Dubai, UAE- March 18, 2016: Diglossia FZ, LLC was named as the 2016 GESS Education Start-up Company of the Year at the GESS Education Awards gala dinner in Dubai.

Master of Ceremonies Ewan McIntosh presented the award with the comments “Start-ups. It is the hardest thing to do. You fall in love with an idea early on and everyone tells you it’s a stupid idea and it won’t work, yet for some crazy reason you keep going and you build it. The difference is 1% of start-ups find something that no one else does… and that’s relevance. They actually build a product that people want and people need. That’s exactly what the winners of this award have done, and this year’s winner is Diglossia.”

Diglossia is indeed a start-up, happy to be located in Twofour54, Abu Dhabi’s media free zone. “With the help of Twofour54, we were able to launch the company with confidence that all requirements were met and that we are in good standing to begin hiring new employees, to develop Arabic tests for native speakers that will provide rich data on multiple levels of measure,” said Mimi Jett, co-founder and CEO.

The relevance Diglossia brings to Arabic language education is support in the form of assessments and actionable data. The company launched with a mission to provide educators with the data they need to improve literacy rates throughout the MENA region. In addition to newly released placement and vocabulary assessments, the company is in the process of building the first benchmark tests for Arabic language arts, which will test vocabulary, reading, and writing against the WLI (World Languages Initiative) Arabic standards. Both the Test of Arabic Language Arts (developed in partnership with Emirates National Schools) and the Arabic Beginning Reading Assessment (developed in partnership with the Arab Thought Foundation) are designed to assess Arabic literacy development of native speakers of Arabic in the primary and secondary grades.

In addition to serving the education sector, Diglossia also works with employers and industries to provide workforce screening and language proficiency tests in both Arabic and English.