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Arabic language

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Languages

   Arabic
   العربية al-‘arabiyyah
   al-‘Arabiyyah in written Arabic ( Kufic script):
   Pronunciation: IPA: /alˌʕa.raˈbij.ja/
   Spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon,
   Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria,
   Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Palestinian territories, Western Sahara
   ( SADR), Yemen by a majority, and in many other countries, such as
   Israel and Iran, as a minority language; it is also the liturgical
   language of Islam.
   Region: Arab world
   Total speakers: Approximately 270 million (206 million according to
   Ethnologue, native speakers of all dialects 1998 est.); 323 million
   (population of Arab countries, CIA World Factbook 2006 est.), excluding
   Arab minorities in other countries and bilingual speakers
   Ranking: 5
   Language family: Afro-Asiatic
     Semitic
      West Semitic
       Central Semitic
       Arabic
   Writing system: Arabic alphabet
   Official status
   Official language of: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt,
   Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania,
   Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Western Sahara ( SADR),
   Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen;

   A national language of: Mali, Senegal ( Hassaniya), Somalia.
   International organizations: United Nations, Arab League, Organization
   of Islamic Conference, African Union
   Regulated by: Egypt: Academy of the Arabic Language
   Language codes
   ISO 639-1: ar
   ISO 639-2: ara
   ISO/FDIS 639-3: ara — Arabic (generic)
   see varieties of Arabic for the individual codes
   Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA
   chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

   The Arabic language (اللغة العربية al-luġah al-ʿarabiyyah), or simply
   Arabic (عربي ʿarabī), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of
   the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central
   Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew, Amharic and Aramaic. It is
   spoken throughout the Arab world and is widely studied and known
   throughout the Islamic world. Classical Arabic has been a literary
   language since at least the 6th century and is the liturgical language
   of Islam. Because of its liturgical role, Arabic has lent many words to
   other Islamic languages, akin to the role Latin has in Western European
   languages. During the Middle Ages Arabic was also a major vehicle of
   culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy, with the
   result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words
   from it. The Arabic script is written from right to left.

Literary and Modern Standard Arabic

   The term "Arabic" may refer either to literary Arabic (fuṣḥā) or to the
   many localized varieties of Arabic commonly called "colloquial Arabic."
   Arabs consider literary Arabic as the standard language and tend to
   view everything else as mere dialects. Literary Arabic (اللغة العربية
   الفصحى translit: al-lughatu’l-‘arabiyyatu’l-fuṣḥā "the most eloquent
   Arabic language"), refers both to the language of present-day media
   across North Africa and the Middle East and to the language of the
   Qur'an. (The expression media here includes most television and radio,
   and practically all written matter, including all books, newspapers,
   magazines, documents of every kind, and reading primers for small
   children.) "Colloquial" or "dialectal" Arabic refers to the many
   national or regional varieties derived from Classical Arabic, spoken
   daily across North Africa and the Middle East, which constitute the
   everyday spoken language. These sometimes differ enough to be mutually
   incomprehensible. These dialects are not typically written, although a
   certain amount of literature (particularly plays and poetry) exists in
   many of them. They are often used to varying degrees in informal spoken
   media, such as soap operas and talk shows. Literary Arabic or classical
   Arabic is the official language of all Arab countries and is the only
   form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages.

   The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a
   prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia–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 local dialect and their
   school-taught literary Arabic (to an equal or lesser degree). This
   diglossic situation facilitates code switching in which a speaker
   switches back and forth unaware between the two varieties of the
   language, sometimes even within the same sentence. In instances in
   which Arabs of different nationalities engage in conversation only to
   find their dialects mutually unintelligible (e.g. a Moroccan speaking
   with a Lebanese), both should be able to code switch into Literary
   Arabic for the sake of communication.
   This image shows where Arabic is the only official language (green) and
   where Arabic is one of the official languages (blue).
   Enlarge
   This image shows where Arabic is the only official language (green) and
   where Arabic is one of the official languages (blue).

   Like other languages, literary Arabic continues to evolve and one can
   distinguish Classical Arabic (especially from the pre-Islamic to the
   Abbasid period, including Qur'anic Arabic) and Modern Standard Arabic
   as used today. Classical Arabic is considered normative; modern authors
   attempt (with varying degrees of success) to follow the syntactic and
   grammatical norms laid down by Classical grammarians (such as
   Sibawayh), and to use the vocabulary defined in Classical dictionaries
   (such as the Lisan al-Arab.) However, the exigencies of modernity have
   led to the adoption of numerous terms which would have been mysterious
   to a Classical author, whether taken from other languages (eg فيلم
   film) or coined from existing lexical resources (eg هاتف hātif
   "telephone" < "caller"). Structural influence from foreign languages or
   from the colloquials has also affected Modern Standard Arabic: for
   example, MSA texts sometimes use the format "X, X, X, and X" when
   listing things, whereas Classical Arabic prefers "X and X and X and X",
   and subject-initial sentences are significantly more common in MSA than
   in Classical Arabic. For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is
   generally treated separately in non-Arab sources.

The influence of Arabic on other languages

   In common with other European languages, many English words are derived
   from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish
   and Italian. Among them every-day vocabulary like "sugar" (sukkar),
   "cotton" (quṭn) or "magazine" ( maḫāzin). More recognizable are words
   like "algebra", "alcohol", "alchemy", " alkali" and " zenith" (see list
   of English words of Arabic origin).

   The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries
   dominated by Islam or Islamic power. Arabic is a major source of
   vocabulary for languages as diverse as Berber, Kurdish, Persian,
   Swahili, Urdu, Hindi (especially the spoken variety), Turkish, Malay,
   and Indonesian, as well as other languages in countries where these
   languages are spoken. For example the Arabic word for book /kita:b/ is
   used in all the languages listed, apart from Malay and Indonesian
   (where it specifically means "religious book").

   The terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber
   taẓallit "prayer" < salat), academic terms (like Uyghur mentiq
   "logic"), economic items (like English "sugar") to placeholders (like
   Spanish fulano "so and so") and everyday conjunctions (like Urdu lekin
   "but".) Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili,
   borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most religious terms used by Muslims
   around the world are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as salat
   'prayer' and imam 'prayer leader'. In languages not directly in contact
   with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often mediated by other
   languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic; for
   example, most Arabic loanwords in Urdu entered through Persian, and
   many older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri.

   Between the 9th and the 15th centuries Portuguese acquired about 1000
   words from Arabic by influence of Moorish Iberia. They are often
   recognizable by the initial Arabic article a(l)-, and include many
   common words such as aldeia "village" from التجارية aldaya, alface
   "lettuce" from الخس alkhass, armazém "warehouse" from المخزن almahazan,
   and azeite "olive oil" from زيت azzait. From Arabic came also the
   grammatically peculiar word oxalá "God willing".

Arabic and Islam

   The Qur'an is expressed in Arabic and traditionally Muslims deem it
   impossible to translate in a way that would adequately reflect its
   exact meaning—indeed, until recently, some schools of thought
   maintained that it should not be translated at all. A list of Islamic
   terms in Arabic covers those terms which are used by all Muslims,
   whatever their mother tongue. While Arabic is strongly associated with
   Islam (and is the language of salah, prayer), it is also spoken by Arab
   Christians, Mizrahi Jews, and smaller sects such as Iraqi Mandaeans.

   A majority of the world's Muslims do not speak Arabic, but only know
   some fixed phrases of the language, such as those used in Islamic
   prayer, without necessarily knowing their meaning. However, learning
   Arabic is an essential part of the curriculum for anyone attempting to
   become an Islamic religious scholar.

Dialects and descendants

   "Colloquial Arabic" is a collective term for the spoken languages or
   dialects of people throughout the Arab world, which, as mentioned,
   differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal
   division is between the North African dialects and those of the Middle
   East, followed by that between sedentary dialects and the much more
   conservative Bedouin dialects. Speakers of some of these dialects are
   unable to converse with speakers of another dialect of Arabic; in
   particular, while Middle Easterners can generally understand one
   another, they often have trouble understanding North Africans (although
   the converse is not true, due to the popularity of Middle
   Eastern—especially Egyptian—films and other media).

   One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the
   languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided
   a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced
   pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor
   for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change
   of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine
   fīh, and North African kayən all mean "there is", and all come from
   classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound
   very different.

   The major groups are:
     * Egyptian Arabic مصري : Spoken by about 46 million people in Egypt
       and perhaps the most widely understood variety, thanks to the
       popularity of Egyptian-made films and TV shows
     * Maghreb Arabic مغربي ( Algerian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Tunisian
       Arabic, Maltese and western Libyan) The Moroccan and Algerian
       dialects are each spoken by about 20 million people.
     * Levantine Arabic شامي (Western Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian,
       western Jordanian and Cypriot Maronite Arabic)
     * Iraqi Arabic عراقي (and Khuzestani Arabic) - with significant
       differences between the more Arabian-like gilit-dialects of the
       south and the more conservative qeltu-dialects of the northern
       cities
     * East Arabian Arabic (Eastern Saudi Arabia, Western Iraq, Eastern
       Syrian , Jordanian and parts of Oman)
     * Gulf Arabic or Khaleeji (Arabic script: خليجي) (Bahrain, Saudi
       Eastern Province, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, and Oman)

   Other varieties include:
     * Ḥassānīya (in Mauritania and western Sahara)
     * Andalusi Arabic (extinct, but important role in literary history)
     * Sudanese Arabic (with a dialect continuum into Chad)
     * Hijazi Arabic حجازي (west coast of Saudi Arabia, Northern Saudi
       Arabia, eastern Jordan, Western Iraq)
     * Najdi Arabic نجدي (Najd region of central Saudi Arabia)
     * Yemeni Arabic يمني (Yemen to southern Saudi Arabia)

   Maltese, which is spoken on the Mediterranean island of Malta, is the
   only one to have established itself as a fully separate language, with
   independent literary norms. It falls within the Maghreb Arabic group,
   although numerous sound changes have rendered it phonologically
   different from its nearest relative, Tunisian Arabic. It also contains
   a number of Italian and English borrowings.

Sounds

   The phonemes below reflect the pronunciation of Standard Arabic.

Vowels

   Arabic has three vowels, with their long forms, plus two diphthongs: a
   [ɛ̈] (open e as in English bed, but centralised), i [ɪ], u [ʊ]; ā [æː],
   ī [iː], ū [uː]; ai (ay) [ɛ̈ɪ], au (aw) [ɛ̈ʊ]. Allophonically, after
   velarized consonants (see following), the vowel a is pronounced [ɑ], ā
   as [ɑː] (thus also after r), ai as [ɑɪ] and au as [ɑʊ].

Consonants

   CAPTION: Standard Arabic consonant phonemes

     Bilabial Inter-dental Dental (incl. alveolar) Post-
   alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyn-
   geal Glottal
    plain  emphatic
   Plosive voiceless     t̪ t̪ˁ     k q   ʔ
   voiced b   d̪ d̪ˁ dʒ¹
   Fricative voiceless f θ s sˁ ʃ   x   ħ h
   voiced   ð z ðˁ     ɣ   ʕ
   Nasal m   n
   Lateral     l ²
   Trill     r
   Approximant w         j

   See Arabic alphabet for explanations on the IPA phonetic symbols found
   in this chart.
    1. [dʒ] is pronounced as [ɡ] by some speakers. This is especially
       characteristic of the Egyptian and southern Yemeni dialects. In
       many parts of North Africa and in the Levant, it is pronounced as
       [ʒ].
    2. /l/ is pronounced [lˁ] only in /ʔalːɑːh/, the name of God, i.e.
       Allah, when the word follows a, ā, u or ū (after i or ī it is
       unvelarised: bismi l-lāh /bɪsmɪlːæːh/).
    3. /ʕ/ is usually a phonetic approximant.
    4. In many varieties, /ħ, ʕ/ are actually epiglottal [ʜ, ʢ] (despite
       what is reported in many earlier works).

   The consonants traditionally termed "emphatic" /tˁ, dˁ, sˁ, ðˁ/ are
   either velarized [tˠ, dˠ, sˠ, ðˠ] or pharyngealised [tˁ, dˁ, sˁ, ðˁ].
   In some transcription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing the
   letter e.g. /dˁ/ is written ‹D›; in others the letter is underlined or
   has a dot below it e.g. ‹ḍ›.

   Vowels and consonants can be (phonologically) short or long. Long
   (geminate) consonants are normally written doubled in Latin
   transcription (i.e. bb, dd, etc.), reflecting the presence of the
   Arabic diacritic mark shaddah, which marks lengthened consonants. Such
   consonants are held twice as long as short consonants. This consonant
   lengthening is phonemically contrastive: e.g. qabala "he received" and
   qabbala "he kissed".

Syllable structure

   Arabic has two kinds of syllables: open syllables (CV) and (CVV) - and
   closed syllables (CVC), (CVVC) and (CVCC). Every syllable begins with a
   consonant - or else a consonant is borrowed from a previous word
   through elision – especially in the case of the definite article THE,
   al (used when starting an utterance) or _l (when following a word),
   e.g. baytu –l mudiir “house (of) the director”, which becomes
   bay-tul-mu-diir when divided syllabically. By itself, "the director"
   would be pronounced /al mudiːr/.

Stress

   Although word stress is not phonemically contrastive in Standard
   Arabic, it does bear a strong relationship to vowel length and syllable
   shape, and correct word stress aids intelligibility. In general,
   "heavy" syllables attract stress (i.e. syllables of longer duration - a
   closed syllable or a syllable with a long vowel). In a word with a
   syllable with one long vowel, the long vowel attracts the stress (e.g.
   ki-'taab and ‘kaa-tib). In a word with two long vowels, the second long
   vowel attracts stress (e.g.ma-kaa-'tiib). In a word with a "heavy"
   syllable where two consonants occur together or the same consonant is
   doubled, the (last) heavy syllable attracts stress (e.g. ya-ma-’niyy,
   ka-'tabt, ka-‘tab-na, ma-‘jal-lah, ‘mad-ra-sah, yur-‘sil-na). This last
   rule trumps the first two: ja-zaa-ʔi-‘riyy. Otherwise, word stress
   typically falls on the first syllable: ‘ya-man, ‘ka-ta-bat, etc. The
   Cairo ( Egyptian Arabic) dialect, however, has some idiosyncrasies in
   that a heavy syllable may not carry stress more than two syllables from
   the end of a word, so that mad-‘ra-sah carries the stress on the
   second-to-last syllable, as does qaa-‘hi-rah.

Dialectal variations

   In some dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemes than those listed
   in the chart above. For example, non-Arabic [v] is used in the Maghreb
   dialects as well in the written language mostly for foreign names.
   Semitic [p] became [f] extremely early on in Arabic before it was
   written down; a few modern Arabic dialects, such as Iraqi (influenced
   by Persian) distinguish between [p] and [b].

   Interdental fricatives ([θ] and [ð]) are rendered as stops [t] and [d]
   in some dialects (such as Levantine, Egyptian, and much of the
   Maghreb); some of these dialects render them as [s] and [z] in
   "learned" words from the Standard language. Early in the expansion of
   Arabic, the separate emphatic phonemes [dˁ] and [ðˁ] coallesced into a
   single phoneme, becoming one or the other. Predictably, dialects
   without interdental fricatives use [dˁ] exclusively, while those with
   such fricatives use [ðˁ]. Again, in "learned" words from the Standard
   language, [ðˁ] is rendered as [zˁ] (in the Middle East) or [dˁ] (in
   North Africa) in dialects without interdental fricatives.

   Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects is how they render
   Standard [q] (a voiceless uvular stop). It retains its original
   pronunciation in widely scattered regions such as Yemen, Morocco, and
   urban areas of the Maghreb. But it is rendered as a voiced velar stop
   [ɡ] in Gulf Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Upper Egypt, much of the Maghreb, and
   less urban parts of the Levant (e.g. Jordan); as a voiced uvular
   constrictive [ʁ] in Sudanese Arabic; and as a glottal stop [ʔ] in
   several prestige dialects, such as those spoken in Cairo, Beirut and
   Damascus. Additionally, confessional differences may sometimes be
   distinguished: in the case of [q], some traditionally Christian
   villages in rural areas of the Levant render the sound as [k], as do
   Shia Bahrainis. Thus, Arabs instantly give away their geographical (and
   class) origin by their pronunciation of a word such as qamar "moon":
   [qamar], [ɡamar], [ʁamar], [ʔamar] or [kamar].

Grammar

   Arabic has three grammatical cases roughly corresponding to:
   nominative, genitive and accusative, and three numbers: singular, dual
   and plural. Arabic has two genders, expressed by pronominal, verbal and
   adjectival agreement. Numerals may agree with the same or different
   gender depending on the number's amount.

   As in many other Semitic languages, Arabic verb formation is based on a
   (usually) triconsonantal root, which is not a word in itself but
   contains the semantic core. The consonants k-t-b, for example, indicate
   'write', q-r-ʾ indicate 'read', ʾ-k-l indicate 'eat' etc.; Words are
   formed by supplying the root with a vowel structure and with affixes.
   Traditionally, Arabic grammarians have used the root f-ʿ-l 'do' as a
   template to discuss word formation. The personal forms a verb can take
   correspond to the forms of the pronouns, except that in the 3rd person
   dual, gender is differentiated, yielding paradigms of 13 forms.

   Arabic has two verbal voices, active and passive. The passive voice is
   expressed by a change in vocalization and is normally not expressed in
   unvocalized writing.

Writing system

   The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic script ( Nabataean), to
   which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic
   script to Greek script. Traditionally, there were several differences
   between the Western (North African) and Middle Eastern version of the
   alphabet—in particular, the fa and qaf had a dot underneath and a
   single dot above respectively in the Maghreb, and the order of the
   letters was slightly different (at least when they were used as
   numerals). However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandoned except
   for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb itself, and remains in use
   mainly in the Quranic schools ( zaouias) of West Africa. Arabic, like
   other Semitic languages, is written from right to left.

Calligraphy

   After the definitive fixing of the Arabic script around 786, by Khalil
   ibn Ahmad al Farahidi, many styles were developed, both for the writing
   down of the Qur'an and other books, and for inscriptions on monuments
   as decoration.

   Arabic calligraphy has not fallen out of use as in the Western world,
   and is still considered by Arabs as a major art form; calligraphers are
   held in great esteem. Being cursive by nature, unlike the Latin
   alphabet, Arabic script is used to write down a verse of the Qur'an, a
   Hadith, or simply a proverb, in a spectacular composition. The
   composition is often abstract, but sometimes the writing is shaped into
   an actual form such as that of an animal. Two of the current masters of
   the genre are Hassan Massoudy and Khaled Al Saa’i.

Transliteration

   There are a number of different standards of Arabic transliteration:
   methods of accurately and efficiently representing Arabic with the
   Latin alphabet. The more scientific standards allow the reader to
   recreate the exact word using the Arabic alphabet. However, these
   systems are heavily reliant on diacritical marks such as "š" for the
   English sh sound. At first sight, this may be difficult to recognize.
   Less scientific systems often use digraphs (like sh and kh), which are
   usually more simple to read, but sacrifice the definiteness of the
   scientific systems. In some cases, the sh or kh sounds can be
   represented by italicizing or underlining them -- that way, they can be
   distinguished from separate s and h sounds or k and h sounds,
   respectively. (Compare gashouse to gash.)

   The system used by the US military, Standard Arabic Technical
   Transliteration System or SATTS, solves some of these issues, as well
   as the need for special characters by representing each Arabic letter
   with a unique symbol in the ASCII range to provide a one-to-one mapping
   from Arabic to ASCII and back. This system, while facilitating typing
   on English keyboards, presents its own ambiguities and disadvantages.

   During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s,
   Western-invented text communication technologies have become prevalent
   in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web,
   email, Bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone
   text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability
   to communicate using the Latin alphabet only, and some of them still do
   not have the Arabic alphabet as an optional feature. As a result,
   Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by
   transliterating the Arabic text using the Latin script, sometime known
   as IM Arabic.

   To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accurately represented
   using the Latin script, numerals and other characters were
   appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" may be used to represent the
   Arabic letter "ع", ayn. There is no universal name for this type of
   transliteration, but some have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other
   systems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capitalization
   to represent the "emphatic" counterparts of certain consonants. For
   instance, using capitalization, the letter "د", or daal, may be
   represented by d. Its emphatic counterpart, "ض", may be written as D.
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