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Arabic is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. It is spoken throughout the Arab world and is widely known throughout the Islamic world. Arabic has been a literary language since at least the 6th century, and is the liturgical language of Islam.

The expression "Arabic" may refer either to literary Arabic or to the many spoken varieties of Arabic; Arabs consider literary Arabic as the standard language and tend to view everything else as mere dialects. Literary Arabic, al-luġatu 'l-ʿarabīyatu 'l-fuṣḥā (Literally: the pure Arabic language—اللغة العربية الفصحى) is both the language of present-day media across North Africa and the Middle East (from Morocco to Iraq) and the language of the Qur'an. (The expression media here includes most television and radio, and 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 dialects/languages 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 frequently written, although a certain amount of literature (particularly plays and poetry) exists in many of them, notably Egypt and Lebanon. They are often used to varying degrees in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and chat shows.

The term Modern Standard Arabic is sometimes used in the West to refer to the language of the media as opposed to the language of "Classical" Arabic literature; Arabs make no such distinction, and regard the two as identical.

It is sometimes difficult to translate Islamic concepts, and concepts specific to Arab culture, without using the original Arabic terminology. 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 too specific to translate in one phrase. While Arabic is strongly associated with Islam (and is the language of salah), it is also spoken by Arab Christians, Oriental Jews, and indeed Iraqi Mandaeans; and, of course, the vast majority of the world's Muslims do not actually speak it; they only know some fixed phrases of Arabic, as used in Islamic prayer.

Quite a few English words are ultimately derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, among them every-day vocabulary like sugar, cotton or magazine. More recognizable are words like algorithm, algebra, alchemy, alcohol, azimuth, nadir, and zenith (See List of English words of Arabic origin). The Maltese language is the only surviving European language to derive primarily from Arabic, though it contains a large number of Italian and English borrowings.

Dialects

See Varieties of Arabic for a fuller overview.

"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 Maghreb dialects and those of the Middle East, followed by that between sedentary dialects and the much more conservative Bedouin dialects. Maltese, though descended from Arabic, is considered a separate language. 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 Maghrebis (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 fiih, and North African kayen all mean "there is", and all come from Arabic (yakuun, fiihi, kaa'in respectively), but now sound very different.

The major groups are:

• Egyptian Arabic (Egypt) Considered the most widely understood and used "second dialect"
• Maghreb Arabic (Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and western Libyan)
• Hassaniiya (in Mauritania)
• Andalusi Arabic (extinct, but important role in literary history)
• Maltese
• Sudanese Arabic (with a dialect continuum into Chad)
• Levantine Arabic (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and western Jordanian)
• Iraqi Arabic
• Gulf Arabic (Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, and minorities on the other side)
• Hijazi Arabic
• Najdi Arabic
• Yemeni Arabic

A fuller list can be found at the main article (Varieties of Arabic.)

Grammar

See Arabic grammar

Phonology

Standard Arabic has only three vowels, in long and short variants, namely /i, a, u/. Naturally, considerable allophony occurs.

See Arabic alphabet for the IPA phonetic symbols that belong in this chart.

1. is for some speakers, i.e. a plosive. This is especially characteristic of the Egyptian dialect. In many parts of North Africa and in Lebanon, it is (ie not affricated).
2. becomes only in /ʔallaːh/, the name of God, i.e. Allah.

is used to indicate velarization and pharyngalization (=emphatic consonants).

In the dialects there are more phonemes, one occurs in the Maghreb as well in the written language mostly for names: .

Vowels and consonants can be (phonologically) short or long.

Alphabet

Main article: Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic script (which variety - Nabataean or Syriac - is a matter of scholarly dispute), 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 (Maghrebi) and 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

See Arabic calligraphy for a fuller overview.

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 that is often indecipherable. 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.

See also

• Arabist
• Arabic alphabet
• Arabic calligraphy
• Semitic languages
• Arabic literature
• altahmam -- One of the ten non-English words that were voted hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company

External links

• "Antonyms in Arabic are a strange phenomenon" by Tamim al-Barghouti
• "The Development of Classical Arabic" by Kees Versteegh
• Wellesley College Professor of Arabic on the forms and dialects of the language
• Multilingual Computing in Arabic with Windows, major word processors, web browsers, Arabic keyboards, and Arabic transliteration fonts

Web references and examples:

• 6 links
• E2 article
• Sprachprofi
• Introduction to Arabic grammatical states
• Arabic - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition.
• SIL's Ethnologue
• Arabic Phrases
• Dialects of Arabic

Arabic Sample Languages:

• Arabic
• Arabic Chadian Spoken
• Arabic Judeo Iraqi
• Arabic North Levantine Spoken
• "The Development of Classical Arabic" by Kees Versteegh

• Arabic language