Arabic language

This article is about the language. For the literary the official language of 26 states and the liturgical lan- standard, see Modern Standard Arabic. For vernaculars, guage of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows see varieties of Arabic. For others, see Arabic languages. the grammatical standards of Quranic Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no Arabic i/ˈærəbɪk/ ( al-ʻarabiyyah [alʕaraˈbijja] ( longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and العَر َبِية ُ ʻarabī [ˈʕarabiː] ( )) is the Classical Ara- adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from عربي ,عربى or ( bic language of the 6th century and its modern descen- the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used dants excluding Maltese. Arabic is spoken in a wide arc to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-Quranic stretching across the Middle East, North Africa, and the era, especially in modern times. Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic fam- ily. Arabic is the only surviving member of the Ancient North Arabian dialect group attested in pre-Islamic Arabic in- The literary language, called Modern Standard Arabic or scriptions dating back to the 4th century.[10] Arabic is Literary Arabic, is the only official form of Arabic. It written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script is used in most written documents as well as in formal and is written from right-to-left although the spoken vari- spoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts. eties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left-to- Moroccan Arabic was official in Morocco for some time, right with no standardized forms. before the country joined the Arab League. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to throughout its history; some of the most influenced lan- Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. The stan- guages are Urdu, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Somali, dardized written Arabic is distinct from and more conser- Swahili, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, vative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in Indonesian, Tigrinya, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different and Hausa. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was societal functions. a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in sci- Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligi- ence, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many Eu- ble,[4] both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole ropean languages have also borrowed many words from constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on it. Many words of Arabic origin are also found in an- purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered cient languages like Latin and Greek. Arabic influence, to constitute more than one language, but are commonly mainly in vocabulary, is seen in Romance languages, par- grouped together as a single language for political and/or ticularly Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Sicilian, ow- religious reasons (see below). If considered multiple lan- ing to both the proximity of Christian European and Mus- guages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, lim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear language in the Iberian Peninsula referred to in Arabic as boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it al-Andalus. perhaps is spoken by as many as 420 million speakers (na- Arabic has also borrowed words from many languages, [5] tive and non-native) in the Arab world, making it one including Hebrew, Greek, Persian and Syriac in early cen- of the half dozen most populous languages in the world. turies, Turkish in medieval times and contemporary Eu- If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety ropean languages in modern times, mostly from English would most likely be Egyptian Arabic, with 54 million na- and French. tive speakers[6]—still greater than any other Afro-Asiatic language. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 bil- lion Muslims.[7][8] It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.[9] 1 History The modern written language (Modern Standard Arabic) is derived from the language of the Quran (known as 1.1 Pre-Islamic Arabic and Arabic Lan- Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic). It is widely taught in guage schools, universities and used to varying degrees in work- places, government and the media. The two formal vari- The earliest Arabic inscriptions date back to AD 512- eties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is 568.[11] The Aramaic alphabet was introduced to the

1 2 2 CLASSICAL, MODERN STANDARD AND SPOKEN ARABIC

Arab people through traders from the Mediterranean Em- Islamic Period. The informal dialect was used on coin pire, and the Arab people began using the script during and tomb inscriptions while the formal variety of Ara- the Christian period in the Middle East.[11] From the Ara- bic was used on letters and contracts. However, contracts maic, the script continued to develop through two sep- were sometimes written in a mixture of Formal and In- arate kingdoms in the region: The Nabataean and the formal Arabic, reflecting the large influence dialects had Palmyran. The Arabic script that is widely used today de- on the written language in Pre-Islamic Arabia.[19] veloped from the Nabataean Kingdom’s writing script.[12] While the Nabataean alphabet and writing system met a great deal of the needs, it did not provide letters or 1.3 The Islamic Conquests and Arabic symbols for /t/, /d/, /h/, /g/, /z/ and /d/, which were not Language represented by Aramaic script.[12] The Aramaic writing system also only provided fifteen letter shapes for 28 The Islamic Conquests introduced Arabic to new non- consonants.[12] In order to differentiate between conso- Arab regions, such as Spain and Persia. As a result, Os- nants that had the same shape, a system of placing dots manli, Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Malay, Berber, Swahili around the letters developed. It took over 100 years in and Hausa all adopted some Arabic alphabet into their order to codify these dots around letters (Bateson, 55). writing systems and Arabic adopted 12 letters from others Evidence of the development of codified dots is recorded (for example, Persian P CH Zh and Ga). These sounds on numerous different codes and tombstones.[12] In the entered Arabic through loanwords (Bateson, 58).[20] In 8th century, the dots were finally codified enough that all the 8th century Islamic scholars in Lower Iraq feared the texts used dots with the exception of purely decorative influence that the recently conquered non-Arabs would writings that were not meant to be read.[12] In addition have on the language and scholars became more conser- to the issue of codifying the dots above letters, there was vative and a more standardized Classical Arabic writing also the issue of how to represent vowel sounds in Arabic system developed (Clive Holes, 4) [17] However, non- script, a language made up of an all-consonants script. Arabs had a huge influence on the religious writings at During the 7th century a dotting system also developed the time since many of the intellectual elite were in fact to mark voweling.[13] Red dots were used to mark vowels non-Arab (Clive Holes, 4).[17] while black lines were used to mark consonants. Eventu- ally smaller versions of the letters representing short vow- els were placed above consonants in order to indicate that 1.4 Modern era a vowel was present.[13] During the colonial era, the European powers occupying Arab nations actively encouraged the public spread and 1.2 Pre-Islamic Poetry and Early Islamic use of colloquial Arabic dialects and suppressed the use [21] Literature and teaching of classical Arabic. After wiping out a third of the Algerian population between 1830 and 1872, for example, the French then closed all Qur'anic schools The oral poetic tradition had been alive and well for cen- and banned public usage of Arabic; Arabic was actu- turies in the Arabian Peninsula before it was eventually ally declared a foreign language in 1938 and while about recorded. Arab poets blossomed in the 6th century AD half the population was literate in Arabic at the begin- but their work was not recorded or written down until the ning of French colonization, 90% of the native popula- 8th or 9th century AD.[14] There were linguistic oddi- tion was illiterate in both Arabic and French by its end in ties in regards to spelling found throughout the poems. the 1960s.[22] The poems had been recorded, but there were different spelling and pronunciation techniques used by different authors when trying to record a poem that had previ- ously only been recited.[15] These differences reflected 2 Classical, Modern Standard and how different dialects had a large impact on written Ara- spoken Arabic bic and how texts were recorded. To solve this problem, grammarians and scholars asked Bedouins to recite po- ems in order to hear how they pronounced the poem as Arabic usually designates one of three main variants: their voices were believed to be pure. Consensus was then Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and colloquial used to determine the correct pronunciation of a word so or dialectal Arabic. that the word could also be spelt correctly.[16] Eventually, Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran, scholars and grammarians developed a system for stan- used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of dardizing Classical Arabic so that texts and words would the Abbasid Caliphate. Theoretically, Classical Arabic be written in a way that the majority of the population is considered normative, according to the syntactic and could understand.[16] Muslims believe that the Quran was grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians revealed to Muhammad in 632 CE.[17][18] Both a formal (such as Sibawayh) and the vocabulary defined in classi- and informal version of Arabic existed during the Pre- cal dictionaries (such as the Lisān al-ʻArab). In practice, 3

however, modern authors almost never write in pure Clas- using forms within existing roots (istimātah 'apoptosis', sical Arabic, instead using a literary language with its own using the root m/w/t 'death' put into the Xth form, or grammatical norms and vocabulary, commonly known as jāmiʻah 'university', based on jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on jumhūr 'multitude'). An MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic earlier tendency was to repurpose older words; that has -hātif 'telephone' < 'invisi هاتف ,.publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across fallen into disuse (e.g North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East, ble caller (in Sufism)'; jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. “Lit- stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many na- fuṣḥá) are فُصْ حَى) ”erary Arabic” and “Standard Arabic less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Stan- tional or regional varieties which constitute the everyday dard Arabic or Classical Arabic. spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; these sometimes differ enough to be mutually Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: languages.[24] The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap • Certain grammatical constructions of CA that have operas and talk shows,[25] as well as occasionally in cer- no counterpart in any modern dialect (e.g., the tain forms of written media such as poetry and printed energetic mood) are almost never used in Modern advertising. Standard Arabic. The only variety of modern Arabic to have acquired • No modern spoken variety of Arabic has case dis- official language status is Maltese, which is spoken in tinctions. As a result, MSA is generally composed (predominately Roman Catholic) Malta and written with without case distinctions in mind, and the proper the Latin script. It is descended from Classical Ara- cases are added after the fact, when necessary. Be- bic through Siculo-Arabic, but is not mutually intelligible cause most case endings are noted using final short with other varieties of Arabic. Most linguists list it as a vowels, which are normally left unwritten in the Ara- separate language rather than as a dialect of Arabic. His- bic script, it is unnecessary to determine the proper torically, Algerian Arabic was taught in French Algeria case of most words. The practical result of this is under the name darija. that MSA, like English and Standard Chinese, is written in a strongly determined word order and al- ternative 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 can- not consistently use the correct endings in extempo- raneous speech. As a result, spoken MSA tends to drop or regularize the endings except when reading from a prepared text.

• 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 circum- stances; instead, a significantly simplified system is used, approximating the system of the conservative Flag of the Arab league, used in some cases for the Arabic Lan- spoken varieties. guage.

MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to Note that even during Muhammad’s lifetime, there were go') that is not present in the spoken varieties. In addition, dialects of spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the di- MSA has borrowed or coined a large number of terms for alect of Mecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA was in this dialect that the Quran was written down. How- continues to evolve.[23] Some words have been borrowed ever, the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly considered the most prestigious at the time, so the lan- indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., fīlm guage of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology. It is this phonology that underlies the فيلم 'film' or dimūqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phono- However, the current preference is to avoid direct bor- logical differences between these two dialects account for rowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., some of the complexities of Arabic writing, most notably farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or the writing of the glottal stop or hamzah (which was pre- organization; jināḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an served in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech) airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words and the use of alif maqṣūrah (representing a sound pre- 4 4 INFLUENCE OF ARABIC ON OTHER LANGUAGES

perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Ro- mance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative vari- ety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehen- sible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is in- comprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers. This sug- gests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be con- sidered separate languages.

4 Influence of Arabic on other lan-

Flag used in some cases for the Arabic Language guages served in the western dialects but merged with ā in eastern Main article: Influence of Arabic on other languages speech). See also: List of Arabic loanwords in English

The influence of Arabic has been most important in Is- 3 Language and dialect lamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, Quran. Arabic is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Baluchi, Bengali, The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon Berber, Bosnian, Catalan, English, French, German, of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate vari- Gujarati, Hausa, Hindustani, Italian, Indonesian, Kazakh, eties of the same language, usually in different social sit- Kurdish, Kutchi, Malay, Malayalam, Pashto, Persian, uations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any na- Portuguese, Punjabi, Rohingya, Saraiki, Sicilian, Sindhi, tionality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek Standard Arabic as well as their native, mutually unintel- and Wolof, as well as other languages in countries where ligible “dialects";[26][27][28][29][30] these dialects linguisti- these languages are spoken. cally constitute separate languages which may have di- In addition, English has many Arabic loanwords, some alects of their own.[31] When educated Arabs of different directly but most through the medium of other Mediter- dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan ranean languages. Examples of such words include admi- speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch ral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, back and forth between the dialectal and standard vari- almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, eties of the language, sometimes even within the same coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah, sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiar- magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff and many ity with other dialects via music or film. other words. Other languages such as Maltese[35] and The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammar rules. languages is politically charged, similar to the issue with Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like ṣalāh), academic صلاة)(and English, etc. Similar to how speakers of Hindi and Berber taẓallit 'prayer' < salat Urdu will claim they cannot understand each other even terms (like Uyghur mentiq 'logic'), economic items (like when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will English coffee) to placeholders (like Spanish fulano 'so- claim they can all understand each other even when they and-so') and everyday conjunctions (like Hindustani lekin can't.[32] The issue of diglossia between spoken and writ- 'but', or Spanish taza meaning 'cup'and hasta meaning ten language is a significant complicating factor: A sin- 'until'), and expressions (like Catalan a betzef 'galore, in gle written form, significantly different from any of the quantity'). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Ara- Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, bic, such as salat 'prayer' and imam 'prayer leader.' despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility [33] In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, among differing spoken versions. Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly via From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the var- other languages rather than being transferred directly ious spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other from Arabic. For example, most Arabic loanwords in collectively about as much as the Romance languages.[34] Hindustani entered through Persian though Persian is an This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The pe- Indo-Iranian language. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa riod of divergence from a single spoken form is similar— were borrowed from Kanuri. 5 city or city square), a ,مدينة) Some words in English and other European languages • madīnah/medina are derived from Arabic, often through other Euro- word of Aramaic or Hebrew origin; Alfred-Louis de pean languages, especially Spanish and Italian. Among Prémare explains in The Foundations Of Islam (p. them are commonly used words like "coffee"(qah- 101) that the Jews were long before Arabs a seden- wah), "cotton"(quṭn) and “magazine” (makhāzin). En- tary population of “Arabian desert.” glish words more recognizably of Arabic origin include the tax imposed by the caliphate on ,(جزية) algebra", "alcohol", "alchemy", "alkali", "zenith,” and • jizyah" "nadir". individuals of religion other than Islam (dhimmis), Arabic words also made their way into several West a tax in addition to the levy on agricultural land African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. (kharāj). The term comes from the Syriac gzita, Variants of Arabic words such as kitāb (book) have spread which is in turn borrowed from Persian gazit. to the languages of African groups who had no direct con- land tax originally imposed only on ,(خراج) tact with Arab traders.[36] • kharāj As, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a po- non-Muslims, which comes from the Persian term sition similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of the kharazh, a term which designates the act by which Arabic concepts in the field of science, philosophy, com- the wealthy citizens were taxed, sometimes im- merce etc. were coined from Arabic roots by non-native posed upon states; satrapies were supposed to col- lect them. This term probably originates from the Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian trans- [39] lators, and then found their way into other languages. Greek language. This process of using Arabic roots, especially in Turkish as in the well-known form “Al ,(جزيرة) and Persian, to translate foreign concepts continued right • jazīrah until the 18th and 19th century, when swaths of Arab- Jazeera,” means 'island' and has its origin in Syriac inhabited lands were under Ottoman rule. gazīra/gzīrta. savior) is the naturalized form of ,فاروق) fārūq • 5 Influence of other languages on the Aramaic word poruk, which in the Syriac Bible (Peshitta) means the Savior or Liberator. Once nat- Arabic uralized, the term produced mnemonic derivatives or shortcuts, so the root f-r-q (meaning cutting) be- Arabic was influenced by other languages as well. came a folk etymological explanation for faruq: the The most important sources of borrowings into (pre- Savior was one who cuts (separates) the truth from Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languages falsehood. Aramaic,[37] which used to be the principal, international hypocrite), a term borrowed from ,منافق) language of communication throughout the ancient Near • munāfiq and Middle East, Ethiopic, and to a lesser degree He- Ethiopian, where it had the sense of heretical sect. brew (mainly religious concepts). In addition, many cul- is taken from Persian lājvard, the (لازورد) tural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic • lāzaward from Iranian, notably Middle Persian or Parthian and name of a blue stone, lapis lazuli. This word was [38] (Classical) Persian, and Hellenistic Greek (kīmiyāʼ has borrowed in several European languages to mean as origin the Greek chymia, meaning in that language (light) blue - azure in English, azur in French and the melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, Histoire de la azul in Spanish. Médecine de l'Antiquité au XXe siècle, Tallandier, 2008, p. 251), alembic (distiller) from ambix (cup), qalam (pen, pencil, feather) from kalamos (reed, pen), almanac (cli- mate) from almenichiakon (calendar). (For the origin of 6 Arabic alphabet and nationalism the last three borrowed words, see Alfred-Louis de Pré- mare, Foundations of Islam, Seuil, L'Univers Historique, There have been many instances of national movements 2002.) Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persian to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize languages are, as presented in De Prémare’s above-cited the language. book: 6.1 Lebanon -merciful), from Hebrew and Ara ,رحمن) raḥmān • maic, where it had a similar meaning The Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin script in 1922. The major prophet), old non-Arabic term that head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French ,نبي) nabī • came into Arabic from Aramaic and Hebrew before Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic the emergence of Islam. Language Academy in Damacus in 1928. Massignon’s 6 8 EXTERNAL HISTORY attempt at Romanization failed as the Academy and pop- guage as a prototype symbolic system of communication, ulation viewed the proposal as an attempt from the West- based upon its system of triconsonantal roots, spoken by ern world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a man from which all other languages were derived, having member of the Academy, mentioned that the movement first been corrupted.[43][44] Judaism has a similar account to Romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate with the Tower of Babel. Lebanon.[40][41] 8 External history 6.2 Egypt See also: Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were DAN: Islamic & Jewish Origins. looking for a way to reclaim and reemphasize Egyp- tian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for Eastern Aramaic Northwest an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the Central Canaanite Ebalite Arabic Aramaic ? Eastern South Ugaritic formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be com- Eteocypriot Amorite Southern Old South Western South North Ethiopian South Phoenician bined into one language and the Latin alphabet would Maltese Living language Ammonite >150m [40][41] Punic Extinct 20m-100m Hebrew 5m-20m be used. There was also the idea of finding a way Akkadian ? Origin uncertain ? Moabite 1m-5m 0.5m-1m Philistine 0.1m-0.5m <100,000 Edomite to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but Native Speakers [40][41] Nabatean this was seen as too complicated to use. A scholar, Ancient North Arabic Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin al- phabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also be- lieved that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as Arabic it would allow for more advances in science and technol- ogy. This change in script, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written Hobyót Harsusi Shehri vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made Mehri Minaean Bathari [40][41] Tigre it difficult for non native speakers to learn. Ah- Dahlak Qahtanian Hadhramautic mad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian Tigrinya Sabaean intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push Soqotri Ge'ez [40][42] for Romanization. The idea that Romanization was Gafat Amharic necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt con- Argobba Harari Chaha tinued with Abd Al Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the Inor Zay Silt'e chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for Soddo the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo.[40][42] However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cul- tural tie to the Arabic alphabet.[40][42] In particular, the Arabic languages (brown) within Semitic languages. older Egpytian generations believed that the Arabic al- phabet had strong connections to Arab values and his- Among the earliest surviving texts in Ancient North Ara- tory, which is easy to believe due to the long history of bian, a group of languages closely related to but not a di- the Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189). rect predecessor of Arabic, are the Hasaean inscriptions of in eastern Saudi Arabia, from about the 4th century BC, written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the epigraphic 7 Arabic and Islam South Arabian musnad. More numerous are the 6th- century BC Lihyanite texts from southeastern Saudi Ara- Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an. Arabic bia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and is closely associated with the religion of Islam because the Sinai, and not actually connected with Thamud. Later the Qur'an is written in the language, but it is neverthe- come the Safaitic inscriptions beginning in the 1st cen- less also spoken by Arab Christians, Mizrahi Jews and tury AD and the many Arabic personal names attested Iraqi Mandaeans. Most of the world’s Muslims do not in Nabataean inscriptions (which are, however, written in speak Arabic as their native language, but many can read Aramaic). the Quranic script and recite the Quran. Among non- Classical Arabic co-existed with the Old North Arabian Arab Muslims, translations of the Quran are most often languages. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus (Histories accompanied by the original text. I,131; III,8) quotes the epithet of a goddess in its pre- Some Muslims present a monogenesis of languages and classical Arabic form as Alilat (Ἀλιλάτ, i. e.,ʼal-ʼilat), claim that the Arabic language was the language revealed which means “the goddess”.[45] Apart from this iso- by God for the benefit of mankind and the original lan- lated theonym, Arabic is first attested in an inscrip- 9.1 Phonological history 7

tion in Qaryat al-Fāw (formerly Qaryat Dhat Kahil, near 9.1 Phonological history Sulayyil, Saudi Arabia) in the 1st century BC.[46][47] The oldest inscription in Classical Arabic known in 1985 goes back to 328 AD and is known as the Namārah inscrip- Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has been tion, written in the Nabataean alphabet and named after lost: */ʒ/, which merged with /ʃ/.[50] But the conso- the place where it was found in southern Syria in April nant */ʒ/ is still found in many colloquial Arabic. Var- 1901.[48] By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms ious other consonants have changed their sound too, but of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq and the Ghassanids in have remained distinct. An original */p/ lenited to /f/, southern Syria appeared. The Kindite Kingdom emerged and */ɡ/ became palatalized to /ɡʲ/ or /ɟ/ by the time of in Central Arabia. Their courts were responsible for some the Quran and /d͡ʒ/, /ɡ/, /ʒ/ or /ɟ/ in MSA (see Arabic notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and for phonology#Local variations for more detail).[51] An orig- some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions inal voiceless alveolar lateral fricative */ɬ/ became /ʃ/.[52] in the Arabic script.[49] Its emphatic counterpart /ɬˠ~ɮˤ/ was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic (Hence the Classi- cal Arabic’s appellation lughat al-ḍād or “language of the ḍād”); for most modern dialects, it has become an em- 9 Internal history phatic stop /dˤ/ with loss of the laterality[52] or with com- plete 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 exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.) Other changes may also have happened. Classical Ara- bic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and differ- ent reconstructions of the sound system of Proto-Semitic propose different phonetic values. One example is the emphatic consonants, which are pharyngealized in mod- ern pronunciations may have been velarized in the eighth century and glottalized in Proto-Semitic.[52] 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 Bilingual traffic sign in Qatar. Akkadian transcriptions of Arabic names shows that this reduction had not yet occurred as of the early part of the The Semitic languages changed a great deal between 1st millennium BC. Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central The Classical Arabic language as recorded was a poetic Semitic languages, particularly in terms of grammar. In- koine that reflected a consciously archaizing dialect, cho- novations of the Central Semitic languages—all main- sen based on the Bedouin tribes in the eastern part of the tained in Classical Arabic—include Arabian Peninsula, who spoke the most conservative vari- ants of Arabic. Even at the time of Mohammed and be- • The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative for- fore, other dialects existed with many more changes, in- mation into a past tense. cluding the loss of most glottal stops, the loss of case end- ings, the reduction of the diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ into • The conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite- monophthongs /eː, oː/, etc. Most of these changes are tense formation into a present tense. present in most or all modern varieties of Arabic. An interesting feature of the writing system of the Quran • The elimination of other prefix-conjugated (and hence of Classical Arabic) is that it contains certain mood/aspect forms (e.g., a present tense formed features of Muhammad’s native dialect of Mecca, cor- by doubling the middle root, a perfect formed rected through diacritics into the forms of standard Clas- by infixing a /t/ after the first root consonant, sical Arabic. Among these features visible under the cor- probably a jussive formed by a stress shift) in favor rections are the loss of the glottal stop and a differing of new moods formed by endings attached to the development of the reduction of certain final sequences prefix-conjugation forms (e.g., -u for indicative, -a containing /j/: Evidently, final /-awa/ became /aː/ as in for subjunctive, no ending for jussive, -an or -anna the Classical language, but final /-aja/ became a different for energetic). sound, possibly /eː/ (rather than again /aː/ in the Clas- sical language). This is the apparent source of the alif • The development of an internal passive. maqṣūrah 'restricted alif' where a final /-aja/ is recon- 8 10 DIALECTS AND DESCENDANTS

structed: a letter that would normally indicate /j/ or some bic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound similar high-vowel sound, but is taken in this context to very different. be a logical variant of alif and represent the sound /aː/. 10.1 Examples

10 Dialects and descendants Transcription is a broad IPA transcription, so minor dif- ferences were ignored for easier comparison.

Gulf Arabic Bahrani Najdi Omani Hijazi and Rashaida 10.2 Koine Shihhi Dhofari Yemeni and Somali Chadic and Shuwa [53] Sudanese According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are Sa'idi Egyptian Judeo Arabic some of the characteristic features of the koine that un- Nubi Cypriot Arabic Juba derlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabian Iraqi Levantine North Mesopotamian peninsula. Although many other features are common to Badawi Moroccan most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these Tunisian Algerian Libyan features in particular are unlikely to have evolved inde- Hassaniya Saharans pendently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine: Different dialects of Arabic. • Loss of the dual (grammatical number) except on Main article: Varieties of Arabic nouns, with consistent plural agreement (cf. femi- nine singular agreement in plural inanimates). Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken vari- • Change of a to i in many affixes (e.g., non-past-tense eties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which prefixes ti- yi- ni-; wi- 'and'; il- 'the'; feminine -it in differ radically from the literary language. The main the construct state). dialectal division is between the varieties within and outside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that be- • Loss of third-weak verbs ending in w (which merge tween sedentary varieties and the much more conserva- with verbs ending in y). tive Bedouin varieties. All of the varieties outside of the Arabian peninsula (which include the large majority of • Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., ḥalaltu 'I un- speakers) have a large number of features in common tied' → ḥalēt(u). with each other that are not found in Classical Arabic. • Conversion of separate words lī 'to me', laka 'to This has led researchers to postulate the existence of a you', etc. into indirect-object clitic suffixes. prestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries imme- diately following the Arab conquest, whose features even- • Certain changes in the cardinal number system, tually spread to all of the newly conquered areas. (These e.g., khamsat ayyām 'five days’ → kham(a)s tiyyām, features are present to varying degrees inside the Ara- where certain words have a special plural with pre- bian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula vari- fixed t. eties have much more diversity than the non-peninsula • varieties, but have been understudied.) Loss of the feminine elative (comparative). Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest difference • Adjective plurals of the form kibār 'big' → kubār. is between the non-Egyptian North African dialects (es- • Change of nisba suffix -iyy > i. pecially Moroccan Arabic) and the others. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic • Certain lexical items, e.g., jāb 'bring' < jāʼa bi- speakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true, 'come with'; shāf 'see'; ēsh 'what' (or similar) < ayyu in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other shayʼ 'which thing'; illi (relative pronoun). media). • Merger of /ɮˤ/ and /ðˤ/. One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influ- ence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of 10.3 Dialect groups new words and have sometimes also influenced pronun- ciation or word order; however, a much more significant • Egyptian Arabic, spoken by around 55 million in factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, Egypt. It is one of the most understood varieties of retention (or change of meaning) of different classical Arabic, due in large part to the widespread distribu- forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh and North African tion of Egyptian films and television shows through- kayən all mean 'there is’, and all come from Classical Ara- out the Arabic-speaking world. 9

• Levantine Arabic includes North Levantine Arabic, • Judeo-Arabic dialects - these are the dialects spo- South Levantine Arabic and Cypriot Arabic. It ken by the Jews that had lived or continue to live in is spoken by about 21 million people in Lebanon, the Arab World. As Jewish migration to Israel took Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus and Turkey. hold, the language did not thrive and is now consid- ered endangered. • Maghrebi Arabic, spoken by about 70 million peo- ple in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Malta. • Central Asian Arabic, spoken in Uzbekistan, It is very hard to understand for Arabic speakers Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is highly endangered from the Mashriq or Mesopotamia, the easiest be- • Samaritan Arabic, spoken by only several hundred ing Libyan Arabic and the hardest Moroccan Arabic in the Nablus region and Maltese language. • Shirvani Arabic, spoken in Azerbaijan and Dagestan • Maltese, spoken on the island of Malta, is the only until the 1930s, now extinct. dialect to have established itself as a fully separate language, with independent literary norms. Sicilian • Andalusian Arabic, spoken in Spain and Portugal Arabic, spoken on the island of Sicily until the 14th until the 16th century. century, developed into Maltese in Malta. In the course of its history the language has adopted nu- merous loanwords, phonetic and phonological fea- 11 Phonology tures, and even some grammatical patterns, from Italian, Sicilian and English. It is also the only Semitic language written in the Latin script. Main article: Arabic phonology • Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken by about 15 million The “colloquial” spoken varieties of Arabic are learned people in Iraq, eastern Syria and southwestern Iran at home and constitute the native languages of Arabic (Khuzestan). speakers. “Formal” Literary Arabic (usually specifically Modern Standard Arabic) is learned at school; although • Sudanese Arabic is spoken by 17 million people in many speakers have a native-like command of the lan- Sudan and some parts of southern Egypt. Sudanese guage, it is technically not the native language of any Arabic is quite distinct from the dialect of its neigh- speakers. Both varieties can be both written and spoken, bor to the north; rather, the Sudanese have a dialect although the colloquial varieties are rarely written down similar to the Hijazi dialect. and the formal variety is spoken mostly in formal circum- • Gulf Arabic, spoken by around four million peo- stances, e.g., in radio broadcasts, formal lectures, parlia- ple, predominantly in Kuwait, Bahrain, some parts mentary discussions and to some extent between speak- of Oman, eastern Saudi Arabia coastal areas and ers of different colloquial varieties. Even when the lit- some parts of UAE and Qatar. Also spoken in erary language is spoken, however, it is normally only Iran's Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. Although spoken in its pure form when reading a prepared text Gulf Arabic is spoken in Qatar, most Qatari citizens out loud. When speaking extemporaneously (i.e. mak- speak Najdi Arabic (Bedawi). ing up the language on the spot, as in a normal discus- sion among people), speakers tend to deviate somewhat • Yemeni Arabic spoken in Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti from the strict literary language in the direction of the and southern Saudi Arabia by 15 million people. colloquial varieties. In fact, there is a continuous range of Similar to Gulf Arabic. “in-between” spoken varieties: from nearly pure Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), to a form that still uses MSA • Najdi Arabic, spoken by around 10 million people, grammar and vocabulary but with significant colloquial mainly spoken in Najd, central and northern Saudi influence, to a form of the colloquial language that im- Arabia. Most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic ports a number of words and grammatical constructions (Bedawi). in MSA, to a form that is close to pure colloquial but with the “rough edges” (the most noticeably “vulgar” or non- • Hejazi Arabic (6 million speakers), spoken in Hijaz, Classical aspects) smoothed out, to pure colloquial. The western Saudi Arabia particular variant (or register) used depends on the social • Hassaniya Arabic (3 million speakers), spoken in class and education level of the speakers involved and the Mauritania, Western Sahara, some parts of northern level of formality of the speech situation. Often it will Mali, southern Morocco and south-western Algeria. vary within a single encounter, e.g., moving from nearly pure MSA to a more mixed language in the process of a • Bahrani Arabic (600,000 speakers), spoken by radio interview, as the interviewee becomes more com- Bahrani Shiʻah in Bahrain and Qatif, the dialect ex- fortable with the interviewer. This type of variation is hibits many big differences from Gulf Arabic. It is characteristic of the diglossia that exists throughout the also spoken to a lesser extent in Oman. Arabic-speaking world. 10 11 PHONOLOGY

11.1 Literary Arabic cents and dialects, such as those of the Hijaz, have central [ä(ː)] in all situations. The vowels /u/ and /i/ are often Although Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a unitary affected somewhat in emphatic neighborhoods as well, language, its pronunciation varies somewhat from coun- with generally more back and/or centralized allophones, try to country and from region to region within a country. but the differences are less great than for the low vowels. The variation in individual “accents” of MSA speakers The pronunciation of short /u/ and /i/ tends towards [ʊ~o] tends to mirror corresponding variations in the colloquial and [ɪ~e] in many dialects. speech of the speakers in question, but with the distin- The definition of both “emphatic” and “neighborhood” guishing characteristics moderated somewhat. Note that vary in ways that echo (to some extent) correspond- it is important in descriptions of “Arabic” phonology to ing variations in the spoken dialects. Generally, the distinguish between pronunciation of a given colloquial consonants triggering “emphatic” allophones are the (spoken) dialect and the pronunciation of MSA by these pharyngealized consonants /tˤ dˤ sˤ ðˤ/; /q/; and /r/, if same speakers. Although they are related, they are not not followed immediately by /i(ː)/. Frequently, the uvular the same. For example, the phoneme that derives from fricatives /x ɣ/ also trigger emphatic allophones; occa- Proto-Semitic /g/ has many different pronunciations in sionally also the pharyngeal consonants /ʕ ħ/ (the former the modern spoken varieties, e.g., [d͡ʒ ~ ʒ ~ j ~ ɡʲ ~ ɡ]. more than the latter). Many dialects have multiple em- Speakers whose native variety has either [d͡ʒ] or [ʒ] will phatic allophones of each vowel, depending on the partic- use the same pronunciation when speaking MSA, even ular nearby consonants. In most MSA accents, emphatic speakers from Cairo, whose native Egyptian Arabic has coloring of vowels is limited to vowels immediately adja- [ɡ], normally use [ɡ] when speaking MSA. [j] of Persian cent to a triggering consonant, although in some it spreads Gulf is the only pronunciation which isn't pronounced in a bit farther: e.g., waqt [wɑqt] 'time'; waṭan [wɑtˤɑn] MSA, but instead [d͡ʒ~ʒ]. 'homeland'; wasṭ al-madīnah [wæstˤɑl-mædiːnɐ] 'down- Another example: Many colloquial varieties are known town' (sometimes [wɑstˤɑl-mædiːnæ] or similar). for a type of vowel harmony in which the presence of In a non-emphatic environment, the vowel /a/ in the diph- an "emphatic consonant" triggers backed allophones of thong /aj/ tends to be fronted even more than elsewhere, nearby vowels (especially of the low vowels /aː/, which often pronounced [æj] or [ɛj]: hence sayf [sajf ~ sæjf are backed to [ɑ(ː)] in these circumstances and very often ~ sɛjf] 'sword' but ṣayf [sˤɑjf] 'summer'. However, in fronted to [æ(ː)] in all other circumstances). In many spo- accents with no emphatic allophones of /a/ (e.g., in the ken varieties, the backed or “emphatic” vowel allophones Hijaz), the pronunciation [äj] occurs in all situations. spread a fair distance in both directions from the trigger- ing consonant; in some varieties (most notably Egyptian Arabic), the “emphatic” allophones spread throughout 11.1.2 Consonants the entire word, usually including prefixes and suffixes, even at a distance of several syllables from the trigger- ^1 This phoneme is represented by the Arabic ing consonant. Speakers of colloquial varieties with this -and has many standard pronunci (ج) letter jīm vowel harmony tend to introduce it into their MSA pro- ations. [d͡ʒ] is characteristic of north Algeria, nunciation as well, but usually with a lesser degree of Iraq, also in most of the Arabian peninsula but spreading than in the colloquial varieties. (For exam- with an allophonic [ʒ] in some positions; [ʒ] ple, speakers of colloquial varieties with extremely long- occurs in most of the Levant and most North distance harmony may allow a moderate, but not extreme, Africa; and [ɡ] is used in most of Egypt and amount of spreading of the harmonic allophones in their some regions in Yemen and Oman. Generally MSA speech, while speakers of colloquial varieties with this corresponds with the pronunciation in the moderate-distance harmony may only harmonize imme- colloquial dialects.[54] In some regions in Su- diately adjacent vowels in MSA.) dan and Yemen, as well as in some Sudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either [ɡʲ] or 11.1.1 Vowels [ɟ], representing the original pronunciation of Classical Arabic. Foreign words containing /ɡ/ ݣ , گ , ق , ك , غ , ج Modern Standard Arabic has six pure vowels, with short may be transcribed with -mainly depending on the regional spo , ڨ a i u/ and corresponding long vowels /aː iː uː/. There are or/ also two diphthongs: /aj/ and /aw/. ken variety of Arabic or the commonly diacrit- icized Arabic letter. Note also that in northern The pronunciation of the vowels differs from speaker to Egypt, where the Arabic letter jīm ( ) is nor- ج speaker, in a way that tends to echo the pronunciation of mally pronounced [ɡ], a separate phoneme /ʒ/, the corresponding colloquial variety. Nonetheless, there which may be transcribed with , occurs in a چ are some common trends. Most noticeable is the differing pronunciation of /a/ and /aː/, which tend towards fronted small number of mostly non-Arabic loanwords, [æ(ː)], [a(ː)] or [ɛ(ː)] in most situations, but a back [ɑ(ː)] e.g., /ʒakitta/ 'jacket'. in the neighborhood of emphatic consonants. Some ac- ^2 /l/ is pronounced [ɫ] in /ʔallaːh/, the name 11.1 Literary Arabic 11

of God, q.e. Allah, when the word follows a, consonants has been lost). (In less formal pronuncia- ā, u or ū (after i or ī it is unvelarized: bismi l– tions of Modern Standard Arabic, superheavy syllables lāh /bismillaːh/). Some speakers velarize other are common at the end of words or before clitic suffixes occurrences of /l/ in MSA, in imitation of their such as -nā 'us, our', due to the deletion of final short vow- spoken dialects. els.) ^3 The emphatic consonant /dˤ/ was actually In surface pronunciation, every vowel must be preceded pronounced [ɮˤ], or possibly [d͡ɮˤ][55]—either by a consonant (which may include the glottal stop [ʔ]). way, a highly unusual sound. The medieval There are no cases of hiatus within a word (where two Arabs actually termed their language lughat vowels occur next to each other, without an intervening al-ḍād 'the language of the Ḍād' (the name consonant). Some words do have an underlying vowel at of the letter used for this sound), since they the beginning, such as the definite article al- or words such thought the sound was unique to their language. as ishtarā 'he bought', ijtimāʻ 'meeting'. When actually (In fact, it also exists in a few other minority pronounced, one of three things happens: Semitic languages, e.g., Mehri.) are actu- • If the word occurs after another word ending in a ( ع ح,) /In many varieties, /ħ, ʕ 4^ ally epiglottal [ʜ, ʢ] (despite what is reported consonant, there is a smooth transition from final in many earlier works). consonant to initial vowel, e.g., al-ijtimāʻ 'meeting' /alid͡ʒtimaːʕ/. ,are often post-velar ( غ خ,) /x/ and /ɣ/ 5^ though velar and uvular pronunciations are also • possible.[56] If the word occurs after another word ending in a vowel, the initial vowel of the word is elided, -can be pronounced as [t] or even e.g., baytu (a)l-mudīr 'house of the director' /baj (ث) /θ/ 6^ [s]. In some places of Maghreb it can be also tulmudiːr/. pronounced as [ts͡ ]. • If the word occurs at the beginning of an utterance, Arabic has consonants traditionally termed “emphatic” a glottal stop [ʔ] is added onto the beginning, e.g., which exhibit simultaneous al-baytu huwa ... 'The house is ...' /ʔalbajtuhuwa ,( ظ ص, ض, ط,) /tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/ pharyngealization [tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ] as well as varying degrees .../. of velarization [tˠ, dˠ, sˠ, ðˠ], so they may be written with the “Velarized or pharyngealized” diacritic ( ̴ ) as: /t,̴ d̴, s̴, ð̴/. This simultaneous articulation is described as “Re- 11.1.4 Stress tracted Tongue Root” by phonologists.[57] In some tran- scription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard letter, for example, /dˤ/ is written ⟨D⟩; in others the letter Arabic. It bears a strong relationship to vowel length. The is underlined or has a dot below it, for example, ⟨ḍ⟩. basic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are: Vowels and consonants can be phonologically short or long. Long (geminate) consonants are normally written • A final vowel, long or short, may not be stressed. doubled in Latin transcription (i.e. bb, dd, etc.), reflect- ing the presence of the Arabic diacritic mark shaddah, • Only one of the last three syllables may be stressed. which indicates doubled consonants. In actual pronunci- ation, doubled consonants are held twice as long as short • Given this restriction, the last heavy syllable (con- consonants. This consonant lengthening is phonemically taining a long vowel or ending in a consonant) is contrastive: qabala 'he accepted' vs. qabbala 'he kissed'. stressed, if it is not the final syllable.

• If the final syllable is super heavy and closed (of the 11.1.3 Syllable structure form CVVC or CVCC) it receives stress.

Arabic has two kinds of syllables: open syllables (CV) • If no syllable is heavy or super heavy, the first pos- and (CVV)—and closed syllables (CVC), (CVVC) and sible syllable (i.e. third from end) is stressed. (CVCC). The syllable types with three morae (units of time), i.e. CVC and CVV, are termed heavy syllables, • As a special exception, in Form VII and VIII verb while those with four morae, i.e. CVVC and CVCC, forms stress may not be on the first syllable, despite are superheavy syllables. Superheavy syllables in Clas- the above rules: Hence inkatab(a) 'he subscribed' sical Arabic occur in only two places: at the end of the (whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced), sentence (due to pausal pronunciation) and in words such yankatib(u) 'he subscribes’ (whether or not the fi- as ḥārr 'hot', māddah 'stuff, substance', taḥājjū 'they dis- nal short vowel is pronounced), yankatib 'he should puted with each other', where a long ā occurs before two subscribe (juss.)'. Likewise Form VIII ishtarā 'he identical consonants (a former short vowel between the bought', yashtarī 'he buys’. 12 11 PHONOLOGY i.e. the -t in the) ة Examples:kitāb(un) 'book', kā-ti-b(un) 'writer', mak-ta- nouns preceded by a tāʾ marbūṭah b(un) 'desk', ma-kā-ti-b(u) 'desks’, mak-ta-ba-tun 'library' ending -at- that typically marks feminine nouns), but (but mak-ta-ba(-tun) 'library' in short pronunciation), ka- pronounced as -ā in other nouns (hence its writing ta-bū (Modern Standard Arabic) 'they wrote' = ka-ta-bu in this fashion in the Arabic script). (dialect), ka-ta-bū-h(u) (Modern Standard Arabic) 'they • The tāʼ marbūṭah itself (typically of feminine nouns) wrote it' = ka-ta-bū (dialect), ka-ta-ba-tā (Modern Stan- is pronounced as h. (At least, this is the case in ex- dard Arabic) 'they (dual, fem) wrote', ka-tab-tu (Mod- tremely formal pronunciation, e.g., some Quranic ern Standard Arabic) 'I wrote' = ka-tabt (short form or recitations. In practice, this h is usually omitted.) dialect). Doubled consonants count as two consonants: ma-jal-la-(tan) 'magazine', ma-ḥall(-un) “place”. These rules may result in differently stressed syllables Formal short pronunciation This is a formal level of when final case endings are pronounced, vs. the normal pronunciation sometimes seen. It is somewhat like pro- situation where they are not pronounced, as in the above nouncing all words as if they were in pausal position (with example of mak-ta-ba-tun 'library' in full pronunciation, influence from the colloquial varieties). The following but mak-ta-ba(-tun) 'library' in short pronunciation. changes occur:

The restriction on final long vowels does not apply to • Most final short vowels are not pronounced. How- the spoken dialects, where original final long vowels have ever, the following short vowels are pronounced: been shortened and secondary final long vowels have arisen from loss of original final -hu/hi. • feminine plural -na • Some dialects have different stress rules. In the Cairo shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative of (Egyptian Arabic) dialect a heavy syllable may not carry defective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!' stress more than two syllables from the end of a word, • second-person singular feminine past-tense -ti hence mad-ra-sah 'school', qā-hi-rah 'Cairo'. This also and likewise anti 'you (fem. sg.)' affects the way that Modern Standard Arabic is pro- • sometimes, first-person singular past-tense -tu nounced in Egypt. In the Arabic of Sanaa, stress is of- • sometimes, second-person masculine past- ten retracted: bay-tayn 'two houses’, mā-sat-hum 'their tense -ta and likewise anta 'you (masc. sg.)' table', ma-kā-tīb 'desks’, zā-rat-ḥīn 'sometimes’, mad-ra- • final -a in certain short words, e.g., laysa 'is sat-hum 'their school'. (In this dialect, only syllables with not', sawfa (future-tense marker) long vowels or diphthongs are considered heavy; in a two- syllable word, the final syllable can be stressed only if the • The nunation endings -an -in -un are not pro- preceding syllable is light; and in longer words, the final nounced. However, they are pronounced in adver- َتْقِريًبا syllable cannot be stressed.) bial accusative formations, e.g., taqrīban .'usually' َعاَدًة almost, approximately', ʻādatan' is unpronounced, except ة Levels of pronunciation • The tāʾ marbūṭah ending 11.1.5 in construct state nouns, where it sounds as t (and in َعاَدًة The final short vowels (e.g., the case endings -a -i -u and adverbial accusative constructions, e.g., ʻādatan mood endings -u -a) are often not pronounced in this lan- 'usually', where the entire -tan is pronounced). guage, despite forming part of the formal paradigm of • The masculine singular nisbah ending -iyy is actually nouns and verbs. The following levels of pronunciation pronounced -ī and is unstressed (but plural and fem- exist: inine singular forms, i.e. when followed by a suffix, still sound as -iyy-). Full pronunciation • Full endings (including case endings) occur when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added (e.g., -nā 'us/our'). Full pronunciation with pausa This is the most for- mal level actually used in speech. All endings are pro- nounced as written, except at the end of an utterance, Informal short pronunciation This is the pronunci- where the following changes occur: ation used by speakers of Modern Standard Arabic in extemporaneous speech, i.e. when producing new sen- • Final short vowels are not pronounced. (But possi- tences rather than simply reading a prepared text. It bly an exception is made for feminine plural -na and is similar to formal short pronunciation except that the shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative of defec- rules for dropping final vowels apply even when a clitic tive verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'".) suffix is added. Basically, short-vowel case and mood endings are never pronounced and certain other changes • The entire indefinite noun endings -in and -un (with occur that echo the corresponding colloquial pronuncia- nunation) are left off. The ending -an is left off of tions. Specifically: 11.2 Colloquial varieties 13

• All the rules for formal short pronunciation apply, • Feminine plural endings in verbs and clitic suf- except as follows. fixes will often drop out, with the masculine plural endings used instead. If the speaker’s • The past tense singular endings written formally as - native variety has feminine plural endings, tu -ta -ti are pronounced -t -t -ti. But masculine ʾanta they may be preserved, but will often be mod- is pronounced in full. ified in the direction of the forms used in the speaker’s native variety, e.g. -an instead of - • Unlike in formal short pronunciation, the rules for na. dropping or modifying final endings are also applied when a clitic object or possessive suffix is added • Dual endings will often drop out except on (e.g., -nā 'us/our'). If this produces a sequence of nouns and then used only for emphasis (simi- three consonants, then one of the following happens, lar to their use in the colloquial varieties); else- depending on the speaker’s native colloquial variety: where, the plural endings are used (or feminine singular, if appropriate). • A short vowel (e.g., -i- or -ǝ-) is consistently added, either between the second and third or the first and second consonants. 11.2 Colloquial varieties • Or, a short vowel is added only if an other- wise unpronounceable sequence occurs, typ- Further information: Varieties of Arabic ically due to a violation of the sonority hi- erarchy (e.g., -rtn- is pronounced as a three- consonant cluster, but -trn- needs to be broken up). 11.2.1 Vowels • Or, a short vowel is never added, but conso- nants like r l m n occurring between two other As mentioned above, many spoken dialects have a consonants will be pronounced as a syllabic process of emphasis spreading, where the “emphasis” consonant (as in the English words “butter bot- (pharyngealization) of emphatic consonants spreads for- tle bottom button”). ward and back through adjacent syllables, pharyngealiz- ing all nearby consonants and triggering the back allo- • When a doubled consonant occurs before an- phone [ɑ(ː)] in all nearby low vowels. The extent of em- other consonant (or finally), it is often short- phasis spreading varies. For example, in Moroccan Ara- ened to a single consonant rather than a vowel bic, it spreads as far as the first full vowel (i.e. sound added. (But note that Moroccan Arabic never derived from a long vowel or diphthong) on either side; shortens doubled consonants or inserts short in many Levantine dialects, it spreads indefinitely, but vowels to break up clusters, instead tolerat- is blocked by any /j/ or /ʃ/; while in Egyptian Arabic, ing arbitrary-length series of arbitrary conso- it usually spreads throughout the entire word, including nants and hence Moroccan Arabic speakers prefixes and suffixes. In Moroccan Arabic, /i u/ also have are likely to follow the same rules in their pro- emphatic allophones [o~ɔ e~ɛ]. nunciation of Modern Standard Arabic.) Unstressed short vowels, especially /i u/, are deleted in • The clitic suffixes themselves tend also to be many contexts. Many sporadic examples of short vowel changed, in a way that avoids many possible occur- change have occurred (especially /a/→/i/ and interchange rences of three-consonant clusters. In particular, -ka /i/↔/u/). Most Levantine dialects merge short /i u/ into -ki -hu generally sound as -ak -ik -uh. /ǝ/ in most contexts (all except directly before a single fi- nal consonant). In Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand, • Final long vowels are often shortened, merging with short /u/ triggers labialization of nearby consonants (espe- any short vowels that remain. cially velar consonants and uvular consonants), and then short /a i u/ all merge into /ǝ/, which is deleted in many • Depending on the level of formality, the speaker’s contexts. (The labialization plus /ǝ/ is sometimes inter- education level, etc., various grammatical changes preted as an underlying phoneme /ŭ/.) This essentially may occur in ways that echo the colloquial variants: causes the wholesale loss of the short-long vowel distinc- • Any remaining case endings (e.g. masculine tion, with the original long vowels /aː iː uː/ remaining as plural nominative -ūn vs. oblique -īn) will half-long [aˑ iˑ uˑ], phonemically /a i u/, which are used to be leveled, with the oblique form used every- represent both short and long vowels in borrowings from where. (However, in words like ab 'father' and Literary Arabic. akh 'brother' with special long-vowel case end- Most spoken dialects have monophthongized original /aj ings in the construct state, the nominative is aw/ to /eː oː/ (in all circumstances, including adjacent to used everywhere, hence abū 'father of', akhū emphatic consonants). In Moroccan Arabic, these have 'brother of'.) subsequently merged into original /iː uː/. 14 12 GRAMMAR

11.2.2 Consonants In Sana'a, Omani, and Bahrani /-ik/ is pronounced /-iʃ/. In some dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed in the chart above. For example, non- Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends to Arabic [v] is used in the Maghrebi dialects as well in the weaken in many of the spoken varieties, and to spread written language mostly for foreign names. Semitic [p] from emphatic consonants to nearby sounds. In addition, became [f] extremely early on in Arabic before it was the “emphatic” allophone [ɑ] automatically triggers pha- written down; a few modern Arabic dialects, such as Iraqi ryngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects. As a (influenced by Persian and Turkish) distinguish between result, it may difficult or impossible to determine whether [p] and [b]. The Iraqi Arabic uses also sounds [ɡ], [tʃ͡ ] and a given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic or gawjah – a plum; not, especially in dialects with long-distance emphasis ﮔﻮﺟﺔ :.uses Persian adding letters, e.g /chimah – a truffle and so on. spreading. (A notable exception is the sounds /t/ vs. /tˤ ﭼﻤﺔ in Moroccan Arabic, because the former is pronounced Early in the expansion of Arabic, the separate em- as an affricate [ts͡ ] but the latter is not.) phatic phonemes [ɮˤ] and [ðˤ] coalesced into a single phoneme [ðˤ]. Many dialects (such as Egyptian, Lev- antine, and much of the Maghreb) subsequently lost interdental fricatives, converting [θ ð ðˤ] into [t d dˤ]. 12 Grammar Most dialects borrow “learned” words from the Standard language using the same pronunciation as for inherited machine فَعّالة words, but some dialects without interdental fricatives root meaning ➔ a a a a h fridge ثلّ ةجة particularly in Egypt and the Levant) render original [θ th l j snow ➔ th a l l a a j a h) glasses نظّارة ð ðˤ ɮˤ] in borrowed words as [s z zˤ dˤ]. n Z r see ➔ n a Z Z a a r a h washing غسّ الة gh s l wash ➔ gh a s s a a l a h Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is machine car سيّارة s y r travel ➔ s a y y a a r a h

how they render the original velar and uvular plosives /q/, stepping by bicycle درّاةجة d r j ➔ d a r r a a j a h /d͡ʒ/(Proto-Semitic /ɡ/), and /k/: degrees process تَفعيل t a i i ➔ فعل

• ➔ t a s w i i q marketing تسويق سوق q/ retains its original pronunciation in widely/ ق saccharification تسكير t a s k i i r ➔ سكر -scattered regions such as Yemen, Morocco, and ur ➔ formation, shaping تسكير t a sh k i i l شكل ban areas of the Maghreb. It is pronounced as a ➔ organisation (the act of) تنظيم t a n Z i i m نظم 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 Per- a a a a do together ➔ m u a a i coactor sian Gulf, Upper Egypt, parts of the Maghreb, and r a a s a l a correspond ➔ m u r a a s i l correspondant i l reactor ع a l a react ➔ m u f a a ع less urban parts of the Levant (e.g. Jordan). In Iraqi f a a Arabic it sometimes retains its original pronuncia- s a a b a q a race ➔ m u s a a b i q competitor share same w a a T a n a ➔ m u w a a T i n fellow citizen tion and is sometimes rendered as a voiced velar nationality plosive, depending on the word. Some tradition- فَعائل a i i a h ➔ a a a ' i plural ally Christian villages in rural areas of the Levant قذائف ,q a dh i i f a h ➔ q a dh a a ' i f missiles render the sound as [k], as do Shiʻi Bahrainis. In projectiles وظائف w a Z i i f a h ➔ w a Z a a ' i f jobs, posts 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 Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works. overtones) borrowed from the Classical language. • ͡ Main article: Arabic grammar dʒ/ is pronounced as an affricate in Iraq and much/ ج 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] 12.1 Literary Arabic in most words in much of the Persian Gulf. • Main article: Modern Standard Arabic k/ usually retains its original pronunciation, but/ ك is palatalized to /tʃ͡ / in many words in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and much of the Ara- As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and bian Peninsula. Often a distinction is made between unusual morphology (i.e. method of constructing words the suffixes /-ak/ ('you', masc.) and /-ik/ ('you', from a basic root). Arabic has a nonconcatenative “root- fem.), which become /-ak/ and /-itʃ/,͡ respectively. and-pattern” morphology: A root consists of a set of bare 12.1 Literary Arabic 15

consonants (usually three), which are fitted into a discon- 12.1.1 Nouns and adjectives tinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root k-t-b Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases 'write' with the pattern -a-a-tu 'I Xed' to form katabtu (nominative, accusative, and genitive [also used when 'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically the noun is governed by a preposition]); three numbers have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. (singular, dual and plural); two genders (masculine and qaraʼtu 'I read', akaltu 'I ate', dhahabtu 'I went', although feminine); and three “states” (indefinite, definite, and other patterns are possible (e.g. sharibtu 'I drank', qultu construct). The cases of singular nouns (other than those 'I said', takallamtu 'I spoke', where the subpattern used that end in long ā) are indicated by suffixed short vowels to signal the past tense may change but the suffix -tu is (/-u/ for nominative, /-a/ for accusative, /-i/ for genitive). always used). The feminine singular is often marked by /-at/, which is From a single root k-t-b, numerous words can be formed reduced to /-ah/ or /-a/ before a pause. Plural is indicated by applying different patterns: either through endings (the sound plural) or internal mod- ification (the broken plural). Definite nouns include all • katabtu 'I wrote' proper nouns, all nouns in “construct state” and all nouns which are prefixed by the definite article /al-/. Indefinite • kattabtu 'I had (something) written' singular nouns (other than those that end in long ā) add a final /-n/ to the case-marking vowels, giving /-un/, /-an/ • kātabtu 'I corresponded (with someone)'" or /-in/ (which is also referred to as nunation or tanwīn). Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, num- • aktabtu 'I dictated' ber, gender and state, as for nouns. However, the plural of all non-human nouns is always combined with a singular • iktatabtu 'I subscribed' feminine adjective, which takes the /-ah/ or /-at/ suffix. • takātabnā 'we corresponded with each other' Pronouns in Literary Arabic are marked for person, num- ber and gender. There are two varieties, independent pro- • aktubu 'I write' nouns and enclitics. Enclitic pronouns are attached to the end of a verb, noun or preposition and indicate verbal and • ukattibu 'I have (something) written' prepositional objects or possession of nouns. The first- person singular pronoun has a different enclitic form used • ukātibu 'I correspond (with someone)' for verbs (/-ni/) and for nouns or prepositions (/-ī/ after consonants, /-ya/ after vowels). • uktibu 'I dictate' Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with each other in all respects. However, non-human plural nouns • aktatibu 'I subscribe' are grammatically considered to be feminine singular. Furthermore, a verb in a verb-initial sentence is marked • natakātabu 'we correspond each other' as singular regardless of its semantic number when the • kutiba 'it was written' subject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun. Numerals between three and ten show “chiasmic” agree- • uktiba 'it was dictated'" ment, in that grammatically masculine numerals have feminine marking and vice versa. • maktūb 'written'

• muktab 'dictated' 12.1.2 Verbs

• kitāb 'book' Verbs in Literary Arabic are marked for person (first, second, or third), gender, and number. They are • kutub 'books’ conjugated in two major paradigms (past and non- past); two voices (active and passive); and six moods • kātib 'writer' (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, shorter energetic and longer energetic), the fifth and sixth moods, • kuttāb 'writers’ the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not in MSA.[58] There are also two participles (active and pas- • maktab 'desk, office' sive) and a verbal noun, but no infinitive. • maktabah 'library, bookshop' The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes also termed perfective and imperfective, indicating the fact • etc. that they actually represent a combination of tense and 16 13 WRITING SYSTEM

aspect. The moods other than the indicative occur only in in ma- (e.g. maktab 'desk, office' < k-t-b 'write', maṭbakh the non-past, and the future tense is signaled by prefixing 'kitchen' < ṭ-b-kh 'cook'). sa- or sawfa onto the non-past. The past and non-past dif- The only three genuine suffixes are as follows: fer in the form of the stem (e.g., past katab- vs. non-past -ktub-), and also use completely different sets of affixes • for indicating person, number and gender: In the past, The feminine suffix -ah; variously derives terms the person, number and gender are fused into a single from women from related terms for men, or more suffixal morpheme, while in the non-past, a combination generally terms along the same lines as the corre- of prefixes (primarily encoding person) and suffixes (pri- sponding masculine, e.g. maktabah 'library' (also a marily encoding gender and number) are used. The pas- writing-related place, but different than maktab, as sive voice uses the same person/number/gender affixes above). but changes the vowels of the stem. • The nisbah suffix -iyy-. This suffix is extremely pro- The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb, ductive, and forms adjectives meaning “related to kataba 'to write'. Note that in Modern Standard Arabic, X”. It corresponds to English adjectives in -ic, -al, many final short vowels are dropped (indicated in paren- -an, -y, -ist, etc. theses below), and the energetic mood (in either long or short form, which have the same meaning) is almost never • The feminine nisbah suffix -iyyah. This is formed used. by adding the feminine suffix -ah onto nisba adjec- tives 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 12.1.3 Derivation in turn its verbal noun ishtirāk 'cooperation, partici- pation' can be formed. This in turn can be made into Unlike most languages, Arabic has virtually no means of a nisbah adjective ishtirākī 'socialist', from which deriving words by adding prefixes or suffixes to words. an abstract noun ishtirākiyyah 'socialism' can be de- Instead, they are formed according to a finite (but fairly rived. Other recent formations are jumhūriyyah large) number of templates applied to roots. 'republic' (lit. “public-ness”, < jumhūr 'multitude, For verbs, a given root can construct up to fifteen dif- general public'), and the Gaddafi-specific variation ferent verbs, each with one or more characteristic mean- jamāhīriyyah 'people’s republic' (lit. “masses-ness”, ings and each with its own templates for the past and < jamāhīr 'the masses’, pl. of jumhūr, as above). 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 12.2 Colloquial varieties Forms XI to XV are rare). These forms encode concepts such as the causative, intensive and reflexive. These forms Main article: Varieties of Arabic can be viewed as analogous to verb conjugations in lan- guages such as Spanish in terms of the additional com- The spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions and plexity of verb formation that they induce. (Note, how- make only limited use of the dual (it occurs only on nouns ever, that their usage in constructing vocabulary is some- and its use is no longer required in all circumstances). what different, since the same root can be conjugated in They have lost the mood distinctions other than impera- multiple forms, with different shades of meaning.) tive, but many have since gained new moods through the Examples of the different verbs formed from the root k-t- use of prefixes (most often /bi-/ for indicative vs. un- b 'write' (using ḥ-m-r 'red' for Form IX, which is limited marked subjunctive). They have also mostly lost the in- to colors and physical defects): definite “nunation” and the internal passive. Form II is sometimes used to create transitive The following is an example of a regular verb paradigm denominative verbs (verbs built from nouns); Form in Egyptian Arabic. 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 Ara- 13 Writing system bic. This is similar to the process by which, for example, the English gerund “meeting” (similar to a verbal noun) Main articles: Arabic alphabet and Arabic Braille has turned into a noun referring to a particular type of The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through social, often work-related event where people gather to- Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that gether to have a “discussion” (another lexicalized verbal of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. Tradition- noun). Another fairly common means of forming nouns ally, there were several differences between the West- is through one of a limited number of patterns that can be ern (North African) and Middle Eastern versions of the applied directly to roots, such as the “nouns of location” alphabet—in particular, the faʼ had a dot underneath and 13.3 Numerals 17

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 exam- -is used to represent both a con ي ple, the same letter sonant, 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 Islamic calligraphy written by a Malay Muslim in Malaysia. The (e.g. the Bahá'í orthography) are intended to help read- calligrapher is making a rough draft. ers who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists to in- tuitively pronounce Arabic names and phrases.[60] These less “scientific” tend to avoid diacritics and use digraphs qaf a single dot above in the Maghreb, and the order of (like sh and kh). These are usually more simple to read, the letters was slightly different (at least when they were but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific systems, and used as numerals). may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to interpret sh as a However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandoned single sound, as in gash, or a combination of two sounds, except for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb it- as in gashouse. The ALA-LC romanization solves this self, and remains in use mainly in the Quranic schools problem by separating the two sounds with a prime sym- (zaouias) of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semitic bol ( ′ ); e.g., as′hal 'easier'. languages (except for the Latin-written Maltese, and the During the last few decades and especially since the languages with the Ge'ez script), is written from right to 1990s, Western-invented text communication technolo- left. There are several styles of script, notably naskh, gies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such as which is used in print and by computers, and ruqʻah, personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin [59] which is commonly used in handwriting. 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, 13.1 Calligraphy and some of them still do not have the Arabic script as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users Main article: Islamic calligraphy communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script, sometimes known as After Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi finally fixed the Ara- IM Arabic. bic script around 786, many styles were developed, both To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately for the writing down of the Quran and other books, and represented using the Latin script, numerals and other for inscriptions on monuments as decoration. characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral There .⟨ع⟩ Arabic calligraphy has not fallen out of use as calligraphy “3” may be used to represent the Arabic letter has in the Western world, and is still considered by Arabs is no universal name for this type of transliteration, but as a major art form; calligraphers are held in great esteem. some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other sys- Being cursive by nature, unlike the Latin script, Arabic tems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capital- script is used to write down a verse of the Quran, a hadith, ization to represent the “emphatic” counterparts of cer- or simply a proverb. The composition is often abstract, tain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, the -may be represented by d. Its emphatic coun ,⟨د⟩ but sometimes the writing is shaped into an actual form letter .may be written as D ,⟨ض⟩ ,such as that of an animal. One of the current masters of terpart the genre is Hassan Massoudy. 13.3 Numerals

13.2 Romanization In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. How- Main article: Romanization of Arabic ever, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the east ٥ – ٤ – ٣ – ٢ – ١ – ٠) of it, the Eastern Arabic numerals -are in use. When representing a num( ٩ – ٨ – ٧ – ٦ – There are a number of different standards for the romanization of Arabic, i.e. methods of accurately ber in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on the 18 18 REFERENCES

right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to- Hayyan al-Gharnati - who, while a scholar of the Ara- right scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone num- bic language, was not ethnically Arab - scholars of the bers are read from left to right, but numbers are spoken Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative in the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens re- linguistics, considering all other languages inferior.[62] versed from the modern English usage. For example, 24 In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab is said “four and twenty” just like in the German language world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman (vierundzwanzig) and Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said wrote in 2011 that “studying and knowing English or “a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy” or, French in most of the Middle East and North Africa more eloquently, “five and seventy and nine-hundred and have become a badge of sophistication and modernity a thousand.” and when feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of fa- cility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange 14 Language-standards regulators of code-switching practises.”[63] Arab-American profes- sor Franck Salamah went as far as to declare Arabic a dead language conveying dead ideas, blaming its stagna- Academy of the Arabic Language is the name of a num- tion for Arab intellectual stagnation and lamenting that ber of language-regulation bodies formed in the Arab great writers in Arabic are judged by their command of League. The most active are in Damascus and Cairo. the language and not the merit of the ideas they express They review language development, monitor new words with it.[64] and approve inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. 17 See also See also: Arabic Language International Council 18 References

15 Studying Arabic Notes

Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary [1] “Världens 100 största språk 2010” [The world’s 100 and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Uni- largest languages in 2010]. Nationalencyklopedin (in Swedish). 2010. Retrieved 12 February 2014. versities around the world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages, Middle Eastern studies, [2] Wright (2001:492) and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the aca- [3] Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, demic world. There are many Arabic language schools Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). “Arabic”. Glottolog 2.2. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolu- in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because tionary Anthropology. the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) [4] “Arabic language.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. En- study the language. Software and books with tapes are cyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved on 29 July 2009. also important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic [5] “World Arabic Language Day”. UNESCO. 18 December learners may live in places where there are no academic 2012. Retrieved 12 February 2014. or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some [6] Egyptian Arabic reference at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009) radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet pro- vide online classes for all levels as a means of distance ed- [7] “Executive Summary”. The Future of the Global Muslim Population. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 22 Decem- ucation; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some ber 2011. teach regional varieties from numerous countries.[61] [8] “Table: Muslim Population by Country | Pew Re- search Center’s Religion & Public Life Project”. Fea- 16 Arabic speakers and other lan- tures.pewforum.org. 2011-01-27. Retrieved 2014-05-18. [9] “UN official languages”. Un.org. Retrieved 20 April guages 2013.

Historically, Arab linguists considered the Arabic lan- [10] Versteegh (1997:33) guage to be superior to all other languages, and took al- [11] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand- most no interest in learning any language other than Ara- book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. bic. With the sole example of Medieval linguist Abu 54. 19

[12] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand- [32] Clive Holes, Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. Varieties, pg. 3. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univer- 55. sity Press, 2004. ISBN 9781589010222

[13] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand- [33] Nizar Y. Habash,Introduction to Arabic Natural Language book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. Processing, pgs. 1-2. San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool 57. Publishers, 2010. ISBN 9781598297959

[14] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func- [34] Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aes- tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer- thetic: Democratic Practice in South India, pgs. 14- sity Press. p. 3. 15. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780231519403 [15] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func- tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer- [35] Encyclopædia Britannica. “Maltese language – Britannica sity Press. p. 11. Online Encyclopedia”. Britannica.com. Retrieved 4 May 2010. [16] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func- tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer- [36] Gregersen (1977:237) sity Press. p. 12. [37] See the seminal study by Siegmund Fraenkel, Die [17] Beeston, A. F. L.. The Arabic language today. Washing- aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen, Leiden 1886 ton, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006. Print. (repr. 1962)

[18] A.F.L, Beeston (1970). The Arabic Language Today. [38] See for instance Wilhelm Eilers, “Iranisches Lehngut im Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. 3. Arabischen”, Actas IV. Congresso des Estudos Árabes et Islâmicos, Coimbra, Lisboa, Leiden 1971, with earlier ref- [19] A.F.L, Beeston (1970). The Arabic Language Today. erences. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. 4. [39] Bertold Spuler, The Muslim World a Historical Survey Part [20] Bateson, Mary Catherine. Arabic language handbook. 1: The Age of the Caliphs, transl. F.R.C. Bagley, (E.J. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Brill, 1960), 24 n1. Print

[21] John Andrew Morrow, Islamic Images and Ideas: Essays [40] Shrivtiel, Shraybom (1998). The Question of Romanisa- on Sacred Symbolism, pg. 257. Jefferson: McFarland & tion of the Script and The Emergence of Nationalism in the Company, 2013. ISBN 9781476612881 Middle East. Mediterranean Language Review. pp. 179– 196. [22] John andrew Morrow, Islamic Images and Ideas, pg. 258. [41] Shrivtiel, p. 188 [23] Kaye (1991:?) [42] Shrivtiel, p. 189 [24] “Arabic Language.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclo- pedia 2009. Retrieved on 29 July 2009. [43] “Arabic – the mother of all languages – Al Islam Online”. Alislam.org. Archived from the original on 30 April 2010. [25] Orville Boyd Jenkins (18 March 2000), Population Anal- Retrieved 4 May 2010. ysis of the Arabic Languages [44] James Coffman (December 1995). “Does the Arabic Lan- [26] Janet C. E. Watson, The Phonology and Morphology of guage Encourage Radical Islam?". Middle East Quarterly. Arabic, Introduction, pg. xix. Oxford: Oxford University Retrieved 5 December 2008. Press, 2007. ISBN 9780191607752 [45] Woodard, Roger D. Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine [27] Proceedings and Debates of the 107th United States and Arabia. p 208 Congress Congressional Record, pg. 10,462. Washing- ton, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, [46] Woodard, Roger D. (2008), Ancient Languages of Syria- 2002. Palestine and Arabia. p. 180

[28] Shalom Staub, Yemenis in New York City: The Folklore [47] M. C. A. Macdonald, “Reflections on the Linguistic Map of Ethnicity, pg. 124. Philadelphia: Balch Institute for of Pre-Islamic Arabia”, Arabian Archaeology and Epig- Ethnic Studies, 1989. ISBN 9780944190050 raphy, 2000, Volume 11, p. 50 and 61

[29] Daniel Newman, Arabic-English Thematic Lexicon, pg. [48] James A. Bellamy (1985). “A New Reading of the 1. London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 9781134103928 Namārah Inscription”. Journal of the American Orien- tal Society (American Oriental Society) 105 (1): 31–51. [30] Rebecca L. Torstrick and Elizabeth Faier, Culture and doi:10.2307/601538. JSTOR 601538. Customs of the Arab Gulf States, pg. 41. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009. ISBN 9780313336591 [49] “A History of the Arabic Language”. Linguistics.byu.edu. Archived from the original on 5 May 2010. Retrieved 4 [31] Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the May 2010. Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, pg. 32. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. ISBN 9780801466304 [50] Lipinski (1997:124) 20 18 REFERENCES

[51] Watson (2002:5, 15–16) • Haywood; Nahmad (1965), A new Arabic grammar, London: Lund Humphries, ISBN 0-85331-585-X [52] Watson (2002:2) • [53] Ferguson, Charles (1959), “The Arabic Koine”, Language Hetzron, Robert (1997), The Semitic languages (Il- 35 (4): 616–630, doi:10.2307/410601 lustrated ed.), Taylor & Francis, ISBN 978-0-415- 05767-7 [54] Watson (2002:16) • Irwin, Robert (2006), For Lust of Knowing, London: [55] Ferguson, Charles (1959), “The Arabic Koine”, Language Allen Lane 35 (4): 630, doi:10.2307/410601

[56] Watson (2002:18) • Kaplan, Robert B.; Baldauf, Richard B. (2007), Language Planning and Policy in Africa, Multilin- [57] e.g., Thelwall (2003:52) gual Matters, ISBN 1-85359-726-0 [58] Rydin, Karin C. (2005). A reference grammar of Mod- • Kaye, Alan S. (1991), “The Hamzat al-Waṣl in Con- ern Standard Arabic. New York: Cambridge University Press. temporary Modern Standard Arabic”, Journal of the American Oriental Society (American Oriental [59] Hanna & Greis (1972:2) Society) 111 (3): 572–574, doi:10.2307/604273, JSTOR 604273 [60] Kharusi, N. S. & Salman, A. (2011) The English Translit- eration of Place Names in Oman. Journal of Academic • Lane, Edward William (1893), Arabic–English Lex- and Applied Studies Vol. 1(3) September 2011, pp. 1–27 Available online at www.academians.org icon (2003 reprint ed.), New Delhi: Asian Educa- tional Services, ISBN 81-206-0107-6 [61] “Reviews of Language Courses”. Lang1234. Retrieved 12 September 2012. • Lipinski, Edward (1997), Semitic Languages, Leu- ven: Peeters [62] Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition, pg. 106. Part of Landmarks in Linguistic Thought series, vol. 3. • Mion, Giuliano (2007), La Lingua Araba (in Ital- New York: Routledge, 1997. ISBN 9780415157575 ian), Rome: Carocci, ISBN 978-88-430-4394-1 [63] Suleiman, p. 93 • Mumisa, Michael (2003), Introducing Arabic, [64] Franck Salamah, Language, Memory, and Identity in Goodword Books, ISBN 81-7898-211-0 the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon, Introduction, pg. xvi. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. ISBN • Procházka, S. (2006), ""Arabic"", Encyclopedia of 9780739137406 Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.)

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19 External links

• Arabic: a Category III language Languages which are difficult for native English speakers. • Dr. Nizar Habash’s, Columbia University, Introduc- tion to Arabic Natural Language Processing • Google Ta3reeb – Google Transliteration

• Transliteration Arabic language pronunciation ap- plet

• USA Foreign Service Institute Arabic basic course • How to speak Arabic

• Morris Jastrow (1905). "Arabic Language and Lit- erature". New International Encyclopedia. 22 20 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

20 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

20.1 Text

• Arabic language Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic%20language?oldid=642193740 Contributors: Brion VIBBER, As- troNomer, Andre Engels, Eclecticology, Youssefsan, Hajhouse, Pgdudda, Rmhermen, Christian List, Gritchka, SimonP, Hannes Hirzel, Heron, KF, Elian, Stevertigo, Edward, Tillwe, Michael Hardy, DopefishJustin, Isomorphic, Norm, Gabbe, Menchi, Wapcaplet, Ixfd64, IZAK, Sannse, TakuyaMurata, Delirium, SebastianHelm, Mr100percent, Looxix, Ihcoyc, Ellywa, Ahoerstemeier, J'raxis, Theresa knott, ILVI, CatherineMunro, Andrewa, Julesd, Salsa Shark, Amcaja, Junesun, Caffelice, Tobias Conradi, Mxn, Smack, Schneelocke, Dwo, Feed- mecereal, Uriber, Dcoetzee, Daniel Quinlan, Jwrosenzweig, WhisperToMe, Selket, DJ Clayworth, Asser hassanain, Maya, Tpbradbury, E23, Morwen, Taxman, Christopher Sundita, Traroth, Joy, Bjarki S, AnonMoos, MD87, Anjouli, Cncs wikipedia, Phil Boswell, Rob- bot, Baher, Benwing, RedWolf, Jmabel, Naddy, Chris Roy, YBeayf, Vlad patryshev, Rursus, Auric, Sunray, Saforrest, Wikibot, Ruakh, Scythian99, Kairos, Jeru, Alan Liefting, Pstevenson, Giftlite, DocWatson42, Amorim Parga, Isam, Wonder al, Jpta, Netoholic, Jabra, Meur- sault2004, HangingCurve, Ayman, Dimi juve, Curps, Henry Flower, Varlaam, DO'Neil, Gilgamesh, Guanaco, Node ue, Khalid hassani, Adam McMaster, Ragib, Johnzello, Gyrofrog, Chowbok, Manuel Anastácio, LordSimonofShropshire, Alexf, Toytoy, Knutux, Sonjaaa, Quadell, Antandrus, Mustafaa, Evertype, Kusunose, Lesgles, Rdsmith4, Mahmood, Al-Andalus, Gscshoyru, ZZyXx, Agari, Chem1, Hadj, D6, Dbach, Zarxos, Fpga, Pasquale, RossPatterson, Discospinster, Zaheen, Rich Farmbrough, Guanabot, Jad Baaklini, Wise mike, NrDg, Vsmith, Freestylefrappe, Parishan, Florian Blaschke, Wikiacc, HeikoEvermann, Ericamick, MeltBanana, Quiensabe, Dbachmann, Mani1, Paul August, SpookyMulder, Bender235, ESkog, Sc147, Kjoonlee, Helldjinn, Evice, Brian0918, Livajo, Kwamikagami, Aude, Mark R Johnson, Mairi, Femto, Jpgordon, Erauch, Bobo192, Circeus, AllyUnion, ParticleMan, Shlomital, Bawolff, Haham hanuka, Seaj11, Fox1, Nsaa, Jakew, Ogress, Jumbuck, Shirimasen, Stephen G. 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