English version are coming records what both need. Voice-over, subtitling in both directions, and multi-language versions are standard parts of our production planning, and the earlier they enter the plan the less they cost. The same logic we described for accessibility applies to language: reach is designed in, not bolted on.
If your brand is still deciding, start from one question: in which language does your audience talk about you? Make the film in that language, version it into the other, and stop letting the meeting decide by habit. Our full production range is on the services page. Email info@finelineprod.com, call +961 1 741 744, or use the contact page.