Dialect areas tend to be identified with urban centers such as Damascus, Amman, Jerusalem, and Beirut. There is a fairly close match between the written symbols and their phonemic, or linguistic function. Short vowels are typically not written even though much morphological and grammatical meaning is signaled by vowels. Because only roots and stems of an inflected word are written the reader has to infer its particular meaning from context. When vowels are symbolized, as in children's books or learners' manuals, super- and subscript diacritics are used.
Writing is written from right to left.
Arabic script is an important orthography used to write many non-Arabic languages, for example, Persian, Pushto, Urdu, and at one time, Swahili and Hausa. Details may differ depending on the colloquial vernacular. This root-pattern system is productive in both MSA and in the vernaculars, including Algerian variants. Plural in many nouns is marked by ablaut, that is, the vowel pattern within a root varies between singular and plural forms, akin to alternations in English as in the verb sing, sang, and sung, or the noun mouse and mice. Templates for verbs fall into ten commonly, and four rarely, used shapes and meanings.