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Arabic
العربية al-‘arabiyyah |
| al-‘Arabiyyah in written Arabic (Naskh script): |
 |
| Pronunciation: |
/alˌʕaraˈbijja/ |
| Spoken in: |
Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Western Sahara, and Yemen, it is also the liturgical language of Islam. |
| Total speakers: |
Estimates of native speakers between 186 and 422 million and as many as 246 million non-native speakers [1]. |
| Ranking: |
2 [2] to 6[3] (native speakers) |
| Language family: |
Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
West Semitic
Central Semitic
Arabic |
| Writing system: |
Arabic alphabet |
| Official status |
| Official language in: |
Official language of 25 countries, the third most after English and French[5]
|
| Regulated by: |
Egypt: Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo
Iraq: Iraqi Science Academy
Sudan: Academy of the Arabic Language in Khartum
Morocco: Academy of the Arabic Language in Rabat (the most active)
Jordan: Jordan Academy of Arabic
Libya: Academy of the Arabic Language in Jamahiriya
Tunisia: Beit Al-Hikma Foundation
Israel: Academy of the Arabic Language (first ever in a non-Arab country)[4]
|
| Language codes |
| ISO 639-1: |
ar |
| ISO 639-2: |
ara |
| ISO 639-3: |
ara – Arabic (generic)
see varieties of Arabic for the individual codes |
Distribution of Arabic as a majority language (dark green) and as a minority language (light green). |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
Arabic (الْعَرَبيّة al-ʿarabiyyah or just عَرَبيْ ʿarabī), in terms of the number of speakers, is the largest living member of the Semitic language family. Classified as Central Semitic, it is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic and has its roots in a Proto-Semitic common ancestor. In ISO 639-3, modern Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage with 27 sub-languages. These varieties are spoken throughout the Arab world, and Standard Arabic is widely studied and used throughout the Islamic world.
Modern Standard Arabic derives from Classical Arabic, the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group, attested epigraphically since the 6th century. It has been a literary language and the liturgical language of Islam since the 7th century.
Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, as Latin
has contributed to most European languages. It has also borrowed from
those languages, as well as Persian and Sanskrit from early contacts
with their affiliated regions. During the Middle Ages,
Arabic was 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. Arabic influence
is seen in mediterranean languages, particularly Spanish, Portuguese, Sicilian, and Maltese, due to both the proximity of European and Arab civilization and 700 years of caliphate government in the Iberian peninsula (see Al-Andalus).
Literary and Modern Standard Arabic
-
The term "Arabic" may refer to either literary Arabic ((al-)fuṣḥā الفصحى) or 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-luġatu l-ʿarabiyyatu 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 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 across North Africa and the Middle East,
which constitute the everyday spoken language. These sometimes differ
enough to be mutually incomprehensible. These dialects are typically
unwritten, 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,
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 local
dialect and their school-taught literary Arabic. When speaking with
someone from the same country, many speakers switch back and forth
between the two varieties of the language (code switching),
sometimes even within the same sentence. When educated Arabs of
different nationalities engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan
or Saudi speaking with a Lebanese), both switch into Literary Arabic
for the sake of communication.
Like other languages, literary Arabic continues to evolve. Classical Arabic (especially from the pre-Islamic to the Abbasid period, including Qur'anic Arabic) can be distinguished from Modern Standard Arabic
(MSA) 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
Lisān al-Arab.) However, many modern terms would have been mysterious
to a Classical author, whether taken from other languages (for example,
فيلم film) or coined from existing lexical resources (for example, هاتف hātif
"telephone" = "caller"). Structural influence from foreign languages or
from the colloquial varieties has also affected Modern Standard Arabic.
For example, MSA texts sometimes use the format "A, B, C, and D" when
listing things, whereas Classical Arabic prefers "A and B and C and D,"
and subject-initial sentences may be more common in MSA than in
Classical Arabic. For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is
generally treated separately in non-Arab sources.
Influence of Arabic on other languages
-
The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic
countries. Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for languages such as
Berber, Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Swahili, Urdu, Hindustani (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 (/kitāb/) has been borrowed in all the languages listed. In addition, Spanish and Portuguese both have large numbers of Arabic loan words, and English has quite a few, some directly but most through the medium of other Mediterranean languages. Other languages such as Maltese[6] and Kinubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammar rules.
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 Hindustani lekin "but".) Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms 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 transferred indirectly via other
languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic. For
example, most Arabic loanwords in Hindustani entered through Persian,
and many older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri. Some words in English and other European languages are derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish and Italian. Among them are commonly-used words like "sugar" (sukkar), "cotton" (quṭn) and "magazine" (maḫāzin). English words more recognizably of Arabic origin include "algebra", "
Classical
from 
