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.