About Arabic Language

ARABIC spoken by more than 280 million people as a first language, most of whom live in the Middle East and North Africa, and by 250 million more as a second language. As the language of the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, it is also widely used throughout the Muslim world. It belongs to the Semitic group of languages which also includes Hebrew and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia.
The Qur’an is one of the oldest surviving documents written in Arabic. Arabs consider this form of Arabic—Classical Arabic—to be the purest and most beautiful forms of the language.
There are three distinct forms of Arabic. Classical or Qur’anical Arabic, Formal or Modern Standard Arabic, and Spoken or Colloquial Arabic.
There are many Arabic dialects. Classical Arabic – the language of the Qur’an – was originally the dialect of Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia. An adapted form of this, known as Modern Standard Arabic, is used in books, newspapers, on television and radio, in the mosques, and in conversation between educated Arabs from different countries (for example at international conferences).
Local dialects vary, and a Moroccan might have difficulty understanding an Iraqi, even though they speak the same language.
Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken varieties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. These dialects can vary from region to region within a country.
The most important thing to know about the Arabic language is that, like other Semitic languages, it is based on what is usually called a ” consonantal root system,” which means that almost every word in the language is ultimately derived from one or another “root,” usually a verb. This root almost always consists of three letters. By making changes to the root letters – adding a letter to the beginning of the root, changing vowels between the consonants, or inserting extra consonants – new words with new meanings are produced. For example, the three consonants d, r, s, combined in that order denote the idea of education. The simplest word based on those letters is ‘darasa’, which means “studied”. Other possible words derived from this root are:
darrasa taught
diraasa studying
madrasa school
mudarris teacher (m)
mudarrisa teacher (f)
Arabic is written from right to left.It consists of 18 shapes, which—with the addition of dots above or below some of these shapes—results in 28 letters. Three letters are long vowels, and all the rest are consonants. Short vowels are sometimes indicated by diacritical marks, and other times omitted altogether. Many of the letters have equivalents in English. Some Arabic letters represent sounds that are written as two letters in English (“sh” and “th”, for example). Other letters represent sounds that are unfamiliar to English speakers, and conversely, some common sounds in English—such as “p” and “v”—don’t exist in Arabic.
Arabic letters are connected to form words in a “cursive” style; there is no way of “printing” Arabic. Neither are there capitals or lowercase letters. The form of the letter changes depending on its position in a word (beginning, middle, and end). Some letters connect on only one side, others on both.
The term Arabic is used to describe three different forms of the same language: classical Arabic, which is the language of the Qur’aan, the holy book of Islam; colloquial or spoken Arabic, as used in the daily lives of Arabs; and literary Arabic, sometimes also called modern standard Arabic (incorrectly labeled as ‘classical’),which is used in literature, books, newspapers, and on TV/radio.
In written Arabic, unlike in English, French and other European languages, there has been no change at all in the alphabet, in spelling, or in the majority of the vocabulary, in, at least, four millenniums.


Figures:

1. The Arabic Alphabet has 28 letters. The shape of these letters changes depending on their position in the word, whether isolated; in the beginning of the word (initial); in the middle (medial); or at the end (final).
2. Several letters in the Arabic alphabet share the same shape, and are differentiated only by the number and placement of dots on the letters. Of the basic 18 shapes, 2 are used for three letters, 6 are used for two letters, and the remaining 10 are used for one letter each.
3. The Arabic and Phoenician alphabets, along with several other alphabets such as Hebrew and Aramaic, are based on an early model called the North Semitic. The Phoenician alphabet was adapted by the Greeks, then the Etruscans and Romans, and eventually became the Western alphabet as we know it today.
4. Al Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi devised a tashkeel system to replace Abu al Aswad’s. His system was universally used since the early eleventh century, and included six diacritical marks to indicate the small vowels attached to Arabic letters.
5. The measuring system of Ibn Muqlah is based on a circle with a diameter that equals the height of the letter Alef. It controls the correct proportions of the letters by comparing them to the circle, and by diagonal dots written with the calligraphy pen.
6. Samples of Kufi Styles of Arabic calligraphy. From top to bottom: Early Kufi, Eastern Kufi, Foliate Kufi, Knotted Kufi, and Square Kufi.
7. Samples of Cursive Styles of Arabic calligraphy. From top to bottom: Naskh, Thuluth, Muhaqqaq, Nastaliq, and riq’a.
Facts about the Arabic Language
Arabic Semitic language is fairly closely related to, for instance, Hebrew language and the Aramaic language spoken throughout Arab world and widely known outside it.
It has been a literary language for over 1500 years, and is the liturgical language Islam.
The term Modern Standard Arabic is sometimes used in the West to refer to the language of the media as opposed to the language of “Classical” Arabic literature; Arabs make no such distinction, and regard the two as identical.
The expressions Arabic and Classical Arabic usually refer to the pure Arabic language which is, according to Arabic speakers, both the language of present-day media across North Africa and the Middle East (from Morocco to Iraq) and the language of the Qur’an.
The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic script (which variety, Nabataean or Syriac, is a matter of scholarly dispute), to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic script to Greek script.
Spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Gaza Strip, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, West Bank, Yemen by a majority, many other countries as a minority language.
Region: Arab world.
Total speakers: 225 million (Ethnologue, native speakers of all dialects)