Arabic

### Official language in

Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

### Recognised minority language in

Brunei, Cyprus, Indonesia, Israel, Iran, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Philippines, Senegal, South Sudan, Turkey

## Overview

**Arabic** (Arabic: العَرَبِيَّة‎) is a Central Semiticlanguage that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the *lingua franca* of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living from Mesopotamia in the east to the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, and in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic.

As the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic (*fuṣḥā*), which is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical language of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era, especially in modern times.

During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages, mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Valencian and Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid 9th to mid 10th centuries. Many of these words relate to agriculture and related activities (Hull and Ruffino). Balkanlanguages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish.

Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Maldivian, Indonesian, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi, and Hausa, and some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, and contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times.

Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims and Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography.

## Classical, Modern, and spoken Arabic

*Arabic* usually designates one of three main variants: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and *colloquial* or *dialectal* Arabic. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran, used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Theoretically, Classical Arabic is considered normative, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisān al-ʻArab). In practice, however, modern authors almost never write in pure Classical Arabic, instead using a literary language with its own grammatical norms and vocabulary, commonly known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa, and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" (فُصْحَى‎ '**fuṣḥá'**) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.

Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows:

* Certain grammatical constructions of CA that have no counterpart in any modern dialect (e.g., the energetic mood) are almost never used in Modern Standard Arabic.
* No modern spoken variety of Arabic has case distinctions. As a result, MSA is generally composed without case distinctions in mind, and the proper cases are added after the fact, when necessary. Because most case endings are noted using final short vowels, which are normally left unwritten in the Arabic script, it is unnecessary to determine the proper case of most words. The practical result of this is that MSA, like English and Standard Chinese, is written in a strongly determined word order and alternative 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 cannot consistently use the correct endings in extemporaneous 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 circumstances; instead, a significantly simplified system is used, approximating the system of the conservative spoken varieties.

MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., '**dhahaba'** 'to go') that is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined a large number of terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve.[18] Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم‎ '**film'** 'film' or ديمقراطية‎ '**dīmuqrāṭiyyah'** 'democracy').

However, the current preference is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع‎ '**farʻ'** 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح‎ '**janāḥ'** 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots (استماتة‎ '**istimātah'** 'apoptosis', using the root موت‎ *m/w/t* 'death' put into the Xth form, or جامعة‎ '**jāmiʻah'** 'university', based on جمع‎ '**jamaʻa'** 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية‎ '**jumhūriyyah'** 'republic', based on جمهور‎ '**jumhūr'** 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف‎ '**hātif'** 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة‎ '**jarīdah'** 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk').

*Colloquial* or *dialectal* Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language and evolved from Classical Arabic. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows, as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising.

The only variety of modern Arabic to have acquired official language status is Maltese, which is spoken in (predominantly Catholic) Malta and written with the Latin script. It is descended from Classical Arabic through Siculo-Arabic, but is not mutually intelligible with any other variety of Arabic. Most linguists list it as a separate language rather than as a dialect of Arabic.

Even during Muhammad's lifetime, there were dialects of spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the dialect of Mecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it was in this dialect that the Quran was written down. However, the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were considered the most prestigious at the time, so the language of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology. It is this phonology that underlies the modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phonological differences between these two dialects account for some of the complexities of Arabic writing, most notably the writing of the glottal stop or *hamzah* (which was preserved in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech) and the use of '**alif maqṣūrah'** (representing a sound preserved in the western dialects but merged with '**ā'** in eastern speech).

## Language and dialect

The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native, mutually unintelligible "dialects"; these dialects linguistically constitute separate languages which may have dialects of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film.

The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scotsand English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a significant complicating factor: A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.

From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages. This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages.

## Arabic excerpt from Wikipedia article "لغة عربية"

زعم أهل الأخبار أن هذه العربية هي عربية قريش وأنها لغة الأدب عند الجاهليين مستشهدين بالشعر الجاهلي لإثبات ذلك وزعموا أنه لم يكن من شاعر إلا وعرض قصيدته على قريش لتقرر سلامتها اللغوية عنه وقد فندت الاكتشافات الأثرية وكتابات المؤرخين المعاصرة لتلك الفترات نظرية تغلب لسان قريش على العرب وأن كعبة مكة كانت محط رحال القبائل بل كتابات الإخباريين واللغويون القدماء تناقض نفسها لاعتمادهم على الروايات واللجوء للوضع والكذب لإثبات آرائهم فلغويو العرب القدماء أرادوا رفع شأن قبيلة النبي محمد ومع ذلك يناقضون أنفسهم حين يذكرون أن النبي محمد كان يخاطب وفود العرب على اختلاف شعوبهم وقبائلهم وعلى مافي لغاتهم من اختلاف منها ماورد عن علي بن أبي طالب عند قدوم وفد من قبائل نهد وتعجب علي من قدرة النبي على مخاطبة العرب بكل لهجاتهم ففي هذا تناقض صريح عن ما أورده الأخباريين انفسهم عن توحد لهجات العرب قبل الإسلام ودلالة أن اختلاف اللهجات لدرجة أنها قد لا تكون مفهومة كان امرا طبيعيا وشائعا بين العرب في تلك الأزمان أما الوارد بشأن دور سوق عكاظ في تهذيب اللغة فضعيف فعمر السوق لا يتجاوز الخمسة عشر سنة قبل الإسلام وحتى لو كان له الدور المزعوم في كتابات الإخباريين، فانه لا يعتبر دلالة قطعية على دور قريش قبل الإسلام في توحيد لهجات العرب فهم كانوا مثل غيرهم من قصاد ذلك السوق كذلك استفسار صحابة قرشيين عن ألفاظ وكلمات واردة في القرآن يضعف أنها لغة قريش ودأب المفسرون على الاستشهاد بلغات العرب وسؤالهم لمعرفة مااشكل عليهم فهمه من كلمات القرآن ونادراً مااستشهدوا بقريش فدور قريش المزعوم في تهذيب اللغة العربية وأن لغتهم كانت لغة القرآن فرضية تنخرها التناقضات من كل جانب في كتابات اللغوييين العرب القدماء أنفسهم بالإضافة للشواهد الأثرية التي لا تبتعد عن الإسلام كثيرا