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Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as (اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
Arabic is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations, and the Sacred language of Islam. Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have loanword words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, and Sicilian) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese language is a Semitic language developed from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet. The Balkans languages, including Albanian, Greek language, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian, have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish.
Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian language, Turkish language, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), (1997). 9780231111522, Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231111522 Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian language, Kazakh language, Bengali language, Malay language (Indonesian and Malaysian), Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi language, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog language, Sindhi language, Odia Language, Hebrew language and African languages such as Hausa language, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali language, Tamazight, and Swahili language. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its Sister language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to a lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian.
Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims. In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic the fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese, and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script that is written from Right-to-left.
Classical Arabic (and Modern Standard Arabic) is considered a conservative language among Semitic languages, it preserved the complete Proto-Semitic three grammatical cases and declension (ʾIʿrab), and it was used in the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic since it preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes.Cornelis Henricus Maria "Kees" Versteegh (1997). 9780231111522, Columbia University Press. . ISBN 9780231111522
In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic. On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B, Thamudic D, Safaitic, and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.9781315147062 ISBN 9781315147062
Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic", a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston, 2011. Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic at italic=no, in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as the conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum.
It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced—epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after the towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to the fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic.
The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in Avdat, and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the italic=no king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria (Zabad, Jebel Usays, Harran, italic=no). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical Arabic".
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the Vernacular developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the court of Al-Hirah. During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax.
By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides, the Al-Andalus Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic—Arabic written in Hebrew alphabet.
First published online: 2021
First print edition: 9789004435964, 20210701, 2021–4
Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized the overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior.
The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab (لسان العرب, "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290.
In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus, the zajal and Muwashshah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb.
In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted the need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship').
In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve the inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts.
In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League. These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, Neologism in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward the standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language. This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era, especially in modern times.Abdulkafi Albirini. 2016. Modern Arabic Sociolinguistics (pp. 34–35).
Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children.
The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages) in medieval and early modern Europe.
MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" (فُصْحَى ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.
Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows:
MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., 'to go') that is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم 'film' or ديمقراطية 'democracy').
The current preference is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use (e.g., فرع 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing Semitic root (استماتة 'apoptosis', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into the Xth form, or جامعة 'university', based on جمع 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية 'republic', based on جمهور 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk').
Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages."Arabic Language." Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2009. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations.Trentman, E. and Shiri, S., 2020. The Mutual Intelligibility of Arabic Dialects. Critical Multilingualism Studies, 8(1), pp.104–134., a sample of Nabataean script, considered a direct precursor of Arabic script]]The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as and , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising.
Hassaniya Arabic, Maltese language, and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic Church) Malta and written with the Maltese alphabet. Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic, though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not a type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus.
In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on the region may be mutually unintelligible.Janet C.E. Watson, The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic , Introduction, p. xix. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Proceedings and Debates of the 107th United States Congress Congressional Record, p. 10,462. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 2002.Shalom Staub, Yemenis in New York City: The Folklore of Ethnicity , p. 124. Philadelphia: Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1989. Daniel Newman, Arabic-English Thematic Lexicon , p. 1. London: Routledge, 2007. Rebecca L. Torstrick and Elizabeth Faier, Culture and Customs of the Arab Gulf States , p. 41. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own.Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture , p. 32. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers Code-switching back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence.
The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi language and Urdu language, Serbian language and Croatian, Scots language and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot.Clive Holes, Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties , p. 3. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004.
While there is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.Nizar Y. Habash, Introduction to Arabic Natural Language Processing , pp. 1–2. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool, 2010.
From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India , pp. 14–15. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. 1916–1925). The flag contains the four Pan-Arab colors: black, white, green and red. |alt=]]
In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of the Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises."Suleiman, p. 93
Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries.
This lexicographic tradition was traditionalist and corrective in nature—holding that linguistic correctness and eloquence derive from Qurʾānic usage, , and Bedouin speech—positioning itself against laḥnu‿l-ʿāmmah (لَحْن العامة), the solecism it viewed as defective.
For the origin of the last three borrowed words, see Alfred-Louis de Prémare, Foundations of Islam, Seuil, L'Univers Historique, 2002. Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persian languages are, as presented in De Prémare's above-cited book:
(1) Early 9th century, script with no dots or diacritic marks;(2) and (3) 9th–10th century under the Abbasid dynasty, Abu al-Aswad's system established red dots with each arrangement or position indicating a different short vowel; later, a second black-dot system was used to differentiate between letters like and ;
(4) 11th century, in al-Farāhidi's system (system used today) dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels.]]A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas & Manfredi (2020).
English language has many Arabic loanwords, some directly, but most via other Mediterranean languages. Examples of such words include admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah, magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff, and zenith. Other languages such as Maltese language and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.
Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber languages taẓallit, "prayer", from salat (صلاة )), academic terms (like Uyghur language mentiq, "logic"), and economic items (like English coffee) to placeholder name (like Spanish language fulano, "so-and-so"), everyday terms (like Hindustani lekin, "but", or Spanish taza and French language tasse, meaning "cup"), and expressions (like Catalan language a betzef, "galore, in quantity"). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle language), along with Swahili language, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as صلاة ( ṣalāh), "prayer", and إمام ( imām), "prayer leader".
In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly via other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic. For example, most Arabic loanwords in Hindustani and Turkish language entered through Persian language. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa language were borrowed from Kanuri language. Most Arabic loanwords in Yoruba language entered through Hausa language.
Arabic words made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. Variants of Arabic words such as كتاب kitāb ("book") have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders.
Since, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a position similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of the Arabic concepts in the fields of science, philosophy, commerce, etc. were coined from Arabic roots by non-native Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian translators, and then found their way into other languages. This process of using Arabic roots, especially in Kurdish and Persian, to translate foreign concepts continued through to the 18th and 19th centuries, when swaths of Arab-inhabited lands were under Ottoman Empire.
One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided many new words and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order. However, a more weighty factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine Arabic and Peninsular fīh and Maghrebi Arabic kayən all mean 'there is', and all come from Classical Arabic forms ( yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different.
Modern Standard Arabic has 28 consonant and 6 vowel phonemes. The four "emphatic" (pharyngealized) consonants contrast with their non-emphatic counterparts , other consonants including the interdentals , and the pharyngeals are considered rare cross-linguistically. Some of these phonemes have Phonetic merger in the various modern dialects, while new phonemes have been introduced through Loanword or . A "phonemic quality of length" applies to Gemination as well as Vowel length.
Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. 'I read', 'I ate', 'I went', although other patterns are possible, e.g. 'I drank', 'I said', 'I spoke', where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix is always used.
From a single root , numerous words can be formed by applying different patterns:
The feminine singular is often marked by /-at/, which is pronounced as /-ah/ before a pause. Plural is indicated either through endings (the sound plural) or internal modification (the broken plural). Definite nouns include all proper nouns, all nouns in "construct state" and all nouns which are by the definite article /al-/. Indefinite singular nouns, other than those that end in long ā, add a final /-n/ to the case-marking vowels, giving /-un/, /-an/ or /-in/, which is also referred to as nunation or tanwīn.
in Literary Arabic are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns. The plural of all non-human nouns is always combined with a singular feminine adjective, which takes the /-at/ suffix.
in Literary Arabic are marked for person, number and gender. There are two varieties, independent pronouns and enclitics. Enclitic pronouns are attached to the end of a verb, noun or preposition and indicate verbal and prepositional objects or possession of nouns. The first-person singular pronoun has a different enclitic form used for verbs ( /-nī/) and for nouns or prepositions ( /-ī/ after consonants, /-ya/ after vowels).
Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. Non-human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. A verb in a verb-initial sentence is marked as singular regardless of its semantic number when the subject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun. Numerals between three and ten show "chiasmic" agreement, in that grammatically masculine numerals have feminine marking and vice versa.
The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes termed perfective and imperfective, indicating the fact that they actually represent a combination of tense and aspect. The moods other than the indicative occur only in the non-past, and the future tense is signaled by prefixing or onto the non-past. The past and non-past differ in the form of the stem (e.g., past vs. non-past ), and use completely different sets of affixes for indicating person, number and gender: In the past, the person, number and gender are fused into a single morpheme, while in the non-past, a combination of (primarily encoding person) and suffixes (primarily encoding gender and number) are used. The passive voice uses the same person/number/gender affixes but changes the vowels of the stem.
The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb, 'to write'. In Modern Standard, the energetic mood, in either long or short form, which has the same meaning, is almost never used.
For verbs, a given root can occur in many different Derived stem, of which there are about fifteen, each with one or more characteristic meanings and each with its own templates for the past and non-past stems, active and passive participles, and verbal noun. These are referred to by Western scholars as "Form I", "Form II", and so on through "Form XV", although Forms XI to XV are rare.
These stems encode grammatical functions such as the causative, intensive and reflexive verb. Stems sharing the same root consonants represent separate verbs, albeit often semantically related, and each is the basis for its own Verb conjugation paradigm. As a result, these derived stems are part of the system of derivational morphology, not part of the system.
Examples of the different verbs formed from the root 'write' (using 'red' for Form IX, which is limited to colors and physical defects):
Form II is sometimes used to create transitive denominative verbs (verbs built from nouns); Form V is the equivalent used for intransitive denominatives.
The associated participles and verbal nouns of a verb are the primary means of forming new lexical nouns in Arabic. This is similar to the process by which, for example, the English gerund "meeting" (similar to a verbal noun) has turned into a noun referring to a particular type of social, often work-related event where people gather together to have a "discussion" (another lexicalized verbal noun). Another fairly common means of forming nouns is through one of a limited number of patterns that can be applied directly to roots, such as the "nouns of location" in ma- (e.g. 'desk, office' < 'write', 'kitchen' < 'cook').
The only three genuine suffixes are as follows:
The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm in Egyptian Arabic.
However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandoned except for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb itself, and remains in use mainly in the Quranic schools () of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semitic languages (except for the Latin-written Maltese, and the languages with the Ge'ez script), is written from right to left. There are several styles of scripts such as thuluth, muhaqqaq, tawqi, rayhan, and notably naskh, which is used in print and by computers, and ruqʻah, which is commonly used for correspondence.
Originally Arabic was made up of only rasm without diacritical marks Later diacritical points (which in Arabic are referred to as nuqaṯ) were added (which allowed readers to distinguish between letters such as b, t, th, n and y). Finally signs known as Tashkil were used for short vowels known as harakat and other uses such as final postnasalized or long vowels.
Arabic calligraphy has not fallen out of use as calligraphy has in the Western world, and is still considered by Arabs as a major art form; calligraphers are held in great esteem. Being cursive by nature, unlike the Latin script, Arabic script is used to write down a ayah of the Quran, a hadith, or a proverb. The composition is often abstract, but sometimes the writing is shaped into an actual form such as that of an animal. One of the current masters of the genre is Hassan Massoudy.
In modern times the intrinsically calligraphic nature of the written Arabic form is haunted by the thought that a typographic approach to the language, necessary for digitized unification, will not always accurately maintain meanings conveyed through calligraphy.
Some systems, e.g. for scholarly use, are intended to accurately and unambiguously represent the phonemes of Arabic, generally making the phonetics more explicit than the original word in the Arabic script. These systems are heavily reliant on marks such as "š" for the sound equivalently written sh in English. Other systems (e.g. the Bahá'í orthography) are intended to help readers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists with intuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases.
These less "scientific" systems tend to avoid diacritics and use digraphs (like sh and kh). These are usually simpler to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret sh as a single sound, as in gash, or a combination of two sounds, as in gashouse. The ALA-LC romanization solves this problem by separating the two sounds with a prime symbol ( ′ ); e.g., as′hal 'easier'.
During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented text communication technologies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using the Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script.
To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the Arabic letter . There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet or IM Arabic. Other systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization to represent the "emphatic" counterparts of certain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, the letter , may be represented by d. Its emphatic counterpart, , may be written as D.
A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made it difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization.Shrivtiel, p. 189
The idea that Romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. This effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet. In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic alphabet had strong connections to Arab values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189) in Muslim societies.
Status and usage
Diglossia
The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means the one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. (2025). 9781589018853, Georgetown University Press. ISBN 9781589018853
Status in the Arab world vis-à-vis other languages
With the sole example of medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior.
As a foreign language
Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary school schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around the world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages, Middle Eastern studies, and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic in the Arab world and other Muslim world countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study the language.
Vocabulary
Lexicography
Pre-modern Arabic lexicography
The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about a millennium before the Modern era. Early lexicographers (لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid (شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from Arabic poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin (أَعْراب) who were perceived to speak the "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah (جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn (), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, is considered the first Dictionary to include all Semitic root; it sought to exhaust all possible root —later called taqālīb (تقاليب) —calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal (مستعمَل) and those that are not used muhmal (مُهمَل). Lisan al-Arab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots.
Western lexicography of Arabic
In the second half of the 19th century, the British Arabist Edward William Lane, working with the Egyptian scholar , compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon by translating material from earlier Arabic lexica into English. The German Arabist Hans Wehr, with contributions from Hedwig Klein, compiled the Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart (1952), later translated into English as A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1961), based on established usage, especially in literature.
Modern Arabic lexicography
The Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo sought to publish a historical dictionary of Arabic in the vein of the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing the changes of meanings and uses of Arabic words over time. A first volume of Al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr was published in 1956 under the leadership of Taha Hussein. The project is not yet complete; its 15th volume, covering the letter ṣād, was published in 2022.
Loanwords
The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic language,See the seminal study by Siegmund Fraenkel, Die aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen, Leiden 1886 (repr. 1962) which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic. Many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and (Classical) Persian,See for instance Wilhelm Eilers, "Iranisches Lehngut im Arabischen", Actas IV. Congresso des Estudos Árabes et Islâmicos, Coimbra, Lisboa, Leiden 1971, with earlier references. and Hellenistic Greek ( kīmiyāʼ has as origin the Greek khymia, meaning in that language the melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, Histoire de la Médecine de l'Antiquité au XXe siècle, Tallandier, 2008, p. 251), alembic (distiller) from ambix (cup), almanac (climate) from almenichiakon (calendar).
(9th–11th century), with the Basmala as an example, from kufic manuscripts:
Influence on other languages
The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran. Arabic is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Amharic language, Azerbaijani, Baluchi language, Bengali language, Berber languages, Bosnian language, Chaldean, Chechen language, Chittagonian, Croatian, Dagestani, Dhivehi, English language, German language, Gujarati, Hausa language, Hindi, Kazakh language, Kurdish language, Kutchi Language, Kyrgyz language, Malay language (Malaysian and Indonesian), Pashto language, Persian language, Punjabi language, Rohingya, Romance languages (French language, Catalan language, Italian language, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish language, etc.) Saraiki language, Sindhi language, Somali language, Sylheti language, Swahili language, Tagalog language, Tigrinya, Turkish language, Turkmen language, Urdu, Uyghur language, Uzbek language, Visayan and Wolof language, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Modern Hebrew has been also influenced by Arabic especially during the process of revival, as MSA was used as a source for modern Hebrew vocabulary and roots.
Spoken varieties
'' and other sources:
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Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken dialects of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the varieties within and outside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that between sedentary varieties and the much more conservative Bedouin varieties. All the varieties outside of the Arabian peninsula, which include the large majority of speakers, have many features in common with each other that are not found in Classical Arabic. This has led researchers to postulate the existence of a prestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries immediately following the Arab conquest, whose features eventually spread to all newly conquered areas. These features are present to varying degrees inside the Arabian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula varieties have much more diversity than the non-peninsula varieties, but these have been understudied.
Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the non-Egyptian Maghrebi Arabic, especially Moroccan Arabic, and the others. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other media).
Koiné
According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the characteristic features of the koiné that underlies all the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine:
Dialect groups
Phonology
While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, contemporary spoken Arabic is more properly described as a continuum of varieties. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions. MSA is used in writing in formal print media and orally in newscasts, speeches and formal declarations of numerous types.
Grammar
The Arabic grammar has similarities with the grammar of other Semitic languages. Some of the typical differences between Standard Arabic (فُصْحَى) and vernacular varieties are a loss of Morpheme of grammatical case, changes in word order, a shift toward more analytic morphosyntax, loss of grammatical mood, and loss of the inflected passive voice.
Literary Arabic
As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and unusual morphology, i.e. method of constructing words from a basic root. Arabic has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology: A root consists of a set of bare consonants (usually triliteral), which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root ' 'write' with the pattern ' 'I Xed' to form 'I wrote'.
Nouns and adjectives
Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical noun case (nominative case, accusative case, and genitive case also); three numbers (singular, dual and plural); two genders (masculine and feminine); and three "states" (indefinite, definite, and construct). The cases of singular nouns, other than those that end in long ā, are indicated by short vowels (/-u/ for nominative, /-a/ for accusative, /-i/ for genitive).
Verbs
Verbs in Literary Arabic are marked for person (first, second, or third), gender, and number. They are conjugated in two major paradigms (past and non-past); two voices (active and passive); and six grammatical mood (indicative, imperative mood, subjunctive, jussive, shorter energetic mood and longer energetic); the fifth and sixth moods, the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA.Rydin, Karin C. (2005). A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. New York: Cambridge University Press. There are two , active and passive, and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.
Derivation
Like other Semitic languages, and unlike most other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology, applying many templates applied to roots, to derive words than adding prefixes or suffixes to words.
+ Most of these forms are exclusively Classical Arabic
! Form !! Past !! Meaning !! Non-past !! Meaning 'he writes' "he makes (someone) write" 'he corresponds with, writes to (someone)' 'he dictates' nonexistent 'he corresponds (with someone, esp. mutually)' 'he subscribes' 'he copies' 'he turns red' 'he asks (someone) to write'
Colloquial varieties
The spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions and make only limited use of the dual (it occurs only on nouns and its use is no longer required in all circumstances). They have lost the mood distinctions other than imperative, but many have since gained new moods through the use of prefixes (most often /bi-/ for indicative vs. unmarked subjunctive). They have also mostly lost the indefinite "nunation" and the internal passive.
+ Example of a regular Form I verb in Egyptian Arabic, kátab/yíktib "write"
! colspan="2" Tense/Mood
! Past
! Present Subjunctive
! Present Indicative
! Future
! Imperative
Writing system
The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic alphabet or to Greek alphabet. Traditionally, there were several differences between the Western (North African) and Middle Eastern versions of the alphabet—in particular, the faʼ had a dot underneath and qaf a single dot above in the Maghreb, and the order of the letters was slightly different (at least when they were used as numerals).
Notes:
1 2 3 or 4 * 5 6 or 7 8 or 9 10 11 12 or 13 14 15 16 17 or 18 or 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 and , 27 and , 28 ʾ or -
Calligraphy
After Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi finally fixed the Arabic script around 786, many styles were developed, both for the writing down of the Quran and other books, and for inscriptions on monuments as decoration.
Romanization
There are a number of different standards for the romanization of Arabic, i.e. methods of accurately and efficiently representing Arabic with the Latin script. There are various conflicting motivations involved, which leads to multiple systems. Some are interested in transliteration, i.e. representing the spelling of Arabic, while others focus on transcription, i.e. representing the pronunciation of Arabic. (They differ in that, for example, the same letter ي is used to represent both a consonant, as in " you" or " yet", and a vowel, as in "m e" or " eat".)
Numerals
In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. However, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals ( – – – – – – – – – ) are in use. When representing a number in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone numbers are read from left to right, but numbers are spoken in the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens reversed from the modern English usage. For example, 24 is said "four and twenty" just like in the German language ( vierundzwanzig) and Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said "a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy" or, more eloquently, "a thousand and nine-hundred five seventy".
Arabic alphabet and nationalism
There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize the language. Currently, the only Arabic variety to use Latin script is Maltese language.
Lebanon
The Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin letters in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at Romanization failed as the academy and population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the academy, mentioned that the movement to Romanize the script was a Zionism plan to dominate Lebanon.Shrivtiel, p. 188 Said Akl created a Latin-based alphabet for Lebanese Arabic and used it in a newspaper he founded, Lebnaan, as well as in some books he wrote.
Egypt
After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and re-emphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. There was also the idea of finding a way to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but this was seen as too complicated to use.
Sample text
+From Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
!Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic script
!ALA-LC transliteration
!English All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
See also
Notes
Further reading
Citations
Sources
(2025). 9780415731959, Routledge. ISBN 9780415731959
(2025). 9781108417303, Cambridge. ISBN 9781108417303
External links
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