page_title: Arabic
section_title: Nahda
hierarchical_section_title: Arabic / History / Nahda
caption_attribution_description: English: Egyptian (UAR) President Gamal Abdel Nasser awarding Taha Hussein the National Honors Prize in Literature
context_page_description: Arabic is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in Northwestern Arabia and in the Sinai Peninsula. The ISO assigns language codes to thirty varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā.
  Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media. Arabic, in its standard form, is the official language of 26 states, as well as the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and Hadith were written in Arabic.
context_section_description: In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications.
  
  The Nahda cultural renaissance saw the creation of a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française, starting with the Arab Academy of Damascus (1918), which aimed to develop the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations. This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic.
caption: Taha Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser were both staunch defenders of Standard Arabic.[31][32]
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