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Arabic

Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, al-ʿarabiyyah [al ʕaraˈbijːa] (listen); عَرَبِيّ, ʿarabīy [ˈʕarabiː] (listen) or [ʕaraˈbij]) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.[6] Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece.[7]

Arabic
اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ
al-ʿarabiyyah
al-ʿarabiyyah in written Arabic (Naskh script)
Pronunciation/ˈʕarabiː/, /alʕaraˈbijːa/
Native toCountries of the Arab League, minorities in neighboring countries and some parts of Asia, Africa, Europe
EthnicityArabs and several peoples of the MENA region (as a result of language shift)
Speakers360 million native speakers of all varieties (2022)[1]
270 million L2 speakers of Modern Standard Arabic[2]
Early form
Standard forms
Dialects
Signed Arabic (different national forms)
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated by
List
Language codes
ISO 639-1ar
ISO 639-2ara
ISO 639-3ara – inclusive code
Individual codes:
arq – Algerian Arabic
aao – Algerian Saharan Arabic
xaa – Andalusian Arabic
bbz – Babalia Creole Arabic
abv – Baharna Arabic
shu – Chadian Arabic
acy – Cypriot Arabic
adf – Dhofari Arabic
avl – Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic
arz – Egyptian Arabic
afb – Gulf Arabic
ayh – Hadrami Arabic
acw – Hijazi Arabic
ayl – Libyan Arabic
acm – Mesopotamian Arabic
ary – Moroccan Arabic
ars – Najdi Arabic
apc – North Levantine Arabic
ayp – North Mesopotamian Arabic
acx – Omani Arabic
aec – Saidi Arabic
ayn – Sanaani Arabic
ssh – Shihhi Arabic
sqr – Siculo Arabic
ajp – South Levantine Arabic
arb – Standard Arabic
apd – Sudanese Arabic
pga – Sudanese Creole Arabic
acq – Taizzi-Adeni Arabic
abh – Tajiki Arabic
Glottologarab1395
Linguasphere12-AAC
Distribution of Arabic: sole official language (dark green); sole official language, minority native speakers (light green); co-official language, majority native speakers (dark blue); co-official language, no native speaker majority (light blue); not official, minority native speakers (light grey)
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Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic[a]—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as mother tongues.[9] Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility.[10][11][12] MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media. In spoken form, MSA is used in formal contexts, news bulletins and for prayers.[13] This variety is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam.[14] It is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory, the third most after English and French.[15] It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.[16]

Spoken varieties are the usual medium of communication in all other domains. They are not standardized and vary significantly, some of them being mutually unintelligible.[17] The International Organization for Standardization assigns language codes to 33 varieties of Arabic, including MSA.[18][19] Arabic vernaculars do not descend from MSA or Classical Arabic.[20][21] Combined, Arabic dialects have 362 million native speakers,[1] while MSA is spoken by 274 million L2 speakers,[2] making it the sixth most spoken language in the world.[22]

Arabic is traditionally written with the Arabic alphabet, a right-to-left abjad. This alphabet is the official script for MSA. Colloquial varieties were traditionally not written, however, with the emergence of social media, the amount of written dialects has significantly increased online. Besides the Arabic alphabet, dialects are also often written in Latin from left to right or in Hebrew characters (in Israel)[3] with no standardized orthography. Maltese is the only colloquial variety officially written in a Latin alphabet.[23]

Classification

Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language. Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups.[6] The Semitic languages changed significantly between Proto-Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include:

  1. The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation (jalas-) into a past tense.
  2. The conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation (yajlis-) into a present tense.
  3. The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms (e.g., a present tense formed by doubling the middle root, a perfect formed by infixing a /t/ after the first root consonant, probably a jussive formed by a stress shift) in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms (e.g., -u for indicative, -a for subjunctive, no ending for jussive, -an or -anna for energetic).
  4. The development of an internal passive.

There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz. These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Arabic.[24][25] The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic:[26]

  1. negative particles m * /mā/; lʾn */lā-ʾan/ to Classical Arabic lan
  2. mafʿūl G-passive participle
  3. prepositions and adverbs f, ʿn, ʿnd, ḥt, ʿkdy
  4. a subjunctive in -a
  5. t-demonstratives
  6. leveling of the -at allomorph of the feminine ending
  7. ʾn complementizer and subordinator
  8. the use of f- to introduce modal clauses
  9. independent object pronoun in (ʾ)y
  10. vestiges of nunation

On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic.[27][28] Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic:[29] Classical Arabic is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor.[24]

History

Old Arabic

 
Safaitic inscription

Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic. Finally, 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 isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are in fact early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.[30]

Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic" (a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic) first emerged around the 1st century CE. Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw, 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.[31]

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).[6] 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.[32] 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.[30]

 
The Namara inscription, a sample of Nabataean script, considered a direct precursor of Arabic script.[33][34]

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 En Avdat, Israel, and dated to around 125 CE.[35] This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolves into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era.[36] There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria (Zabad, Jabal 'Usays, Harran, Umm el-Jimal). 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 are referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical Arabic".[6]

Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic

 
Arabic from the Quran in the old Hijazi dialect (Hijazi script, 7th century AD)

In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz, which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic).[37] This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Qur'an was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi.[citation needed]

 
The Qur'an has served and continues to serve as a fundamental reference for Arabic. (Maghrebi Kufic script, Blue Qur'an, 9th-10th century)

In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra. 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.[citation needed]

Standardization

 
Evolution of early Arabic script (9th–11th century), with the Basmala as an example, from kufic Qur'ān manuscripts: (1) Early 9th century, script with no dots or diacritic marks;(2) and (3) 9th–10th century under 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 fā’ and qāf; (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.

Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali (c. 603–689) is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar, or an-naḥw (النَّحو "the way"[38]), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants (نقط الإعجام nuqat l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization (التشكيل at-tashkil).[39] Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718 – 786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn (كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع"), and is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody.[40] Al-Jahiz (776-868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries.[41] The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al-Kitāb, is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya.[42]

Spread

Arabic spread with the spread of Islam. Following the early Muslim conquests, Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish.[33] In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom.[33]

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 Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic—Arabic written in Hebrew script—including his famous The Guide for the Perplexed (דלאלת אלחאירין‎, دلالة الحائرين Dalālat al-ḥāʾirīn).[43]

Development

Ibn Jinni of Mosul, a pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif, Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab, and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ [ar].[44]

Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized the overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior.[41]

The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab (لسان العرب, "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290.[45]

Neo-Arabic

Charles Ferguson's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories.[42] According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA.[46][47]

In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus, the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb.[48]

Nahda

 
 
 
The first known book printed in Arabic: Kitābu ṣalāti s-sawā'ī (كتاب صلاة السواعي), a book of hours printed with movable type in 1514.[49]
 
Coverage in Al-Ahram in 1934 of the inauguration of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, an organization of major importance to the modernization of Arabic.

The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression."[50] According to James L. Gelvin, "Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to a wider audience."[50]

 
Taha Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser were both staunch defenders of Standard Arabic.[51][52]

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.[53] 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.[54][55] 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,[56] first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum [ar] (1993), and Tunis (1993).[57] They review language development, monitor new words and approve inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts.[citation needed] In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League.[57] These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms 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.[57] 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,[58] and Sudan.[59]

Arabic Swadesh list (1-100).

Classical, Modern Standard and spoken Arabic

 
Flag of the Arab League, used in some cases for the Arabic language
 
Flag used in some cases for the Arabic language (Flag of the Kingdom of Hejaz 1916–1925).The flag contains the four Pan-Arab colors: black, white, green and red.

Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic.[60] It could also refer to any of a variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects, which are not necessarily mutually intelligible.

Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran, used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisān al-ʻArab).[citation needed]

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. 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.[61] 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.[60]

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 fuṣḥá) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.[citation needed]

Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows:[citation needed]

  • Certain grammatical constructions of CA that have no counterpart in any modern vernacular dialect (e.g., the energetic mood) are almost never used in Modern Standard Arabic.[citation needed]
  • Case distinctions are very rare in Arabic vernaculars. As a result, MSA is generally composed without case distinctions in mind, and the proper cases are added after the fact, when necessary. Because most case endings are noted using final short vowels, which are normally left unwritten in the Arabic script, it is unnecessary to determine the proper case of most words. The practical result of this is that MSA, like English and Standard Chinese, is written in a strongly determined word order and alternative orders that were used in CA for emphasis are rare. In addition, because of the lack of case marking in the spoken varieties, most speakers cannot consistently use the correct endings in extemporaneous speech. As a result, spoken MSA tends to drop or regularize the endings except when reading from a prepared text.[citation needed]
  • The numeral system in CA is complex and heavily tied in with the case system. This system is never used in MSA, even in the most formal of circumstances; instead, a significantly simplified system is used, approximating the system of the conservative spoken varieties.[citation needed]

MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba '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.[62] Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy').[citation needed]

However, the current preference is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots (استماتة istimātah 'apoptosis', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into the Xth form, or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk').[citation needed]

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.[63] 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.[64]

The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows,[65] as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising.

Hassaniya Arabic and Maltese are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official status.[66] The Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write Hassaniya[67] Maltese is spoken in (predominantly Catholic) Malta and written with the Latin script. 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.[23]

Even during Muhammad's lifetime, there were dialects of spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the dialect of Mecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it was in this dialect that the Quran was written. However, the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were considered the most prestigious at the time, so the language of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology. It is this phonology that underlies the modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phonological differences between these two dialects account for some of the complexities of Arabic writing, most notably the writing of the glottal stop or hamzah (which was preserved in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech) and the use of alif maqṣūrah (representing a sound preserved in the western dialects but merged with ā in eastern speech).[citation needed]

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.[68] 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.[69][70][71][72][73] Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own.[74] When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film.[citation needed]

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 and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots 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.[75] 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 significant complicating factor: A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.[76]

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.[77] 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.[citation needed]

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.[78]

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."[79]

As a foreign language

Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary 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 language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions[80] of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study the language. Software and books with tapes are also 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.[81] 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.[82]

Vocabulary

Loanwords

The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages Aramaic,[83] which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic. In addition, many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and (Classical) Persian,[84] 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). (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:[citation needed]

  • madīnah/medina (مدينة, city or city square), a word of Aramaic origin ܡܕ݂ܝܼܢ݇ܬܵܐ/"məḏī(n)ttā" (in which it means "state/city").[citation needed]
  • jazīrah (جزيرة), as in the well-known form الجزيرة "Al-Jazeera," means "island" and has its origin in the Syriac ܓܵܙܲܪܬܵܐ gāzartā.[citation needed]
  • lāzaward (لازورد) is taken from Persian لاژورد lājvard, the name of a blue stone, lapis lazuli. This word was borrowed in several European languages to mean (light) blue – azure in English, azur in French and azul in Portuguese and Spanish.[citation needed]

A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas & Manfredi (2020).[85]

Influence of Arabic 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, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Chittagonian, Croatian, Dagestani, Dhivehi, English, German, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc.) Saraiki, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken.[85] 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.[86]

In addition, English 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.[87] Other languages such as Maltese[88] and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.

Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber taẓallit, "prayer", from salat (صلاة ṣalāh)), academic terms (like Uyghur mentiq, "logic"), and economic items (like English coffee) to placeholders (like Spanish fulano, "so-and-so"), everyday terms (like Hindustani lekin, "but", or Spanish taza and French tasse, meaning "cup"), and expressions (like Catalan a betzef, "galore, in quantity"). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as صلاة (salat), "prayer", and إمام (imam), "prayer leader."[citation needed]

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 entered through Persian. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri. Most Arabic loanwords in Yoruba entered through Hausa.[citation needed]

Arabic words also 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.[89]

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 rule.[citation needed]

Spoken varieties

 
Geographical distribution of the varieties of Arabic:

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.[citation needed]

Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the non-Egyptian North African dialects (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).[citation needed]

One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh and North African kayən all mean 'there is', and all come from Classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different.[citation needed]

Koiné

According to Charles A. Ferguson,[90] 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:

  • Loss of the dual number except on nouns, with consistent plural agreement (cf. feminine singular agreement in plural inanimates).
  • Change of a to i in many affixes (e.g., non-past-tense prefixes ti- yi- ni-; wi- 'and'; il- 'the'; feminine -it in the construct state).
  • Loss of third-weak verbs ending in w (which merge with verbs ending in y).
  • Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., ḥalaltu 'I untied' → ḥalēt(u).
  • Conversion of separate words 'to me', laka 'to you', etc. into indirect-object clitic suffixes.
  • Certain changes in the cardinal number system, e.g., khamsat ayyām 'five days' → kham(a)s tiyyām, where certain words have a special plural with prefixed t.
  • Loss of the feminine elative (comparative).
  • Adjective plurals of the form kibār 'big' → kubār.
  • Change of nisba suffix -iyy > i.
  • Certain lexical items, e.g., jāb 'bring' < jāʼa bi- 'come with'; shāf 'see'; ēsh 'what' (or similar) < ayyu shayʼ 'which thing'; illi (relative pronoun).
  • Merger of /ɮˤ/ and /ðˤ/.

Dialect groups

Phonology

History

Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been lost: */ʃ/, which merged with /s/, while /ɬ/ became /ʃ/ (see Semitic languages).[103] Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original */p/ lenited to /f/, and */ɡ/ – consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages[104] – became palatalized to /ɡʲ/ or /ɟ/ by the time of the Quran and /d͡ʒ/, /ɡ/, /ʒ/ or /ɟ/ after early Muslim conquests and in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for more detail).[105] An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative */ɬ/ became /ʃ/.[106] Its emphatic counterpart /ɬˠ~ɮˤ/ was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation لُغَةُ ٱلضَّادِ lughat al-ḍād or "language of the ḍād"); for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop /dˤ/ with loss of the laterality[106] or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, /d/. (The classical ḍād pronunciation of pharyngealization /ɮˤ/ still occurs in the Mehri language, and the similar sound without velarization, /ɮ/, exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.)

Other changes may also have happened. Classical Arabic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and different reconstructions of the sound system of Proto-Semitic propose different phonetic values. One example is the emphatic consonants, which are pharyngealized in modern pronunciations but may have been velarized in the eighth century and glottalized in Proto-Semitic.[106]

Reduction of /j/ and /w/ between vowels occurs in a number of circumstances and is responsible for much of the complexity of third-weak ("defective") verbs. Early Akkadian transcriptions of Arabic names shows that this reduction had not yet occurred as of the early part of the 1st millennium BC.[citation needed]

The Classical Arabic language as recorded was a poetic koine that reflected a consciously archaizing dialect, chosen based on the tribes of the western part of the Arabian Peninsula, who spoke the most conservative variants of Arabic. Even at the time of Muhammed and before, other dialects existed with many more changes, including the loss of most glottal stops, the loss of case endings, the reduction of the diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ into monophthongs /eː, oː/, etc. Most of these changes are present in most or all modern varieties of Arabic.[citation needed]

An interesting feature of the writing system of the Quran (and hence of Classical Arabic) is that it contains certain features of Muhammad's native dialect of Mecca, corrected through diacritics into the forms of standard Classical Arabic. Among these features visible under the corrections are the loss of the glottal stop and a differing development of the reduction of certain final sequences containing /j/: Evidently, final /-awa/ became /aː/ as in the Classical language, but final /-aja/ became a different sound, possibly /eː/ (rather than again /aː/ in the Classical language). This is the apparent source of the alif maqṣūrah 'restricted alif' where a final /-aja/ is reconstructed: a letter that would normally indicate /j/ or some similar high-vowel sound, but is taken in this context to be a logical variant of alif and represent the sound /aː/.[citation needed]

Literary Arabic

The "colloquial" spoken dialects of Arabic are learned at home and constitute the native languages of Arabic speakers. "Formal" Modern Standard Arabic is learned at school; although many speakers have a native-like command of the language, it is technically not the native language of any speakers. Both varieties can be both written and spoken, although the colloquial varieties are rarely written down and the formal variety is spoken mostly in formal circumstances, e.g., in radio and TV broadcasts, formal lectures, parliamentary discussions and to some extent between speakers of different colloquial dialects. Even when the literary language is spoken, however, it is normally only spoken in its pure form when reading a prepared text out loud and communication between speakers of different colloquial dialects. When speaking extemporaneously (i.e. making up the language on the spot, as in a normal discussion among people), speakers tend to deviate somewhat from the strict literary language in the direction of the colloquial varieties. In fact, there is a continuous range of "in-between" spoken varieties: from nearly pure Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), to a form that still uses MSA grammar and vocabulary but with significant colloquial influence, to a form of the colloquial language that imports a number of words and grammatical constructions in MSA, to a form that is close to pure colloquial but with the "rough edges" (the most noticeably "vulgar" or non-Classical aspects) smoothed out, to pure colloquial. The particular variant (or register) used depends on the social class and education level of the speakers involved and the level of formality of the speech situation. Often it will vary within a single encounter, e.g., moving from nearly pure MSA to a more mixed language in the process of a radio interview, as the interviewee becomes more comfortable with the interviewer. This type of variation is characteristic of the diglossia that exists throughout the Arabic-speaking world.[citation needed]

Although Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a unitary language, its pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country and from region to region within a country. The variation in individual "accents" of MSA speakers tends to mirror corresponding variations in the colloquial speech of the speakers in question, but with the distinguishing characteristics moderated somewhat. It is important in descriptions of "Arabic" phonology to distinguish between pronunciation of a given colloquial (spoken) dialect and the pronunciation of MSA by these same speakers. Although they are related, they are not the same. For example, the phoneme that derives from Classical Arabic /ɟ/ has many different pronunciations in the modern spoken varieties, e.g., [d͡ʒ ~ ʒ ~ j ~ ɡʲ ~ ɡ] including the proposed original [ɟ]. Speakers whose native variety has either [d͡ʒ] or [ʒ] will use the same pronunciation when speaking MSA. Even speakers from Cairo, whose native Egyptian Arabic has [ɡ], normally use [ɡ] when speaking MSA. The [j] of Persian Gulf speakers is the only variant pronunciation which isn't found in MSA; [d͡ʒ~ʒ] is used instead, but may use [j] in MSA for comfortable pronunciation. Another reason of different pronunciations is influence of colloquial dialects. The differentiation of pronunciation of colloquial dialects is the influence from other languages previously spoken and some still presently spoken in the regions, such as Coptic in Egypt, Berber, Punic, or Phoenician in North Africa, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian, and Old South Arabian in Yemen and Oman, and Aramaic and Canaanite languages (including Phoenician) in the Levant and Mesopotamia.[citation needed]

Another example: Many colloquial varieties are known for a type of vowel harmony in which the presence of an "emphatic consonant" triggers backed allophones of nearby vowels (especially of the low vowels /aː/, which are backed to [ɑ(ː)] in these circumstances and very often fronted to [æ(ː)] in all other circumstances). In many spoken varieties, the backed or "emphatic" vowel allophones spread a fair distance in both directions from the triggering consonant; in some varieties (most notably Egyptian Arabic), the "emphatic" allophones spread throughout the entire word, usually including prefixes and suffixes, even at a distance of several syllables from the triggering consonant. Speakers of colloquial varieties with this vowel harmony tend to introduce it into their MSA pronunciation as well, but usually with a lesser degree of spreading than in the colloquial varieties. (For example, speakers of colloquial varieties with extremely long-distance harmony may allow a moderate, but not extreme, amount of spreading of the harmonic allophones in their MSA speech, while speakers of colloquial varieties with moderate-distance harmony may only harmonize immediately adjacent vowels in MSA.)[citation needed]

Vowels

Modern Standard Arabic has six pure vowels (while most modern dialects have eight pure vowels which includes the long vowels /eː oː/), with short /a i u/ and corresponding long vowels /aː iː uː/. There are also two diphthongs: /aj/ and /aw/.[citation needed]

The pronunciation of the vowels differs from speaker to speaker, in a way that tends to reflect the pronunciation of the corresponding colloquial variety. Nonetheless, there are some common trends. Most noticeable is the differing pronunciation of /a/ and /aː/, which tend towards fronted [æ(ː)], [a(ː)] or [ɛ(ː)] in most situations, but a back [ɑ(ː)] in the neighborhood of emphatic consonants. Some accents and dialects, such as those of the Hejaz region, have an open [a(ː)] or a central [ä(ː)] in all situations. The vowel /a/ varies towards [ə(ː)] too. Listen to the final vowel in the recording of al-ʻarabiyyah at the beginning of this article, for example. The point is, Arabic has only three short vowel phonemes, so those phonemes can have a very wide range of allophones. The vowels /u/ and /ɪ/ are often affected somewhat in emphatic neighborhoods as well, with generally more back or centralized allophones, but the differences are less great than for the low vowels. The pronunciation of short /u/ and /i/ tends towards [ʊ~o] and [i~e~ɨ], respectively, in many dialects.[citation needed]

The definition of both "emphatic" and "neighborhood" vary in ways that reflect (to some extent) corresponding variations in the spoken dialects. Generally, the consonants triggering "emphatic" allophones are the pharyngealized consonants /tˤ dˤ sˤ ðˤ/; /q/; and /r/, if not followed immediately by /i(ː)/. Frequently, the velar fricatives /x ɣ/ also trigger emphatic allophones; occasionally also the pharyngeal consonants /ʕ ħ/ (the former more than the latter). Many dialects have multiple emphatic allophones of each vowel, depending on the particular nearby consonants. In most MSA accents, emphatic coloring of vowels is limited to vowels immediately adjacent to a triggering consonant, although in some it spreads a bit farther: e.g., وقت waqt [wɑqt] 'time'; وطن waṭan [wɑtˤɑn] 'homeland'; وسط المدينة wasṭ al-madīnah [wæstˤ ɑl mæˈdiːnæ] 'downtown' (also [wɑstˤ æl mæˈdiːnæ] or similar).[citation needed]

In a non-emphatic environment, the vowel /a/ in the diphthong /aj/ is pronounced [æj] or [ɛj]: hence سيف sayf [sajf ~ sæjf ~ sɛjf] 'sword' but صيف ṣayf [sˤɑjf] 'summer'. However, in accents with no emphatic allophones of /a/ (e.g., in the Hejaz), the pronunciation [aj] or [äj] occurs in all situations.[citation needed]

Consonants

The phoneme /d͡ʒ/ is represented by the Arabic letter jīm (ج) and has many standard pronunciations. [d͡ʒ] is characteristic of north Algeria, Iraq, and most of the Arabian peninsula but with an allophonic [ʒ] in some positions; [ʒ] occurs in most of the Levant and most of North Africa; and [ɡ] is standard in Egypt, coastal Yemen, and western Oman. Generally this corresponds with the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects. In Sudan and Yemen, as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni varieties, it may be either [ɡʲ] or [ɟ], representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic.[107] Foreign words containing /ɡ/ may be transcribed with ج, غ, ك, ق, گ, ݣ‎ or ڨ‎, depending on the regional practice. In northern Egypt, where the Arabic letter jīm (ج) is normally pronounced [ɡ], a separate phoneme /ʒ/, which may be transcribed with چ, occurs in a small number of mostly non-Arabic loanwords, e.g., /ʒakitta/ 'jacket'.[citation needed]

/θ/ (ث) can be pronounced as [s]. In some places of Maghreb it can be also pronounced as [t͡s].[citation needed]

/x/ and /ɣ/ (خ,‎ غ) are velar, post-velar, or uvular.[108]

In many varieties, /ħ, ʕ/ (ح,‎ ع) are epiglottal [ʜ, ʢ] in Western Asia.[citation needed]

/l/ is pronounced as velarized [ɫ] in الله /ʔallaːh/, the name of God, q.e. Allah, when the word follows a, ā, u or ū (after i or ī it is unvelarized: بسم الله bismi l–lāh /bismillaːh/).[107]

The emphatic consonant /dˤ/ was actually pronounced [ɮˤ], or possibly [d͡ɮˤ][109]—either way, a highly unusual sound. The medieval Arabs actually termed their language lughat al-ḍād 'the language of the Ḍād' (the name of the letter used for this sound), since they thought the sound was unique to their language. (In fact, it also exists in a few other minority Semitic languages, e.g., Mehri.)

Arabic has consonants traditionally termed "emphatic" /tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/ (ط,‎ ض,‎ ص,‎ ظ), which exhibit simultaneous pharyngealization [tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ] as well as varying degrees of velarization [tˠ, dˠ, sˠ, ðˠ] (depending on the region), so they may be written with the "Velarized or pharyngealized" diacritic ( ̴) as: /t̴, d̴, s̴, ð̴/. This simultaneous articulation is described as "Retracted Tongue Root" by phonologists.[110] In some transcription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the letter, for example, /dˤ/ is written ⟨D⟩; in others the letter is underlined or has a dot below it, for example, ⟨⟩.

Vowels and consonants can be phonologically short or long. Long (geminate) consonants are normally written doubled in Latin transcription (i.e. bb, dd, etc.), reflecting the presence of the Arabic diacritic mark shaddah, which indicates doubled consonants. In actual pronunciation, doubled consonants are held twice as long as short consonants. This consonant lengthening is phonemically contrastive: قبل qabila 'he accepted' vs. قبّل qabbala 'he kissed'.[citation needed]

Syllable structure

Arabic has two kinds of syllables: open syllables (CV) and (CVV)—and closed syllables (CVC), (CVVC) and (CVCC). The syllable types with two morae (units of time), i.e. CVC and CVV, are termed heavy syllables, while those with three morae, i.e. CVVC and CVCC, are superheavy syllables. Superheavy syllables in Classical Arabic occur in only two places: at the end of the sentence (due to pausal pronunciation) and in words such as حارّ ḥārr 'hot', مادّة māddah 'stuff, substance', تحاجوا taḥājjū 'they disputed with each other', where a long ā occurs before two identical consonants (a former short vowel between the consonants has been lost). (In less formal pronunciations of Modern Standard Arabic, superheavy syllables are common at the end of words or before clitic suffixes such as -nā 'us, our', due to the deletion of final short vowels.)[citation needed]

In surface pronunciation, every vowel must be preceded by a consonant (which may include the glottal stop [ʔ]). There are no cases of hiatus within a word (where two vowels occur next to each other, without an intervening consonant). Some words do have an underlying vowel at the beginning, such as the definite article al- or words such as اشترا ishtarā 'he bought', اجتماع ijtimāʻ 'meeting'. When actually pronounced, one of three things happens:

  • If the word occurs after another word ending in a consonant, there is a smooth transition from final consonant to initial vowel, e.g., الاجتماع al-ijtimāʻ 'meeting' /alid͡ʒtimaːʕ/.
  • If the word occurs after another word ending in a vowel, the initial vowel of the word is elided, e.g., بيت المدير baytu (a)l-mudīr 'house of the director' /bajtulmudiːr/.
  • If the word occurs at the beginning of an utterance, a glottal stop [ʔ] is added onto the beginning, e.g., البيت هو al-baytu huwa ... 'The house is ...' /ʔalbajtuhuwa ... /.

Stress

Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard Arabic. It bears a strong relationship to vowel length. The basic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are:

  • A final vowel, long or short, may not be stressed.
  • Only one of the last three syllables may be stressed.
  • Given this restriction, the last heavy syllable (containing a long vowel or ending in a consonant) is stressed, if it is not the final syllable.
  • If the final syllable is super heavy and closed (of the form CVVC or CVCC) it receives stress.
  • If no syllable is heavy or super heavy, the first possible syllable (i.e. third from end) is stressed.
  • As a special exception, in Form VII and VIII verb forms stress may not be on the first syllable, despite the above rules: Hence inkatab(a) 'he subscribed' (whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced), yankatib(u) 'he subscribes' (whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced), yankatib 'he should subscribe (juss.)'. Likewise Form VIII ishta 'he bought', yashta 'he buys'.

These rules may result in differently stressed syllables when final case endings are pronounced, vs. the normal situation where they are not pronounced, as in the above example of mak-ta-ba-tun 'library' in full pronunciation, but mak-ta-ba(-tun) 'library' in short pronunciation.[citation needed]

The restriction on final long vowels does not apply to the spoken dialects, where original final long vowels have been shortened and secondary final long vowels have arisen from loss of original final -hu/hi.[citation needed]

Some dialects have different stress rules. In the Cairo (Egyptian Arabic) dialect a heavy syllable may not carry stress more than two syllables from the end of a word, hence mad-ra-sah 'school', qā-hi-rah 'Cairo'. This also affects the way that Modern Standard Arabic is pronounced in Egypt. In the Arabic of Sanaa, stress is often retracted: bay-tayn 'two houses', -sat-hum 'their table', ma--tīb 'desks', -rat-ḥīn 'sometimes', mad-ra-sat-hum 'their school'. (In this dialect, only syllables with long vowels or diphthongs are considered heavy; in a two-syllable word, the final syllable can be stressed only if the preceding syllable is light; and in longer words, the final syllable cannot be stressed.)[citation needed]

Levels of pronunciation

The final short vowels (e.g., the case endings -a -i -u and mood endings -u -a) are often not pronounced in this language, despite forming part of the formal paradigm of nouns and verbs. The following levels of pronunciation exist:[citation needed]

Full pronunciation with pausa

This is the most formal level actually used in speech. All endings are pronounced as written, except at the end of an utterance, where the following changes occur:[citation needed]

  • Final short vowels are not pronounced. (But possibly an exception is made for feminine plural -na and shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative of defective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'".)
  • The entire indefinite noun endings -in and -un (with nunation) are left off. The ending -an is left off of nouns preceded by a tāʾ marbūṭah ة (i.e. the -t in the ending -at- that typically marks feminine nouns), but pronounced as in other nouns (hence its writing in this fashion in the Arabic script).
  • The tāʼ marbūṭah itself (typically of feminine nouns) is pronounced as h. (At least, this is the case in extremely formal pronunciation, e.g., some Quranic recitations. In practice, this h is usually omitted.)
Formal short pronunciation

This is a formal level of pronunciation sometimes seen. It is somewhat like pronouncing all words as if they were in pausal position (with influence from the colloquial varieties). The following changes occur:[citation needed]

  • Most final short vowels are not pronounced. However, the following short vowels are pronounced:
    • feminine plural -na
    • shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative of defective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'
    • second-person singular feminine past-tense -ti and likewise anti 'you (fem. sg.)'
    • sometimes, first-person singular past-tense -tu
    • sometimes, second-person masculine past-tense -ta and likewise anta 'you (masc. sg.)'
    • final -a in certain short words, e.g., laysa 'is not', sawfa (future-tense marker)
  • The nunation endings -an -in -un are not pronounced. However, they are pronounced in adverbial accusative formations, e.g., taqrīban تَقْرِيبًا 'almost, approximately', ʻādatan عَادَةً 'usually'.
  • The tāʾ marbūṭah ending ة is unpronounced, except in construct state nouns, where it sounds as t (and in adverbial accusative constructions, e.g., ʻādatan عَادَةً 'usually', where the entire -tan is pronounced).
  • The masculine singular nisbah ending -iyy is actually pronounced and is unstressed (but plural and feminine singular forms, i.e. when followed by a suffix, still sound as -iyy-).
  • Full endings (including case endings) occur when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added (e.g., -nā 'us/our').
Informal short pronunciation

This is the pronunciation used by speakers of Modern Standard Arabic in extemporaneous speech, i.e. when producing new sentences rather than reading a prepared text. It is similar to formal short pronunciation except that the rules for dropping final vowels apply even when a clitic suffix is added. Basically, short-vowel case and mood endings are never pronounced and certain other changes occur that echo the corresponding colloquial pronunciations. Specifically:[citation needed]

  • All the rules for formal short pronunciation apply, except as follows.
  • The past tense singular endings written formally as -tu -ta -ti are pronounced -t -t -ti. But masculine ʾanta is pronounced in full.
  • Unlike in formal short pronunciation, the rules for dropping or modifying final endings are also applied when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added (e.g., -nā 'us/our'). If this produces a sequence of three consonants, then one of the following happens, depending on the speaker's native colloquial variety:
    • A short vowel (e.g., -i- or -ǝ-) is consistently added, either between the second and third or the first and second consonants.
    • Or, a short vowel is added only if an otherwise unpronounceable sequence occurs, typically due to a violation of the sonority hierarchy (e.g., -rtn- is pronounced as a three-consonant cluster, but -trn- needs to be broken up).
    • Or, a short vowel is never added, but consonants like r l m n occurring between two other consonants will be pronounced as a syllabic consonant (as in the English words "butter bottle bottom button").
    • When a doubled consonant occurs before another consonant (or finally), it is often shortened to a single consonant rather than a vowel added. (However, Moroccan Arabic never shortens doubled consonants or inserts short vowels to break up clusters, instead tolerating arbitrary-length series of arbitrary consonants and hence Moroccan Arabic speakers are likely to follow the same rules in their pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic.)
  • The clitic suffixes themselves tend also to be changed, in a way that avoids many possible occurrences of three-consonant clusters. In particular, -ka -ki -hu generally sound as -ak -ik -uh.
  • Final long vowels are often shortened, merging with any short vowels that remain.
  • Depending on the level of formality, the speaker's education level, etc., various grammatical changes may occur in ways that echo the colloquial variants:
    • Any remaining case endings (e.g. masculine plural nominative -ūn vs. oblique -īn) will be leveled, with the oblique form used everywhere. (However, in words like ab 'father' and akh 'brother' with special long-vowel case endings in the construct state, the nominative is used everywhere, hence abū 'father of', akhū 'brother of'.)
    • Feminine plural endings in verbs and clitic suffixes will often drop out, with the masculine plural endings used instead. If the speaker's native variety has feminine plural endings, they may be preserved, but will often be modified in the direction of the forms used in the speaker's native variety, e.g. -an instead of -na.
    • Dual endings will often drop out except on nouns and then used only for emphasis (similar to their use in the colloquial varieties); elsewhere, the plural endings are used (or feminine singular, if appropriate).

Colloquial varieties

Vowels

As mentioned above, many spoken dialects have a process of emphasis spreading, where the "emphasis" (pharyngealization) of emphatic consonants spreads forward and back through adjacent syllables, pharyngealizing all nearby consonants and triggering the back allophone [ɑ(ː)] in all nearby low vowels. The extent of emphasis spreading varies. For example, in Moroccan Arabic, it spreads as far as the first full vowel (i.e. sound derived from a long vowel or diphthong) on either side; in many Levantine dialects, it spreads indefinitely, but is blocked by any /j/ or /ʃ/; while in Egyptian Arabic, it usually spreads throughout the entire word, including prefixes and suffixes. In Moroccan Arabic, /i u/ also have emphatic allophones [e~ɛ] and [o~ɔ], respectively.[citation needed]

Unstressed short vowels, especially /i u/, are deleted in many contexts. Many sporadic examples of short vowel change have occurred (especially /a//i/ and interchange /i//u/). Most Levantine dialects merge short /i u/ into /ə/ in most contexts (all except directly before a single final consonant). In Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand, short /u/ triggers labialization of nearby consonants (especially velar consonants and uvular consonants), and then short /a i u/ all merge into /ə/, which is deleted in many contexts. (The labialization plus /ə/ is sometimes interpreted as an underlying phoneme /ŭ/.) This essentially causes the wholesale loss of the short-long vowel distinction, with the original long vowels /aː iː uː/ remaining as half-long [aˑ iˑ uˑ], phonemically /a i u/, which are used to represent both short and long vowels in borrowings from Literary Arabic.[citation needed]

Most spoken dialects have monophthongized original /aj aw/ to /eː oː/ in most circumstances, including adjacent to emphatic consonants, while keeping them as the original diphthongs in others e.g. مَوْعِد /mawʕid/. In most of the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian (except Sahel and Southeastern) Arabic dialects, they have subsequently merged into original /iː uː/.[citation needed]

Consonants

In most dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed in the chart above. For example, [g] is considered a native phoneme in most Arabic dialects except in Levantine dialects like Syrian or Lebanese where ج is pronounced [ʒ] and ق is pronounced [ʔ]. [d͡ʒ] or [ʒ] (ج) is considered a native phoneme in most dialects except in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects where ج is pronounced [g]. [zˤ] or [ðˤ] and [dˤ] are distinguished in the dialects of Egypt, Sudan, the Levant and the Hejaz, but they have merged as [ðˤ] in most dialects of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Tunisia and have merged as [dˤ] in Morocco and Algeria. The usage of non-native [p] پ and [v] ڤ depends on the usage of each speaker but they might be more prevalent in some dialects than others. The Iraqi and Gulf Arabic also has the sound [t͡ʃ] and writes it and [ɡ] with the Persian letters چ and گ, as in گوجة gawjah "plum"; چمة chimah "truffle".

Early in the expansion of Arabic, the separate emphatic phonemes [ɮˤ] and [ðˤ] coalesced into a single phoneme [ðˤ]. Many dialects (such as Egyptian, Levantine, and much of the Maghreb) subsequently lost interdental fricatives, converting [θ ð ðˤ] into [t d dˤ]. Most dialects borrow "learned" words from the Standard language using the same pronunciation as for inherited words, but some dialects without interdental fricatives (particularly in Egypt and the Levant) render original [θ ð ðˤ dˤ] in borrowed words as [s z zˤ dˤ].

Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is how they render the original velar and uvular plosives /q/, /d͡ʒ/ (Proto-Semitic /ɡ/), and /k/:

  • ق /q/ retains its original pronunciation in widely scattered regions such as Yemen, Morocco, and urban areas of the Maghreb. It is pronounced as a glottal stop [ʔ] in several prestige dialects, such as those spoken in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. But it is rendered as a voiced velar plosive [ɡ] in Persian Gulf, Upper Egypt, parts of the Maghreb, and less urban parts of the Levant (e.g. Jordan). In Iraqi Arabic it sometimes retains its original pronunciation and is sometimes rendered as a voiced velar plosive, depending on the word. Some traditionally Christian villages in rural areas of the Levant render the sound as [k], as do Shiʻi Bahrainis. In some Gulf dialects, it is palatalized to [d͡ʒ] or [ʒ]. It is pronounced as a voiced uvular constrictive [ʁ] in Sudanese Arabic. Many dialects with a modified pronunciation for /q/ maintain the [q] pronunciation in certain words (often with religious or educational overtones) borrowed from the Classical language.
  • ج /d͡ʒ/ is pronounced as an affricate in Iraq and much of the Arabian Peninsula but is pronounced [ɡ] in most of North Egypt and parts of Yemen and Oman, [ʒ] in Morocco, Tunisia, and the Levant, and [j], [i̠] in most words in much of the Persian Gulf.
  • ك /k/ usually retains its original pronunciation but is palatalized to /t͡ʃ/ in many words in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and countries in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula. Often a distinction is made between the suffixes /-ak/ ('you', masc.) and /-ik/ ('you', fem.), which become /-ak/ and /-it͡ʃ/, respectively. In Sana'a, Omani, and Bahrani /-ik/ is pronounced /-iʃ/.

Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends to weaken in many of the spoken varieties, and to spread from emphatic consonants to nearby sounds. In addition, the "emphatic" allophone [ɑ] automatically triggers pharyngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects. As a result, it may be difficult or impossible to determine whether a given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic or not, especially in dialects with long-distance emphasis spreading. (A notable exception is the sounds /t/ vs. // in Moroccan Arabic, because the former is pronounced as an affricate [t͡s] but the latter is not.)

Grammar

 
Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works

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 three), which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root k-t-b 'write' with the pattern -a-a-tu 'I Xed' to form katabtu 'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. qaraʼtu 'I read', akaltu 'I ate', dhahabtu 'I went', although other patterns are possible (e.g. sharibtu 'I drank', qultu 'I said', takallamtu 'I spoke', where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix -tu is always used).

From a single root k-t-b, numerous words can be formed by applying different patterns:

  • كَتَبْتُkatabtu 'I wrote'
  • كَتَّبْتُkattabtu 'I had (something) written'
  • كَاتَبْتُkātabtu 'I corresponded (with someone)'
  • أَكْتَبْتُ'aktabtu 'I dictated'
  • اِكْتَتَبْتُiktatabtu 'I subscribed'
  • تَكَاتَبْنَاtakātabnā 'we corresponded with each other'
  • أَكْتُبُ'aktubu 'I write'
  • أُكَتِّبُ'ukattibu 'I have (something) written'
  • أُكَاتِبُ'ukātibu 'I correspond (with someone)'
  • أُكْتِبُ'uktibu 'I dictate'
  • أَكْتَتِبُ'aktatibu 'I subscribe'
  • نَتَكَتِبُnatakātabu 'we correspond each other'
  • كُتِبَkutiba 'it was written'
  • أُكْتِبَ'uktiba 'it was dictated'
  • مَكْتُوبٌmaktūbun 'written'
  • مُكْتَبٌmuktabun 'dictated'
  • كِتَابٌkitābun 'book'
  • كُتُبٌkutubun 'books'
  • كَاتِبٌkātibun 'writer'
  • كُتَّابٌkuttābun 'writers'
  • مَكْتَبٌmaktabun 'desk, office'
  • مَكْتَبَةٌmaktabatun 'library, bookshop'
  • etc.

Nouns and adjectives

Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive [also used when the noun is governed by a preposition]); 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 suffixed short vowels (/-u/ for nominative, /-a/ for accusative, /-i/ for genitive).

The feminine singular is often marked by ـَة‎ /-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 prefixed by the definite article اَلْـ‎ /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).

Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns. However, the plural of all non-human nouns is always combined with a singular feminine adjective, which takes the ـَة‎ /-at/ suffix.

Pronouns 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 (ـنِي‎ /-nī/) and for nouns or prepositions (ـِي‎ /-ī/ after consonants, ـيَ‎ /-ya/ after vowels).

Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. However, non-human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. Furthermore, 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.

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 moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, shorter energetic and longer energetic), the fifth and sixth moods, the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA.[111] There are also two participles (active and passive) and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.

The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes also 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 سَـsa- or سَوْفَsawfa onto the non-past. The past and non-past differ in the form of the stem (e.g., past كَتَبـkatab- vs. non-past ـكْتُبـ-ktub-), and also 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 suffixal morpheme, while in the non-past, a combination of prefixes (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, كَتَبَkataba 'to write'. In Modern Standard, the energetic mood (in either long or short form, which have the same meaning) is almost never used.

Derivation

Like other Semitic languages, and unlike most other languages, Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology (applying many templates applied roots) to derive words than adding prefixes or suffixes to words.

For verbs, a given root can occur in many different derived verb stems (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. Stems sharing the same root consonants represent separate verbs, albeit often semantically related, and each is the basis for its own conjugational paradigm. As a result, these derived stems are part of the system of derivational morphology, not part of the inflectional system.

Examples of the different verbs formed from the root كتبk-t-b 'write' (using حمرḥ-m-r 'red' for Form IX, which is limited to colors and physical defects):

Most of these forms are exclusively Classical Arabic
Form Past Meaning Non-past Meaning
I kataba 'he wrote' yaktubu 'he writes'
II kattaba 'he made (someone) write' yukattibu "he makes (someone) write"
III kātaba 'he corresponded with, wrote to (someone)' yukātibu 'he corresponds with, writes to (someone)'
IV ʾaktaba 'he dictated' yuktibu 'he dictates'
V takattaba 'nonexistent' yatakattabu 'nonexistent'
VI takātaba 'he corresponded (with someone, esp. mutually)' yatakātabu 'he corresponds (with someone, esp. mutually)'
VII inkataba 'he subscribed' yankatibu 'he subscribes'
VIII iktataba 'he copied' yaktatibu 'he copies'
IX iḥmarra 'he turned red' yaḥmarru 'he turns red'
X istaktaba 'he asked (someone) to write' yastaktibu 'he asks (someone) to write'

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. maktab 'desk, office' < k-t-b 'write', maṭbakh 'kitchen' < ṭ-b-kh 'cook').

The only three genuine suffixes are as follows:

  • The feminine suffix -ah; variously derives terms for women from related terms for men, or more generally terms along the same lines as the corresponding masculine, e.g. maktabah 'library' (also a writing-related place, but different from maktab, as above).
  • The nisbah suffix -iyy-. This suffix is extremely productive, and forms adjectives meaning "related to X". It corresponds to English adjectives in -ic, -al, -an, -y, -ist, etc.
  • The feminine nisbah suffix -iyyah. This is formed by adding the feminine suffix -ah onto nisba adjectives to form abstract nouns. For example, from the basic root sh-r-k 'share' can be derived the Form VIII verb ishtaraka 'to cooperate, participate', and in turn its verbal noun ishtirāk 'cooperation, participation' can be formed. This in turn can be made into a nisbah adjective ishtirākī 'socialist', from which an abstract noun ishtirākiyyah 'socialism' can be derived. Other recent formations are jumhūriyyah 'republic' (lit. "public-ness", < jumhūr 'multitude, general public'), and the Gaddafi-specific variation jamāhīriyyah 'people's republic' (lit. "masses-ness", < jamāhīr 'the masses', pl. of jumhūr, as above).

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.

The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm in Egyptian Arabic.

Example of a regular Form I verb in Egyptian Arabic, kátab/yíktib "write"
Tense/Mood Past Present Subjunctive Present Indicative Future Imperative
Singular
1st katáb-t á-ktib bá-ktib ḥá-ktib "
2nd masculine katáb-t tí-ktib bi-tí-ktib ḥa-tí-ktib í-ktib
feminine katáb-ti ti-ktíb-i bi-ti-ktíb-i ḥa-ti-ktíb-i i-ktíb-i
3rd masculine kátab yí-ktib bi-yí-ktib ḥa-yí-ktib "
feminine kátab-it tí-ktib bi-tí-ktib ḥa-tí-ktib
Plural
1st katáb-na ní-ktib bi-ní-ktib ḥá-ní-ktib "
2nd katáb-tu ti-ktíb-u bi-ti-ktíb-u ḥa-ti-ktíb-u i-ktíb-u
3rd kátab-u yi-ktíb-u bi-yi-ktíb-u ḥa-yi-ktíb-u "

Writing system

 
Arabic calligraphy written by a Malay Muslim in Malaysia. The calligrapher is making a rough draft.

The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. 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).

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 (zaouias) 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.[112][113]

Originally Arabic was made up of only rasm without diacritical marks[114] 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.

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.

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 verse 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.[citation needed]

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.[115]

Romanization

Examples of different transliteration/transcription schemes
Letter IPA UNGEGN ALA-LC Wehr DIN ISO SAS - 2 BATR ArabTeX chat
ء ʔ ʼ ʾ ˈ, ˌ ʾ ' e ' 2
ا ā ʾ ā aa aa / A a a/e/é
ي j, y y; ī y; e y; ii y y; i/ee; ei/ai
ث θ th ç c _t s/th
ج d͡ʒ~ɡ~ʒ j ǧ ŷ j j ^g j/g/dj
ح ħ H .h 7
خ x kh j x K _h kh/7'/5
ذ ð dh đ z' _d z/dh/th
ش ʃ sh š x ^s sh/ch
ص ş S .s s/9
ض D .d d/9'
ط ţ T .tu t/6
ظ ðˤ~ đ̣ Z .z z/dh/6'
ع ʕ ʻ ʿ ř E ' 3
غ ɣ gh ġ g j g .g gh/3'/8

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 "me" or "eat".) 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 diacritical 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.[citation needed] 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, sometimes known as IM Arabic.

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 ⟨ع⟩. There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. 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 ⟨د⟩, may be represented by d. Its emphatic counterpart, ⟨ض⟩, may be written as D.

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 (٠‎ – ١‎ – ٢‎ – ٣‎ – ٤‎ – ٥‎ – ٦‎ – ٧‎ – ٨‎ – ٩‎) 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.

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 Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon.[116][117] Said Akl created a Latin-based alphabet for Lebanese 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.[116][117] 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.[116][117] 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.[116][117] Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization.[116][118] 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.[116][118] However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet.[116][118] 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.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Native speakers of Arabic generally do not distinguish between MSA and Classical Arabic and refer to both as العربية الفصحى al-ʻarabīyah al-fuṣḥā, lit.'the eloquent Arabic'.[8]

References

Citations

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  2. ^ a b Arabic, Standard at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)  
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  4. ^ Samoura, Fatma (7 June 2022). "Amendments to the FIFA Statutes: new official FIFA languages" (PDF). Fédération Internationale de Football Association.
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  6. ^ a b c d 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.
  7. ^ Macdonald, Michael C. A. "Arabians, Arabias, and the Greeks_Contact and Perceptions". Literacy and Identity in Pre-Islamic Arabia. pp. 16–17. ISBN 9781003278818.
  8. ^ Badawi, El-Said M. (1996). Understanding Arabic: Essays in Contemporary Arabic Linguistics in Honor of El-Said Badawi. American University in Cairo Press. p. 105. ISBN 977-424-372-2. OCLC 35163083.
  9. ^ Versteegh 2014, p. viii.
  10. ^ al-Sharkawi, Muhammad (2016). History and Development of the Arabic Language. Taylor & Francis. p. xvi. ISBN 978-1-317-58863-4. OCLC 965157532.
  11. ^ Qwaider, Chatrine; Abu Kwaik, Kathrein (2022). Resources and Applications for Dialectal Arabic: the Case of Levantine. University of Gothenburg. pp. 136, 139. ISBN 978-91-8009-803-8.
  12. ^ Schmitt, Genevieve A. (2020). "Relevance of Arabic Dialects: A Brief Discussion". In Brunn, Stanley D.; Kehrein, Roland (eds.). Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer. p. 1391. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-02438-3_79. ISBN 978-3-030-02438-3. OCLC 1126004175. S2CID 242212666.
  13. ^ Al‐Wer, Enam; Jong, Rudolf (2017). "Dialects of Arabic". In Boberg, Charles; Nerbonne, John; Watt, Dominic (eds.). The Handbook of Dialectology. Wiley. p. 525. doi:10.1002/9781118827628.ch32. ISBN 978-1-118-82755-0. OCLC 989950951.
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External links

arabic, this, article, about, general, language, macrolanguage, specific, varieties, other, uses, disambiguation, this, article, needs, attention, from, expert, linguistics, specific, problem, there, seems, some, confusion, surrounding, chronology, origination. This article is about the general language macrolanguage For specific varieties of Arabic and other uses see Arabic disambiguation This article needs attention from an expert in linguistics The specific problem is There seems to be some confusion surrounding the chronology of Arabic s origination including notably in the paragraph on Qaryat Al Faw also discussed on talk There are major sourcing gaps from Literary Arabic onwards WikiProject Linguistics may be able to help recruit an expert August 2022 Arabic ا ل ع ر ب ي ة al ʿarabiyyah al ʕaraˈbijːa listen ع ر ب ي ʿarabiy ˈʕarabiː listen or ʕaraˈbij is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world 6 Having emerged in the 1st century it is named after the Arab people the term Arab was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece 7 Arabicا ل ع ر ب ي ة al ʿarabiyyahal ʿarabiyyah in written Arabic Naskh script Pronunciation ˈʕarabiː alʕaraˈbijːa Native toCountries of the Arab League minorities in neighboring countries and some parts of Asia Africa EuropeEthnicityArabs and several peoples of the MENA region as a result of language shift Speakers360 million native speakers of all varieties 2022 1 270 million L2 speakers of Modern Standard Arabic 2 Language familyAfro Asiatic SemiticWest SemiticCentral SemiticNorth ArabianArabicEarly formProto ArabicOld ArabicOld HijaziClassical ArabicStandard formsModern Standard ArabicDialectsWestern Maghrebi Northern Egyptian Mesopotamian Levantine Southern Peninsular Gulf Hejazi Najdi and Yemeni Writing systemArabic alphabet Latin script Arabizi Said Akl s alphabet Hassaniya alphabet Maltese alphabet Hebrew alphabet in Israel for Levantine 3 Signed formsSigned Arabic different national forms Official statusOfficial language in26 states AlgeriaBahrainChadComorosDjiboutiEgyptIraqJordanKuwaitLebanonLibyaMauritaniaMoroccoOmanPalestineQatarSaudi ArabiaSomaliaSomalilandSudanSyriaTunisiaUnited Arab EmiratesYemenZanzibar Tanzania Western Sahara disputed territory International Organizations African UnionArab LeagueFIFA 4 Organisation of Islamic CooperationUnited NationsRecognised minoritylanguage inList AfghanistanAzerbaijanBruneiCyprusEritreaIndonesiaIsrael 5 IranKazakhstanMalaysiaMaliNigerPakistanPhilippinesSenegalSouth AfricaSouth SudanTurkeyRegulated byList Algeria Supreme Council of the Arabic language in Algeria Egypt Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo Israel Academy of the Arabic Language in Israel Iraq Iraqi Academy of Sciences Jordan Jordan Academy of Arabic Libya Academy of the Arabic Language in Jamahiriya Morocco Academy of the Arabic Language in Rabat Saudi Arabia Academy of the Arabic Language in Riyadh Somalia Academy of the Arabic Language in Mogadishu Sudan Academy of the Arabic Language in Khartoum Syria Arab Academy of Damascus the oldest Tunisia Beit Al Hikma FoundationLanguage codesISO 639 1 span class plainlinks ar span ISO 639 2 span class plainlinks ara span ISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code ara class extiw title iso639 3 ara ara a inclusive codeIndividual codes a href https iso639 3 sil org code arq class extiw title iso639 3 arq arq a Algerian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code aao class extiw title iso639 3 aao aao a Algerian Saharan Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code xaa class extiw title iso639 3 xaa xaa a Andalusian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code bbz class extiw title iso639 3 bbz bbz a Babalia Creole Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code abv class extiw title iso639 3 abv abv a Baharna Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code shu class extiw title iso639 3 shu shu a Chadian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code acy class extiw title iso639 3 acy acy a Cypriot Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code adf class extiw title iso639 3 adf adf a Dhofari Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code avl class extiw title iso639 3 avl avl a Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code arz class extiw title iso639 3 arz arz a Egyptian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code afb class extiw title iso639 3 afb afb a Gulf Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ayh class extiw title iso639 3 ayh ayh a Hadrami Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code acw class extiw title iso639 3 acw acw a Hijazi Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ayl class extiw title iso639 3 ayl ayl a Libyan Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code acm class extiw title iso639 3 acm acm a Mesopotamian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ary class extiw title iso639 3 ary ary a Moroccan Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ars class extiw title iso639 3 ars ars a Najdi Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code apc class extiw title iso639 3 apc apc a North Levantine Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ayp class extiw title iso639 3 ayp ayp a North Mesopotamian Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code acx class extiw title iso639 3 acx acx a Omani Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code aec class extiw title iso639 3 aec aec a Saidi Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ayn class extiw title iso639 3 ayn ayn a Sanaani Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ssh class extiw title iso639 3 ssh ssh a Shihhi Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code sqr class extiw title iso639 3 sqr sqr a Siculo Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code ajp class extiw title iso639 3 ajp ajp a South Levantine Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code arb class extiw title iso639 3 arb arb a Standard Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code apd class extiw title iso639 3 apd apd a Sudanese Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code pga class extiw title iso639 3 pga pga a Sudanese Creole Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code acq class extiw title iso639 3 acq acq a Taizzi Adeni Arabic a href https iso639 3 sil org code abh class extiw title iso639 3 abh abh a Tajiki ArabicGlottologarab1395Linguasphere12 AACDistribution of Arabic sole official language dark green sole official language minority native speakers light green co official language majority native speakers dark blue co official language no native speaker majority light blue not official minority native speakers light grey This article contains IPA phonetic symbols Without proper rendering support you may see question marks boxes or other symbols instead of Unicode characters For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA Since the 7th century Arabic has been characterized by diglossia with an opposition between a standard prestige language i e Literary Arabic Modern Standard Arabic MSA or Classical Arabic a and diverse vernacular varieties which serve as mother tongues 9 Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA impeding mutual intelligibility 10 11 12 MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively It is the language of literature official documents and formal written media In spoken form MSA is used in formal contexts news bulletins and for prayers 13 This variety is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam 14 It is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory the third most after English and French 15 It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations 16 Spoken varieties are the usual medium of communication in all other domains They are not standardized and vary significantly some of them being mutually unintelligible 17 The International Organization for Standardization assigns language codes to 33 varieties of Arabic including MSA 18 19 Arabic vernaculars do not descend from MSA or Classical Arabic 20 21 Combined Arabic dialects have 362 million native speakers 1 while MSA is spoken by 274 million L2 speakers 2 making it the sixth most spoken language in the world 22 Arabic is traditionally written with the Arabic alphabet a right to left abjad This alphabet is the official script for MSA Colloquial varieties were traditionally not written however with the emergence of social media the amount of written dialects has significantly increased online Besides the Arabic alphabet dialects are also often written in Latin from left to right or in Hebrew characters in Israel 3 with no standardized orthography Maltese is the only colloquial variety officially written in a Latin alphabet 23 Contents 1 Classification 2 History 2 1 Old Arabic 2 2 Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic 2 3 Standardization 2 4 Spread 2 5 Development 2 6 Neo Arabic 2 7 Nahda 3 Classical Modern Standard and spoken Arabic 4 Status and usage 4 1 Diglossia 4 2 Status in the Arab world vis a vis other languages 4 3 As a foreign language 5 Vocabulary 5 1 Loanwords 5 2 Influence of Arabic on other languages 6 Spoken varieties 6 1 Koine 6 2 Dialect groups 7 Phonology 7 1 History 7 2 Literary Arabic 7 2 1 Vowels 7 2 2 Consonants 7 2 3 Syllable structure 7 2 4 Stress 7 2 5 Levels of pronunciation 7 2 5 1 Full pronunciation with pausa 7 2 5 2 Formal short pronunciation 7 2 5 3 Informal short pronunciation 7 3 Colloquial varieties 7 3 1 Vowels 7 3 2 Consonants 8 Grammar 8 1 Literary Arabic 8 1 1 Nouns and adjectives 8 1 2 Verbs 8 1 3 Derivation 8 2 Colloquial varieties 9 Writing system 9 1 Calligraphy 9 2 Romanization 9 3 Numerals 9 4 Arabic alphabet and nationalism 9 4 1 Lebanon 9 4 2 Egypt 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 12 1 Citations 12 2 Sources 13 External linksClassificationFurther information Classification of Arabic languages Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub groups 6 The Semitic languages changed significantly between Proto Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages particularly in grammar Innovations of the Central Semitic languages all maintained in Arabic include The conversion of the suffix conjugated stative formation jalas into a past tense The conversion of the prefix conjugated preterite tense formation yajlis into a present tense The elimination of other prefix conjugated mood aspect forms e g a present tense formed by doubling the middle root a perfect formed by infixing a t after the first root consonant probably a jussive formed by a stress shift in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix conjugation forms e g u for indicative a for subjunctive no ending for jussive an or anna for energetic The development of an internal passive There are several features which Classical Arabic the modern Arabic varieties as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor Proto Arabic 24 25 The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto Arabic 26 negative particles m ma lʾn la ʾan to Classical Arabic lan mafʿul G passive participle prepositions and adverbs f ʿn ʿnd ḥt ʿkdy a subjunctive in a t demonstratives leveling of the at allomorph of the feminine ending ʾn complementizer and subordinator the use of f to introduce modal clauses independent object pronoun in ʾ y vestiges of nunationOn the other hand several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic 27 28 Thus Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic 29 Classical Arabic is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor 24 HistoryOld Arabic Main article Old Arabic Safaitic inscription Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity In the southwest various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family e g Southern Thamudic were spoken It is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages non Central Semitic languages were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time To the north in the oases of northern Hejaz Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages In Najd and parts of western Arabia a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested In eastern Arabia inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic Finally 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 isoglosses with later forms of Arabic leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are in fact early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic 30 Linguists generally believe that Old Arabic a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic first emerged around the 1st century CE Previously the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al Faw 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 31 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 6 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 32 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 30 The Namara inscription a sample of Nabataean script considered a direct precursor of Arabic script 33 34 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 allahe found in En Avdat Israel and dated to around 125 CE 35 This is followed by the Namara inscription an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru al Qays bar Amro dating to 328 CE found at Namaraa Syria From the 4th to the 6th centuries the Nabataean script evolves into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era 36 There are inscriptions in an undotted 17 letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE found at four locations in Syria Zabad Jabal Usays Harran Umm el Jimal 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 are referred to by linguists as Quranic Arabic as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into Classical Arabic 6 Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic Main articles Old Hijazi and Classical Arabic Arabic from the Quran in the old Hijazi dialect Hijazi script 7th century AD In late pre Islamic times a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra most strongly in Judeo Christian texts keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the learned tradition Classical Arabic 37 This variety and both its classicizing and lay iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register It is clear that the orthography of the Qur an was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic rather it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi citation needed The Qur an has served and continues to serve as a fundamental reference for Arabic Maghrebi Kufic script Blue Qur an 9th 10th century In the late 6th century AD a relatively uniform intertribal poetic koine distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd probably in connection with the court of al Ḥira 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 citation needed Standardization Evolution of early Arabic script 9th 11th century with the Basmala as an example from kufic Qur an manuscripts 1 Early 9th century script with no dots or diacritic marks 2 and 3 9th 10th century under 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 fa and qaf 4 11th century in al Farahidi s system system used today dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels Abu al Aswad al Du ali c 603 689 is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar or an naḥw الن حو the way 38 and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants نقط الإعجام nuqat l i jam pointing for non Arabs and indicate vocalization التشكيل at tashkil 39 Al Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi 718 786 compiled the first Arabic dictionary Kitab al Ayn كتاب العين The Book of the Letter ع and is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody 40 Al Jahiz 776 868 proposed to Al Akhfash al Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic but it would not come to pass for two centuries 41 The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya Arabic Sibawayhi s al Kitab is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts in addition to Qur an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya 42 Spread Arabic spread with the spread of Islam Following the early Muslim conquests Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish 33 In the early Abbasid period many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad s House of Wisdom 33 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 Andalusi Jewish philosopher authored works in Judeo Arabic Arabic written in Hebrew script including his famous The Guide for the Perplexed דלאלת אלחאירין دلالة الحائرين Dalalat al ḥaʾirin 43 Development Ibn Jinni of Mosul a pioneer in phonology wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitab Al Munṣif Kitab Al Muḥtasab and Kitab Al Khaṣaʾiṣ ar 44 Ibn Mada of Cordoba 1116 1196 realized the overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al Jahiz 200 years prior 41 The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisan al ʿArab لسان العرب Tongue of Arabs a major reference dictionary of Arabic in 1290 45 Neo Arabic Charles Ferguson s koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests this view has been challenged in recent times Ahmad al Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests Northern and Central Al Jallad 2009 The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories 42 According to Veersteegh and Bickerton colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA 46 47 In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al Andalus the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb 48 Nahda The first known book printed in Arabic Kitabu ṣalati s sawa i كتاب صلاة السواعي a book of hours printed with movable type in 1514 49 Coverage in Al Ahram in 1934 of the inauguration of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo an organization of major importance to the modernization of Arabic The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression 50 According to James L Gelvin Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to a wider audience 50 Taha Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser were both staunch defenders of Standard Arabic 51 52 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 53 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 54 55 In response a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Academie francaise were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations 56 first in Damascus 1919 then in Cairo 1932 Baghdad 1948 Rabat 1960 Amman 1977 Khartum ar 1993 and Tunis 1993 57 They review language development monitor new words and approve inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts citation needed In 1997 a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational Cultural and Scientific Organization of the Arab League 57 These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences creating terms 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 57 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 58 and Sudan 59 source source source source source source source source source source source source source source track track track track track Arabic Swadesh list 1 100 Classical Modern Standard and spoken ArabicFurther information Classical Arabic Modern Standard Arabic and Varieties of ArabicSee also List of Arabic dictionaries Flag of the Arab League used in some cases for the Arabic language Flag used in some cases for the Arabic language Flag of the Kingdom of Hejaz 1916 1925 The flag contains the four Pan Arab colors black white green and red Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic 60 It could also refer to any of a variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects which are not necessarily mutually intelligible Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran used from the period of Pre Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate Classical Arabic is prescriptive according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians such as Sibawayh and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries such as the Lisan al ʻArab citation needed 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 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 61 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 60 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 ف ص ح ى fuṣḥa are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic citation needed Some of the differences between Classical Arabic CA and Modern Standard Arabic MSA are as follows citation needed Certain grammatical constructions of CA that have no counterpart in any modern vernacular dialect e g the energetic mood are almost never used in Modern Standard Arabic citation needed Case distinctions are very rare in Arabic vernaculars As a result MSA is generally composed without case distinctions in mind and the proper cases are added after the fact when necessary Because most case endings are noted using final short vowels which are normally left unwritten in the Arabic script it is unnecessary to determine the proper case of most words The practical result of this is that MSA like English and Standard Chinese is written in a strongly determined word order and alternative orders that were used in CA for emphasis are rare In addition because of the lack of case marking in the spoken varieties most speakers cannot consistently use the correct endings in extemporaneous speech As a result spoken MSA tends to drop or regularize the endings except when reading from a prepared text citation needed The numeral system in CA is complex and heavily tied in with the case system This system is never used in MSA even in the most formal of circumstances instead a significantly simplified system is used approximating the system of the conservative spoken varieties citation needed MSA uses much Classical vocabulary e g dhahaba 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 62 Some words have been borrowed from other languages notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation e g ف ل م film film or ديمقراطية dimuqraṭiyyah democracy citation needed However the current preference is to avoid direct borrowings preferring to either use loan translations e g فرع farʻ branch also used for the branch of a company or organization جناح janaḥ wing is also used for the wing of an airplane building air force etc or to coin new words using forms within existing roots استماتة istimatah apoptosis using the root موت m w t death put into the Xth form or جامعة jamiʻah university based on جمع jamaʻa to gather unite جمهورية jumhuriyyah republic based on جمهور jumhur multitude An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse e g هاتف hatif telephone lt invisible caller in Sufism جريدة jaridah newspaper lt palm leaf stalk citation needed 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 63 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 64 The varieties are typically unwritten They are often used in informal spoken media such as soap operas and talk shows 65 as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising Hassaniya Arabic and Maltese are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official status 66 The Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write Hassaniya 67 Maltese is spoken in predominantly Catholic Malta and written with the Latin script 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 23 Even during Muhammad s lifetime there were dialects of spoken Arabic Muhammad spoke in the dialect of Mecca in the western Arabian peninsula and it was in this dialect that the Quran was written However the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were considered the most prestigious at the time so the language of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology It is this phonology that underlies the modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic The phonological differences between these two dialects account for some of the complexities of Arabic writing most notably the writing of the glottal stop or hamzah which was preserved in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech and the use of alif maqṣurah representing a sound preserved in the western dialects but merged with a in eastern speech citation needed Status and usageDiglossia 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 68 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 69 70 71 72 73 Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have sub dialects of their own 74 When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation for example a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese many speakers code switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language sometimes even within the same sentence Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film citation needed 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 and Urdu Serbian and Croatian Scots 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 75 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 significant complicating factor A single written form significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms For political reasons Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions 76 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 77 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 citation needed Status in the Arab world vis a 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 78 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 melange of code switching practises 79 As a foreign language Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary 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 language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic millions 80 of Muslims both Arab and non Arab study the language Software and books with tapes are also 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 81 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 82 VocabularyLoanwords The most important sources of borrowings into pre Islamic Arabic are from the related Semitic languages Aramaic 83 which used to be the principal international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East and Ethiopic In addition many cultural religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages notably Middle Persian Parthian and Classical Persian 84 and Hellenistic Greek kimiyaʼ has as origin the Greek khymia meaning in that language the melting of metals see Roger Dachez Histoire de la Medecine de l Antiquite au XXe siecle Tallandier 2008 p 251 alembic distiller from ambix cup almanac climate from almenichiakon calendar For the origin of the last three borrowed words see Alfred Louis de Premare Foundations of Islam Seuil L Univers Historique 2002 Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persian languages are as presented in De Premare s above cited book citation needed madinah medina مدينة city or city square a word of Aramaic origin ܡܕ ܝ ܢ ܬ ܐ meḏi n tta in which it means state city citation needed jazirah جزيرة as in the well known form الجزيرة Al Jazeera means island and has its origin in the Syriac ܓ ܙ ܪܬ ܐ gazarta citation needed lazaward لازورد is taken from Persian لاژورد lajvard the name of a blue stone lapis lazuli This word was borrowed in several European languages to mean light blue azure in English azur in French and azul in Portuguese and Spanish citation needed A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas amp Manfredi 2020 85 Influence of Arabic 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 Azerbaijani Baluchi Bengali Berber Bosnian Chaldean Chechen Chittagonian Croatian Dagestani Dhivehi English German Gujarati Hausa Hindi Kazakh Kurdish Kutchi Kyrgyz Malay Malaysian and Indonesian Pashto Persian Punjabi Rohingya Romance languages French Catalan Italian Portuguese Sicilian Spanish etc Saraiki Sindhi Somali Sylheti Swahili Tagalog Tigrinya Turkish Turkmen Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Visayan and Wolof as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken 85 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 86 In addition English 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 87 Other languages such as Maltese 88 and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules Terms borrowed range from religious terminology like Berber taẓallit prayer from salat صلاة ṣalah academic terms like Uyghur mentiq logic and economic items like English coffee to placeholders like Spanish fulano so and so everyday terms like Hindustani lekin but or Spanish taza and French tasse meaning cup and expressions like Catalan a betzef galore in quantity Most Berber varieties such as Kabyle along with Swahili borrow some numbers from Arabic Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic such as صلاة salat prayer and إمام imam prayer leader citation needed 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 entered through Persian Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri Most Arabic loanwords in Yoruba entered through Hausa citation needed Arabic words also made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara Variants of Arabic words such as كتاب kitab book have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders 89 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 rule citation needed Spoken varietiesMain article Varieties of Arabic This map s factual accuracy is disputed Relevant discussion may be found on Talk Varieties of Arabic Please help to ensure that disputed statements are reliably sourced November 2022 Learn how and when to remove this template message Geographical distribution of the varieties of Arabic 1 Hassaniyya 2 Moroccan Arabic 3 Algerian Saharan Arabic 4 Algerian Arabic 5 Tunisian Arabic 6 Libyan Arabic 7 Egyptian Arabic 8 Eastern Egyptian Bedawi Arabic 9 Saidi Arabic 10 Chadian Arabic 11 Sudanese Arabic 12 Sudanese Creole Arabic 13 Najdi Arabic 14 South Levantine Arabic 15 North Levantine Arabic 16 North Mesopotamian Arabic 17 Mesopotamian Arabic 18 Gulf Arabic 19 Baharna Arabic 20 Hijazi Arabic 21 Shihhi Arabic 22 Omani Arabic 23 Dhofari Arabic 24 Sanaani Arabic 25 Ta izzi Adeni Arabic 26 Hadrami Arabic 27 Uzbeki Arabic 28 Tajiki Arabic 29 Cypriot Arabic 30 Maltese 31 Nubi Sparsely populated area or no indigenous Arabic speakersSolid area fill variety natively spoken by at least 25 of the population of that area or variety indigenous to that area onlyHatched area fill minority scattered over the areaDotted area fill speakers of this variety are mixed with speakers of other Arabic varieties in the area 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 citation needed Within the non peninsula varieties the largest difference is between the non Egyptian North African dialects 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 citation needed One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas which have typically provided a significant number of new words and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order however a much more significant factor for most dialects is as among Romance languages retention or change of meaning of different classical forms Thus Iraqi aku Levantine fih and North African kayen all mean there is and all come from Classical Arabic forms yakun fihi ka in respectively but now sound very different citation needed Koine According to Charles A Ferguson 90 the following are some of the characteristic features of the koine 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 Loss of the dual number except on nouns with consistent plural agreement cf feminine singular agreement in plural inanimates Change of a to i in many affixes e g non past tense prefixes ti yi ni wi and il the feminine it in the construct state Loss of third weak verbs ending in w which merge with verbs ending in y Reformation of geminate verbs e g ḥalaltu I untied ḥalet u Conversion of separate words li to me laka to you etc into indirect object clitic suffixes Certain changes in the cardinal number system e g khamsat ayyam five days kham a s tiyyam where certain words have a special plural with prefixed t Loss of the feminine elative comparative Adjective plurals of the form kibar big kubar Change of nisba suffix iyy gt i Certain lexical items e g jab bring lt jaʼa bi come with shaf see esh what or similar lt ayyu shayʼ which thing illi relative pronoun Merger of ɮˤ and dˤ Dialect groups Egyptian Arabic is spoken by around 53 million people in Egypt 55 million worldwide 91 It is one of the most understood varieties of Arabic due in large part to the widespread distribution of Egyptian films and television shows throughout the Arabic speaking world Levantine Arabic includes North Levantine Arabic South Levantine Arabic and Cypriot Arabic It is spoken by about 21 million people in Lebanon Syria Jordan Palestine Israel Cyprus and Turkey Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic spoken primarily in Lebanon Jordanian Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by the population of the Kingdom of Jordan Palestinian Arabic is a name of several dialects of the subgroup of Levantine Arabic spoken by the Palestinians in Palestine by Arab citizens of Israel and in most Palestinian populations around the world Samaritan Arabic spoken by only several hundred in the Nablus region Cypriot Maronite Arabic spoken in Cyprus Maghrebi Arabic also called Darija spoken by about 70 million people in Morocco Algeria Tunisia and Libya It also forms the basis of Maltese via the extinct Sicilian Arabic dialect 92 Maghrebi Arabic is very hard to understand for Arabic speakers from the Mashriq or Mesopotamia the most comprehensible being Libyan Arabic and the most difficult Moroccan Arabic The others such as Algerian Arabic can be considered in between the two in terms of difficulty Libyan Arabic spoken in Libya and neighboring countries Tunisian Arabic spoken in Tunisia and North eastern Algeria Algerian Arabic spoken in Algeria Judeo Algerian Arabic was spoken by Jews in Algeria until 1962 Moroccan Arabic spoken in Morocco Hassaniya Arabic 3 million speakers spoken in Mauritania Western Sahara some parts of the Azawad in northern Mali southern Morocco and south western Algeria Andalusian Arabic spoken in Spain until the 16th century Siculo Arabic Sicilian Arabic was spoken in Sicily and Malta between the end of the 9th century and the end of the 12th century and eventually evolved into the Maltese language Maltese spoken on the island of Malta is the only fully separate standardized language to have originated from an Arabic dialect the extinct Siculo Arabic dialect with independent literary norms Maltese has evolved independently of Modern Standard Arabic and its varieties into a standardized language over the past 800 years in a gradual process of Latinisation 93 94 Maltese is therefore considered an exceptional descendant of Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic 95 Maltese is also different from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages Italian and Sicilian 96 It is also the only Semitic language written in the Latin script In terms of basic everyday language speakers of Maltese are reported to be able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic 97 which is related to Siculo Arabic 92 whereas speakers of Tunisian are able to understand about 40 of what is said to them in Maltese 98 This asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between Maghrebi Arabic dialects 99 Maltese has its own dialects with urban varieties of Maltese being closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties 100 Mesopotamian Arabic spoken by about 41 2 million people in Iraq where it is called Aamiyah eastern Syria and southwestern Iran Khuzestan and in the southeastern of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean Southeastern Anatolia Region North Mesopotamian Arabic is a spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq in western Iran northern Syria and in southeastern Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean Region Southeastern Anatolia Region and southern Eastern Anatolia Region 101 Judeo Mesopotamian Arabic also known as Iraqi Judeo Arabic and Yahudic is a variety of Arabic spoken by Iraqi Jews of Mosul Baghdad Arabic is the Arabic dialect spoken in Baghdad and the surrounding cities and it is a subvariety of Mesopotamian Arabic Baghdad Jewish Arabic is the dialect spoken by the Iraqi Jews of Baghdad South Mesopotamian Arabic Basrawi dialect is the dialect spoken in southern Iraq such as Basra Dhi Qar and Najaf 102 Khuzestani Arabic is the dialect spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan This dialect is a mix of Southern Mesopotamian Arabic and Gulf Arabic Khorasani Arabic spoken in the Iranian province of Khorasan Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait Sudanese Arabic is spoken by 17 million people in Sudan and some parts of southern Egypt Sudanese Arabic is quite distinct from the dialect of its neighbor to the north rather the Sudanese have a dialect similar to the Hejazi dialect Juba Arabic spoken in South Sudan and southern Sudan Gulf Arabic spoken by around four million people predominantly in Kuwait Bahrain some parts of Oman eastern Saudi Arabia coastal areas and some parts of UAE and Qatar Also spoken in Iran s Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces Although Gulf Arabic is spoken in Qatar most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic Bedawi Omani Arabic distinct from the Gulf Arabic of Eastern Arabia and Bahrain spoken in Central Oman With recent oil wealth and mobility has spread over other parts of the Sultanate Hadhrami Arabic spoken by around 8 million people predominantly in Hadhramaut and in parts of the Arabian Peninsula South and Southeast Asia and East Africa by Hadhrami descendants Yemeni Arabic spoken in Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia by 15 million people Similar to Gulf Arabic Najdi Arabic spoken by around 10 million people mainly spoken in Najd central and northern Saudi Arabia Most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic Bedawi Hejazi Arabic 6 million speakers spoken in Hejaz western Saudi Arabia Saharan Arabic spoken in some parts of Algeria Niger and Mali Baharna Arabic 600 000 speakers spoken by Bahrani Shiʻah in Bahrain and Qatif the dialect exhibits many big differences from Gulf Arabic It is also spoken to a lesser extent in Oman Judeo Arabic dialects these are the dialects spoken by the Jews that had lived or continue to live in the Arab World As Jewish migration to Israel took hold the language did not thrive and is now considered endangered So called Qeltu Arabic Chadian Arabic spoken in Chad Sudan some parts of South Sudan Central African Republic Niger Nigeria Cameroon Central Asian Arabic spoken in Uzbekistan Tajikistan and Afghanistan is highly endangered Shirvani Arabic spoken in Azerbaijan and Dagestan until the 1930s now extinct PhonologyMain article Arabic phonology History Of the 29 Proto Semitic consonants only one has been lost ʃ which merged with s while ɬ became ʃ see Semitic languages 103 Various other consonants have changed their sound too but have remained distinct An original p lenited to f and ɡ consistently attested in pre Islamic Greek transcription of Arabic languages 104 became palatalized to ɡʲ or ɟ by the time of the Quran and d ʒ ɡ ʒ or ɟ after early Muslim conquests and in MSA see Arabic phonology Local variations for more detail 105 An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative ɬ became ʃ 106 Its emphatic counterpart ɬˠ ɮˤ was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic Hence the Classical Arabic s appellation ل غ ة ٱلض اد lughat al ḍad or language of the ḍad for most modern dialects it has become an emphatic stop dˤ with loss of the laterality 106 or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization d The classical ḍad pronunciation of pharyngealization ɮˤ still occurs in the Mehri language and the similar sound without velarization ɮ exists in other Modern South Arabian languages Other changes may also have happened Classical Arabic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and different reconstructions of the sound system of Proto Semitic propose different phonetic values One example is the emphatic consonants which are pharyngealized in modern pronunciations but may have been velarized in the eighth century and glottalized in Proto Semitic 106 Reduction of j and w between vowels occurs in a number of circumstances and is responsible for much of the complexity of third weak defective verbs Early Akkadian transcriptions of Arabic names shows that this reduction had not yet occurred as of the early part of the 1st millennium BC citation needed The Classical Arabic language as recorded was a poetic koine that reflected a consciously archaizing dialect chosen based on the tribes of the western part of the Arabian Peninsula who spoke the most conservative variants of Arabic Even at the time of Muhammed and before other dialects existed with many more changes including the loss of most glottal stops the loss of case endings the reduction of the diphthongs aj and aw into monophthongs eː oː etc Most of these changes are present in most or all modern varieties of Arabic citation needed An interesting feature of the writing system of the Quran and hence of Classical Arabic is that it contains certain features of Muhammad s native dialect of Mecca corrected through diacritics into the forms of standard Classical Arabic Among these features visible under the corrections are the loss of the glottal stop and a differing development of the reduction of certain final sequences containing j Evidently final awa became aː as in the Classical language but final aja became a different sound possibly eː rather than again aː in the Classical language This is the apparent source of the alif maqṣurah restricted alif where a final aja is reconstructed a letter that would normally indicate j or some similar high vowel sound but is taken in this context to be a logical variant of alif and represent the sound aː citation needed Literary Arabic source source Recording of a poem by Al Ma arri titled I no longer steal from nature The colloquial spoken dialects of Arabic are learned at home and constitute the native languages of Arabic speakers Formal Modern Standard Arabic is learned at school although many speakers have a native like command of the language it is technically not the native language of any speakers Both varieties can be both written and spoken although the colloquial varieties are rarely written down and the formal variety is spoken mostly in formal circumstances e g in radio and TV broadcasts formal lectures parliamentary discussions and to some extent between speakers of different colloquial dialects Even when the literary language is spoken however it is normally only spoken in its pure form when reading a prepared text out loud and communication between speakers of different colloquial dialects When speaking extemporaneously i e making up the language on the spot as in a normal discussion among people speakers tend to deviate somewhat from the strict literary language in the direction of the colloquial varieties In fact there is a continuous range of in between spoken varieties from nearly pure Modern Standard Arabic MSA to a form that still uses MSA grammar and vocabulary but with significant colloquial influence to a form of the colloquial language that imports a number of words and grammatical constructions in MSA to a form that is close to pure colloquial but with the rough edges the most noticeably vulgar or non Classical aspects smoothed out to pure colloquial The particular variant or register used depends on the social class and education level of the speakers involved and the level of formality of the speech situation Often it will vary within a single encounter e g moving from nearly pure MSA to a more mixed language in the process of a radio interview as the interviewee becomes more comfortable with the interviewer This type of variation is characteristic of the diglossia that exists throughout the Arabic speaking world citation needed Although Modern Standard Arabic MSA is a unitary language its pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country and from region to region within a country The variation in individual accents of MSA speakers tends to mirror corresponding variations in the colloquial speech of the speakers in question but with the distinguishing characteristics moderated somewhat It is important in descriptions of Arabic phonology to distinguish between pronunciation of a given colloquial spoken dialect and the pronunciation of MSA by these same speakers Although they are related they are not the same For example the phoneme that derives from Classical Arabic ɟ has many different pronunciations in the modern spoken varieties e g d ʒ ʒ j ɡʲ ɡ including the proposed original ɟ Speakers whose native variety has either d ʒ or ʒ will use the same pronunciation when speaking MSA Even speakers from Cairo whose native Egyptian Arabic has ɡ normally use ɡ when speaking MSA The j of Persian Gulf speakers is the only variant pronunciation which isn t found in MSA d ʒ ʒ is used instead but may use j in MSA for comfortable pronunciation Another reason of different pronunciations is influence of colloquial dialects The differentiation of pronunciation of colloquial dialects is the influence from other languages previously spoken and some still presently spoken in the regions such as Coptic in Egypt Berber Punic or Phoenician in North Africa Himyaritic Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian in Yemen and Oman and Aramaic and Canaanite languages including Phoenician in the Levant and Mesopotamia citation needed Another example Many colloquial varieties are known for a type of vowel harmony in which the presence of an emphatic consonant triggers backed allophones of nearby vowels especially of the low vowels aː which are backed to ɑ ː in these circumstances and very often fronted to ae ː in all other circumstances In many spoken varieties the backed or emphatic vowel allophones spread a fair distance in both directions from the triggering consonant in some varieties most notably Egyptian Arabic the emphatic allophones spread throughout the entire word usually including prefixes and suffixes even at a distance of several syllables from the triggering consonant Speakers of colloquial varieties with this vowel harmony tend to introduce it into their MSA pronunciation as well but usually with a lesser degree of spreading than in the colloquial varieties For example speakers of colloquial varieties with extremely long distance harmony may allow a moderate but not extreme amount of spreading of the harmonic allophones in their MSA speech while speakers of colloquial varieties with moderate distance harmony may only harmonize immediately adjacent vowels in MSA citation needed Vowels Modern Standard Arabic has six pure vowels while most modern dialects have eight pure vowels which includes the long vowels eː oː with short a i u and corresponding long vowels aː iː uː There are also two diphthongs aj and aw citation needed The pronunciation of the vowels differs from speaker to speaker in a way that tends to reflect the pronunciation of the corresponding colloquial variety Nonetheless there are some common trends Most noticeable is the differing pronunciation of a and aː which tend towards fronted ae ː a ː or ɛ ː in most situations but a back ɑ ː in the neighborhood of emphatic consonants Some accents and dialects such as those of the Hejaz region have an open a ː or a central a ː in all situations The vowel a varies towards e ː too Listen to the final vowel in the recording of al ʻarabiyyah at the beginning of this article for example The point is Arabic has only three short vowel phonemes so those phonemes can have a very wide range of allophones The vowels u and ɪ are often affected somewhat in emphatic neighborhoods as well with generally more back or centralized allophones but the differences are less great than for the low vowels The pronunciation of short u and i tends towards ʊ o and i e ɨ respectively in many dialects citation needed The definition of both emphatic and neighborhood vary in ways that reflect to some extent corresponding variations in the spoken dialects Generally the consonants triggering emphatic allophones are the pharyngealized consonants tˤ dˤ sˤ dˤ q and r if not followed immediately by i ː Frequently the velar fricatives x ɣ also trigger emphatic allophones occasionally also the pharyngeal consonants ʕ ħ the former more than the latter Many dialects have multiple emphatic allophones of each vowel depending on the particular nearby consonants In most MSA accents emphatic coloring of vowels is limited to vowels immediately adjacent to a triggering consonant although in some it spreads a bit farther e g وقت waqt wɑqt time وطن waṭan wɑtˤɑn homeland وسط المدينة wasṭ al madinah waestˤ ɑl maeˈdiːnae downtown also wɑstˤ ael maeˈdiːnae or similar citation needed In a non emphatic environment the vowel a in the diphthong aj is pronounced aej or ɛj hence سيف sayf sajf saejf sɛjf sword but صيف ṣayf sˤɑjf summer However in accents with no emphatic allophones of a e g in the Hejaz the pronunciation aj or aj occurs in all situations citation needed Consonants See also Literary Arabic phonology Consonant phonemes of Modern Standard Arabic Labial Dental Denti alveolar Post alv Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottalplain emphaticNasal m nStop voiceless t tˤ k q ʔvoiced b d dˤ d ʒ ɡFricative voiceless f 8 s sˤ ʃ x x ħ hvoiced d z dˤ ɣ ʁ ʕTrill rApproximant l ɫ j wThe phoneme d ʒ is represented by the Arabic letter jim ج and has many standard pronunciations d ʒ is characteristic of north Algeria Iraq and most of the Arabian peninsula but with an allophonic ʒ in some positions ʒ occurs in most of the Levant and most of North Africa and ɡ is standard in Egypt coastal Yemen and western Oman Generally this corresponds with the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects In Sudan and Yemen as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni varieties it may be either ɡʲ or ɟ representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic 107 Foreign words containing ɡ may be transcribed with ج غ ك ق گ ݣ or ڨ depending on the regional practice In northern Egypt where the Arabic letter jim ج is normally pronounced ɡ a separate phoneme ʒ which may be transcribed with چ occurs in a small number of mostly non Arabic loanwords e g ʒakitta jacket citation needed 8 ث can be pronounced as s In some places of Maghreb it can be also pronounced as t s citation needed x and ɣ خ غ are velar post velar or uvular 108 In many varieties ħ ʕ ح ع are epiglottal ʜ ʢ in Western Asia citation needed l is pronounced as velarized ɫ in الله ʔallaːh the name of God q e Allah when the word follows a a u or u after i or i it is unvelarized بسم الله bismi l lah bismillaːh 107 The emphatic consonant dˤ was actually pronounced ɮˤ or possibly d ɮˤ 109 either way a highly unusual sound The medieval Arabs actually termed their language lughat al ḍad the language of the Ḍad the name of the letter used for this sound since they thought the sound was unique to their language In fact it also exists in a few other minority Semitic languages e g Mehri Arabic has consonants traditionally termed emphatic tˤ dˤ sˤ dˤ ط ض ص ظ which exhibit simultaneous pharyngealization tˤ dˤ sˤ dˤ as well as varying degrees of velarization tˠ dˠ sˠ dˠ depending on the region so they may be written with the Velarized or pharyngealized diacritic as t d s d This simultaneous articulation is described as Retracted Tongue Root by phonologists 110 In some transcription systems emphasis is shown by capitalizing the letter for example dˤ is written D in others the letter is underlined or has a dot below it for example ḍ Vowels and consonants can be phonologically short or long Long geminate consonants are normally written doubled in Latin transcription i e bb dd etc reflecting the presence of the Arabic diacritic mark shaddah which indicates doubled consonants In actual pronunciation doubled consonants are held twice as long as short consonants This consonant lengthening is phonemically contrastive قبل qabila he accepted vs قب ل qabbala he kissed citation needed Syllable structure Arabic has two kinds of syllables open syllables CV and CVV and closed syllables CVC CVVC and CVCC The syllable types with two morae units of time i e CVC and CVV are termed heavy syllables while those with three morae i e CVVC and CVCC are superheavy syllables Superheavy syllables in Classical Arabic occur in only two places at the end of the sentence due to pausal pronunciation and in words such as حار ḥarr hot ماد ة maddah stuff substance تحاجوا taḥajju they disputed with each other where a long a occurs before two identical consonants a former short vowel between the consonants has been lost In less formal pronunciations of Modern Standard Arabic superheavy syllables are common at the end of words or before clitic suffixes such as na us our due to the deletion of final short vowels citation needed In surface pronunciation every vowel must be preceded by a consonant which may include the glottal stop ʔ There are no cases of hiatus within a word where two vowels occur next to each other without an intervening consonant Some words do have an underlying vowel at the beginning such as the definite article al or words such as اشترا ishtara he bought اجتماع ijtimaʻ meeting When actually pronounced one of three things happens If the word occurs after another word ending in a consonant there is a smooth transition from final consonant to initial vowel e g الاجتماع al ijtimaʻ meeting alid ʒtimaːʕ If the word occurs after another word ending in a vowel the initial vowel of the word is elided e g بيت المدير baytu a l mudir house of the director bajtulmudiːr If the word occurs at the beginning of an utterance a glottal stop ʔ is added onto the beginning e g البيت هو al baytu huwa The house is ʔalbajtuhuwa Stress Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard Arabic It bears a strong relationship to vowel length The basic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are A final vowel long or short may not be stressed Only one of the last three syllables may be stressed Given this restriction the last heavy syllable containing a long vowel or ending in a consonant is stressed if it is not the final syllable If the final syllable is super heavy and closed of the form CVVC or CVCC it receives stress If no syllable is heavy or super heavy the first possible syllable i e third from end is stressed As a special exception in Form VII and VIII verb forms stress may not be on the first syllable despite the above rules Hence inkatab a he subscribed whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced yankatib u he subscribes whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced yankatib he should subscribe juss Likewise Form VIII ishtara he bought yashtari he buys These rules may result in differently stressed syllables when final case endings are pronounced vs the normal situation where they are not pronounced as in the above example of mak ta ba tun library in full pronunciation but mak ta ba tun library in short pronunciation citation needed The restriction on final long vowels does not apply to the spoken dialects where original final long vowels have been shortened and secondary final long vowels have arisen from loss of original final hu hi citation needed Some dialects have different stress rules In the Cairo Egyptian Arabic dialect a heavy syllable may not carry stress more than two syllables from the end of a word hence mad ra sah school qa hi rah Cairo This also affects the way that Modern Standard Arabic is pronounced in Egypt In the Arabic of Sanaa stress is often retracted bay tayn two houses ma sat hum their table ma ka tib desks za rat ḥin sometimes mad ra sat hum their school In this dialect only syllables with long vowels or diphthongs are considered heavy in a two syllable word the final syllable can be stressed only if the preceding syllable is light and in longer words the final syllable cannot be stressed citation needed Levels of pronunciation The final short vowels e g the case endings a i u and mood endings u a are often not pronounced in this language despite forming part of the formal paradigm of nouns and verbs The following levels of pronunciation exist citation needed Full pronunciation with pausa This is the most formal level actually used in speech All endings are pronounced as written except at the end of an utterance where the following changes occur citation needed Final short vowels are not pronounced But possibly an exception is made for feminine plural na and shortened vowels in the jussive imperative of defective verbs e g irmi throw The entire indefinite noun endings in and un with nunation are left off The ending an is left off of nouns preceded by a taʾ marbuṭah ة i e the t in the ending at that typically marks feminine nouns but pronounced as a in other nouns hence its writing in this fashion in the Arabic script The taʼ marbuṭah itself typically of feminine nouns is pronounced as h At least this is the case in extremely formal pronunciation e g some Quranic recitations In practice this h is usually omitted Formal short pronunciation This is a formal level of pronunciation sometimes seen It is somewhat like pronouncing all words as if they were in pausal position with influence from the colloquial varieties The following changes occur citation needed Most final short vowels are not pronounced However the following short vowels are pronounced feminine plural na shortened vowels in the jussive imperative of defective verbs e g irmi throw second person singular feminine past tense ti and likewise anti you fem sg sometimes first person singular past tense tu sometimes second person masculine past tense ta and likewise anta you masc sg final a in certain short words e g laysa is not sawfa future tense marker The nunation endings an in un are not pronounced However they are pronounced in adverbial accusative formations e g taqriban ت ق ر يب ا almost approximately ʻadatan ع اد ة usually The taʾ marbuṭah ending ة is unpronounced except in construct state nouns where it sounds as t and in adverbial accusative constructions e g ʻadatan ع اد ة usually where the entire tan is pronounced The masculine singular nisbah ending iyy is actually pronounced i and is unstressed but plural and feminine singular forms i e when followed by a suffix still sound as iyy Full endings including case endings occur when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added e g na us our Informal short pronunciation This is the pronunciation used by speakers of Modern Standard Arabic in extemporaneous speech i e when producing new sentences rather than reading a prepared text It is similar to formal short pronunciation except that the rules for dropping final vowels apply even when a clitic suffix is added Basically short vowel case and mood endings are never pronounced and certain other changes occur that echo the corresponding colloquial pronunciations Specifically citation needed All the rules for formal short pronunciation apply except as follows The past tense singular endings written formally as tu ta ti are pronounced t t ti But masculine ʾanta is pronounced in full Unlike in formal short pronunciation the rules for dropping or modifying final endings are also applied when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added e g na us our If this produces a sequence of three consonants then one of the following happens depending on the speaker s native colloquial variety A short vowel e g i or ǝ is consistently added either between the second and third or the first and second consonants Or a short vowel is added only if an otherwise unpronounceable sequence occurs typically due to a violation of the sonority hierarchy e g rtn is pronounced as a three consonant cluster but trn needs to be broken up Or a short vowel is never added but consonants like r l m n occurring between two other consonants will be pronounced as a syllabic consonant as in the English words butter bottle bottom button When a doubled consonant occurs before another consonant or finally it is often shortened to a single consonant rather than a vowel added However Moroccan Arabic never shortens doubled consonants or inserts short vowels to break up clusters instead tolerating arbitrary length series of arbitrary consonants and hence Moroccan Arabic speakers are likely to follow the same rules in their pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic The clitic suffixes themselves tend also to be changed in a way that avoids many possible occurrences of three consonant clusters In particular ka ki hu generally sound as ak ik uh Final long vowels are often shortened merging with any short vowels that remain Depending on the level of formality the speaker s education level etc various grammatical changes may occur in ways that echo the colloquial variants Any remaining case endings e g masculine plural nominative un vs oblique in will be leveled with the oblique form used everywhere However in words like ab father and akh brother with special long vowel case endings in the construct state the nominative is used everywhere hence abu father of akhu brother of Feminine plural endings in verbs and clitic suffixes will often drop out with the masculine plural endings used instead If the speaker s native variety has feminine plural endings they may be preserved but will often be modified in the direction of the forms used in the speaker s native variety e g an instead of na Dual endings will often drop out except on nouns and then used only for emphasis similar to their use in the colloquial varieties elsewhere the plural endings are used or feminine singular if appropriate Colloquial varieties Further information Varieties of Arabic Vowels Vowel phonemes of Modern Standard Arabic Short LongFront Back Front BackClose i u iː uː Open a aː Diphthongs aw aj most common vowel system among Arabic dialects Short LongFront Back Front BackClose i u iː uː Mid eː oː Open a aː Diphthongs aw aj As mentioned above many spoken dialects have a process of emphasis spreading where the emphasis pharyngealization of emphatic consonants spreads forward and back through adjacent syllables pharyngealizing all nearby consonants and triggering the back allophone ɑ ː in all nearby low vowels The extent of emphasis spreading varies For example in Moroccan Arabic it spreads as far as the first full vowel i e sound derived from a long vowel or diphthong on either side in many Levantine dialects it spreads indefinitely but is blocked by any j or ʃ while in Egyptian Arabic it usually spreads throughout the entire word including prefixes and suffixes In Moroccan Arabic i u also have emphatic allophones e ɛ and o ɔ respectively citation needed Unstressed short vowels especially i u are deleted in many contexts Many sporadic examples of short vowel change have occurred especially a i and interchange i u Most Levantine dialects merge short i u into e in most contexts all except directly before a single final consonant In Moroccan Arabic on the other hand short u triggers labialization of nearby consonants especially velar consonants and uvular consonants and then short a i u all merge into e which is deleted in many contexts The labialization plus e is sometimes interpreted as an underlying phoneme ŭ This essentially causes the wholesale loss of the short long vowel distinction with the original long vowels aː iː uː remaining as half long aˑ iˑ uˑ phonemically a i u which are used to represent both short and long vowels in borrowings from Literary Arabic citation needed Most spoken dialects have monophthongized original aj aw to eː oː in most circumstances including adjacent to emphatic consonants while keeping them as the original diphthongs in others e g م و ع د mawʕid In most of the Moroccan Algerian and Tunisian except Sahel and Southeastern Arabic dialects they have subsequently merged into original iː uː citation needed Consonants In most dialects there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed in the chart above For example g is considered a native phoneme in most Arabic dialects except in Levantine dialects like Syrian or Lebanese where ج is pronounced ʒ and ق is pronounced ʔ d ʒ or ʒ ج is considered a native phoneme in most dialects except in Egyptian and a number of Yemeni and Omani dialects where ج is pronounced g zˤ or dˤ and dˤ are distinguished in the dialects of Egypt Sudan the Levant and the Hejaz but they have merged as dˤ in most dialects of the Arabian Peninsula Iraq and Tunisia and have merged as dˤ in Morocco and Algeria The usage of non native p پ and v ڤ depends on the usage of each speaker but they might be more prevalent in some dialects than others The Iraqi and Gulf Arabic also has the sound t ʃ and writes it and ɡ with the Persian letters چ and گ as in گوجة gawjah plum چمة chimah truffle Early in the expansion of Arabic the separate emphatic phonemes ɮˤ and dˤ coalesced into a single phoneme dˤ Many dialects such as Egyptian Levantine and much of the Maghreb subsequently lost interdental fricatives converting 8 d dˤ into t d dˤ Most dialects borrow learned words from the Standard language using the same pronunciation as for inherited words but some dialects without interdental fricatives particularly in Egypt and the Levant render original 8 d dˤ dˤ in borrowed words as s z zˤ dˤ Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is how they render the original velar and uvular plosives q d ʒ Proto Semitic ɡ and k ق q retains its original pronunciation in widely scattered regions such as Yemen Morocco and urban areas of the Maghreb It is pronounced as a glottal stop ʔ in several prestige dialects such as those spoken in Cairo Beirut and Damascus But it is rendered as a voiced velar plosive ɡ in Persian Gulf Upper Egypt parts of the Maghreb and less urban parts of the Levant e g Jordan In Iraqi Arabic it sometimes retains its original pronunciation and is sometimes rendered as a voiced velar plosive depending on the word Some traditionally Christian villages in rural areas of the Levant render the sound as k as do Shiʻi Bahrainis In some Gulf dialects it is palatalized to d ʒ or ʒ It is pronounced as a voiced uvular constrictive ʁ in Sudanese Arabic Many dialects with a modified pronunciation for q maintain the q pronunciation in certain words often with religious or educational overtones borrowed from the Classical language ج d ʒ is pronounced as an affricate in Iraq and much of the Arabian Peninsula but is pronounced ɡ in most of North Egypt and parts of Yemen and Oman ʒ in Morocco Tunisia and the Levant and j i in most words in much of the Persian Gulf ك k usually retains its original pronunciation but is palatalized to t ʃ in many words in Israel and the Palestinian Territories Iraq and countries in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula Often a distinction is made between the suffixes ak you masc and ik you fem which become ak and it ʃ respectively In Sana a Omani and Bahrani ik is pronounced iʃ Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends to weaken in many of the spoken varieties and to spread from emphatic consonants to nearby sounds In addition the emphatic allophone ɑ automatically triggers pharyngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects As a result it may be difficult or impossible to determine whether a given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic or not especially in dialects with long distance emphasis spreading A notable exception is the sounds t vs tˤ in Moroccan Arabic because the former is pronounced as an affricate t s but the latter is not Grammar Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works Main article Arabic grammar Literary Arabic Main article Modern Standard 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 three which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words For example the word for I wrote is constructed by combining the root k t b write with the pattern a a tu I Xed to form katabtu I wrote Other verbs meaning I Xed will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants e g qaraʼtu I read akaltu I ate dhahabtu I went although other patterns are possible e g sharibtu I drank qultu I said takallamtu I spoke where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix tu is always used From a single root k t b numerous words can be formed by applying different patterns ك ت ب ت katabtu I wrote ك ت ب ت kattabtu I had something written ك ات ب ت katabtu I corresponded with someone أ ك ت ب ت aktabtu I dictated ا ك ت ت ب ت iktatabtu I subscribed ت ك ات ب ن ا takatabna we corresponded with each other أ ك ت ب aktubu I write أ ك ت ب ukattibu I have something written أ ك ات ب ukatibu I correspond with someone أ ك ت ب uktibu I dictate أ ك ت ت ب aktatibu I subscribe ن ت ك ت ب natakatabu we correspond each other ك ت ب kutiba it was written أ ك ت ب uktiba it was dictated م ك ت وب maktubun written م ك ت ب muktabun dictated ك ت اب kitabun book ك ت ب kutubun books ك ات ب katibun writer ك ت اب kuttabun writers م ك ت ب maktabun desk office م ك ت ب ة maktabatun library bookshop etc Nouns and adjectives Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases nominative accusative and genitive also used when the noun is governed by a preposition 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 a are indicated by suffixed short vowels u for nominative a for accusative i for genitive The feminine singular is often marked by ـ ة 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 prefixed by the definite article ا ل ـ al Indefinite singular nouns other than those that end in long a add a final n to the case marking vowels giving un an or in which is also referred to as nunation or tanwin Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case number gender and state as for nouns However the plural of all non human nouns is always combined with a singular feminine adjective which takes the ـ ة at suffix Pronouns 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 ـن ي ni and for nouns or prepositions ـ ي i after consonants ـي ya after vowels Nouns verbs pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects However non human plural nouns are grammatically considered to be feminine singular Furthermore 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 Verbs Further information Arabic 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 moods indicative imperative subjunctive jussive shorter energetic and longer energetic the fifth and sixth moods the energetics exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA 111 There are also two participles active and passive and a verbal noun but no infinitive The past and non past paradigms are sometimes also 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 س ـ sa or س و ف sawfa onto the non past The past and non past differ in the form of the stem e g past ك ت بـ katab vs non past ـك ت بـ ktub and also 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 suffixal morpheme while in the non past a combination of prefixes 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 ك ت ب kataba to write In Modern Standard the energetic mood in either long or short form which have the same meaning is almost never used Derivation Like other Semitic languages and unlike most other languages Arabic makes much more use of nonconcatenative morphology applying many templates applied roots to derive words than adding prefixes or suffixes to words For verbs a given root can occur in many different derived verb stems 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 Stems sharing the same root consonants represent separate verbs albeit often semantically related and each is the basis for its own conjugational paradigm As a result these derived stems are part of the system of derivational morphology not part of the inflectional system Examples of the different verbs formed from the root كتب k t b write using حمر ḥ m r red for Form IX which is limited to colors and physical defects Most of these forms are exclusively Classical Arabic Form Past Meaning Non past MeaningI kataba he wrote yaktubu he writes II kattaba he made someone write yukattibu he makes someone write III kataba he corresponded with wrote to someone yukatibu he corresponds with writes to someone IV ʾaktaba he dictated yuktibu he dictates V takattaba nonexistent yatakattabu nonexistent VI takataba he corresponded with someone esp mutually yatakatabu he corresponds with someone esp mutually VII inkataba he subscribed yankatibu he subscribes VIII iktataba he copied yaktatibu he copies IX iḥmarra he turned red yaḥmarru he turns red X istaktaba he asked someone to write yastaktibu he asks someone to write 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 maktab desk office lt k t b write maṭbakh kitchen lt ṭ b kh cook The only three genuine suffixes are as follows The feminine suffix ah variously derives terms for women from related terms for men or more generally terms along the same lines as the corresponding masculine e g maktabah library also a writing related place but different from maktab as above The nisbah suffix iyy This suffix is extremely productive and forms adjectives meaning related to X It corresponds to English adjectives in ic al an y ist etc The feminine nisbah suffix iyyah This is formed by adding the feminine suffix ah onto nisba adjectives to form abstract nouns For example from the basic root sh r k share can be derived the Form VIII verb ishtaraka to cooperate participate and in turn its verbal noun ishtirak cooperation participation can be formed This in turn can be made into a nisbah adjective ishtiraki socialist from which an abstract noun ishtirakiyyah socialism can be derived Other recent formations are jumhuriyyah republic lit public ness lt jumhur multitude general public and the Gaddafi specific variation jamahiriyyah people s republic lit masses ness lt jamahir the masses pl of jumhur as above Colloquial varieties Main article Varieties of Arabic 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 The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm in Egyptian Arabic Example of a regular Form I verb in Egyptian Arabic katab yiktib write Tense Mood Past Present Subjunctive Present Indicative Future ImperativeSingular1st katab t a ktib ba ktib ḥa ktib 2nd masculine katab t ti ktib bi ti ktib ḥa ti ktib i ktibfeminine katab ti ti ktib i bi ti ktib i ḥa ti ktib i i ktib i3rd masculine katab yi ktib bi yi ktib ḥa yi ktib feminine katab it ti ktib bi ti ktib ḥa ti ktibPlural1st katab na ni ktib bi ni ktib ḥa ni ktib 2nd katab tu ti ktib u bi ti ktib u ḥa ti ktib u i ktib u3rd katab u yi ktib u bi yi ktib u ḥa yi ktib u Writing systemMain articles Arabic alphabet and Arabic Braille Arabic calligraphy written by a Malay Muslim in Malaysia The calligrapher is making a rough draft The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script 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 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 zaouias 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 112 113 Originally Arabic was made up of only rasm without diacritical marks 114 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 Calligraphy Main article Arabic 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 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 verse 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 citation needed 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 115 Romanization Main article Romanization of Arabic Examples of different transliteration transcription schemes Letter IPA UNGEGN ALA LC Wehr DIN ISO SAS 2 BATR ArabTeX chatء ʔ ʼ ʾ ˈ ˌ ʾ e 2ا aː a ʾ a aa aa A a a e eي j iː y y i y e y ii y y i ee ei aiث 8 th ṯ c ṯ c t s thج d ʒ ɡ ʒ j ǧ ŷ j j g j g djح ħ ḩ ḥ H h 7خ x kh ḵ ḫ ẖ j x K h kh 7 5ذ d dh ḏ đ z d z dh thش ʃ sh s x s sh chص sˤ s ṣ S s s 9ض dˤ ḑ ḍ D d d 9 ط tˤ ţ ṭ T tu t 6ظ dˤ zˤ z ẓ đ Z z z dh 6 ع ʕ ʻ ʿ r E 3غ ɣ gh ḡ ġ g j g g gh 3 8There 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 me or eat 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 diacritical marks such as s for the sound equivalently written sh in English Other systems e g the Baha i orthography are intended to help readers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists with intuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases citation needed 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 sometimes known as IM Arabic 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 ع There is no universal name for this type of transliteration but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet 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 د may be represented by d Its emphatic counterpart ض may be written as D 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 ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ 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 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 Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon 116 117 Said Akl created a Latin based alphabet for Lebanese 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 116 117 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 116 117 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 116 117 Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi two Egyptian intellectuals agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization 116 118 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 116 118 However this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet 116 118 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 See also Islam portal Language portalArabic Ontology Arabic diglossia Arabic influence on the Spanish language Arabic Language International Council Arabic literature Arabic English Lexicon Arabist Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic Glossary of Islam International Association of Arabic Dialectology List of Arab newspapers List of Arabic language television channels List of Arabic given names List of arabophones List of countries where Arabic is an official language List of French words of Arabic origin List of replaced 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Press ISBN 978 0 19 824137 9 Wehr Hans 1952 Arabisches Worterbuch fur die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart Arabisch Deutsch 1985 reprint English ed Harassowitz ISBN 978 3 447 01998 9 Wright John W 2001 The New York Times Almanac 2002 Routledge ISBN 978 1 57958 348 4External links Standard Arabic edition of Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Egyptian Arabic edition of Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Moroccan Arabic edition of Wikipedia the free encyclopedia Algerian Arabic test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator South Levantine Arabic test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator North Levantine Arabic test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator Tunisian Arabic test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator For a list of words relating to Arabic see the Arabic category of words in Wiktionary the free dictionary Wikiversity has learning resources about Arabic Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Arabic Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arabic language Wikiquote has quotations related to Arabic Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Arabic Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Arabic amp oldid 1129505769, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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