Arabic

This article is about the general language or languagegroup. For the literary standard, see Modern StandardArabic. For the various vernaculars, see varieties ofArabic. For the small family also encompassing theNorth Arabian languages, see Arabic languages.

Arabic (/ˈærəbɪk/;[4] Arabic: ية ب , العر al-ʻarabiyyah[alʕaraˈbijja] or Arabic: ,عربى ʻarabī عربي [ˈʕarabiː]) isthe Classical Arabic language of the 6th century and itsmodern descendants excluding Maltese. Arabic is spo-ken in a wide arc stretching across Western Asia, NorthAfrica, and the Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to theSemitic branch of the Afroasiatic family.The literary language, called Modern Standard Arabic orLiterary Arabic, is the only official form of Arabic. Itis used in most written documents as well as in formalspoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts.Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related toAramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. StandardArabic is distinct from and more conservative than all ofthe spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state knownas diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal func-tions.Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligi-ble,[5] both written and orally, and the varieties as a wholeconstitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that onpurely linguistic grounds they would likely be consideredto constitute more than one language, but are commonlygrouped together as a single language for political or re-ligious reasons (see below). If considered multiple lan-guages, it is unclear how many languages there would be,as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clearboundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it isperhaps spoken by as many as 422 million speakers (na-tive and non-native) in the Arab world,[6] making it oneof the six most-spoken languages in the world. If consid-ered separate languages, the most-spoken variety wouldmost likely be Egyptian Arabic[7] with 89 million nativespeakers[8]—still greater than any other Afroasiatic lan-guage. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 billionMuslims.[9][10] It is one of six official languages of theUnited Nations.[11]

The modern written language (Modern Standard Arabic)is derived from the language of the Quran (known asClassical Arabic or Quranic Arabic). It is widely taught inschools and universities, and is used to varying degrees inworkplaces, government, and the media. The two formalvarieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which

is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical lan-guage of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely fol-lows the grammatical standards of Quranic Arabic anduses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has dis-carded some grammatical constructions and vocabularythat no longer have any counterpart in the spoken vari-eties, and has adopted certain new constructions and vo-cabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vo-cabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in thepost-Quranic era, especially in modern times.Arabic is the only surviving member of the Ancient NorthArabian dialect group attested in pre-Islamic Arabic in-scriptions dating back to the 4th century.[12] Arabic iswritten with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad scriptand is written from right-to-left although the spoken vari-eties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left-to-right with no standardized forms.Arabic has influenced many languages around the globethroughout its history. Some of the most influencedlanguages are Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, Somali, Swahili,Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Indonesian,Tigrinya, Pashto, Punjabi, Tagalog, Sindhi and Hausa.During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a majorvehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, math-ematics and philosophy. As a result, many European lan-guages have also borrowed many words from it. Manywords of Arabic origin are also found in ancient languageslike Latin and Greek. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabu-lary, is seen in Romance languages, particularly Spanish,Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Sicilian, owing to boththe proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arabcivilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and lan-guage in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic asal-Andalus.Arabic has also borrowed words from many languages,including Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Persian and Syriacin early centuries, Kurdish in medieval times and con-temporary European languages in modern times, mostlyEnglish and French.

1 History

1.1 Pre-Islamic Arabic and Arabic lan-guage

Many Semitic languages were spoken in Arabia dur-ing antiquity. The first of these languages to share the

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2 1 HISTORY

isoglosses of Arabic dialects are today labelled Safaiticand Hismaic.[13] These were natively written in SouthArabian scripts, although some transcriptions into Greekscript survive in graffiti.[14] Some Safaitic writing wasetched into the walls of Pompeii, and in Arabia arerecorded Imperial Roman names like Claudius and Titus- implying a first-century CE date, at least for these.[15]

The earliest inscriptions of Arabic in the (northern) Ara-bic script date CE 512-568.[16] The Aramaic alphabetwas introduced to the Arab people through traders fromthe Mediterranean Empire, and the Arab people beganusing the script during the Christian period in the MiddleEast.[16] From the Aramaic, the script continued to de-velop through two separate kingdoms in the region: TheNabataean and the Palmyran. The Arabic script that iswidely used today developed from the Nabataean King-dom’s writing script.[17] While the Nabataean alphabetand writing system met a great deal of the needs, it didnot provide letters or symbols for /t/, /h/, /g/, /z/ and /d/,which were not represented by Aramaic script.[17] TheAramaic writing system also only provided fifteen let-ter shapes for 28 consonants.[17] In order to differenti-ate between consonants that had the same shape, a sys-tem of placing dots around the letters developed. It tookover 100 years in order to codify these dots around let-ters (Bateson, 55). Evidence of the development of cod-ified dots is recorded on numerous different codes andtombstones.[17] In the 8th century, the dots were finallycodified enough that all texts used dots with the excep-tion of purely decorative writings that were not meant tobe read.[17] In addition to the issue of codifying the dotsabove letters, there was also the issue of how to repre-sent vowel sounds in Arabic script, a language made upof an all-consonants script (an abjad). During the 7th cen-tury a dotting system also developed to mark vowels.[18]

Red dots were used to mark vowels while black lineswere used to mark consonants. Eventually smaller ver-sions of the letters representing short vowels were placedabove consonants in order to indicate that a vowel waspresent.[18]

1.2 Pre-Islamic poetry and early Islamicliterature

The oral poetic tradition had been alive and well for cen-turies in the Arabian Peninsula before it was eventuallyrecorded. Arab poets blossomed in the 6th century ADbut their work was not recorded or written down until the8th or 9th century AD.[19] There were linguistic oddi-ties in regards to spelling found throughout the poems.The poems had been recorded, but there were differentspelling and pronunciation techniques used by differentauthors when trying to record a poem that had previ-ously only been recited.[20] These differences reflectedhow different dialects had a large impact on written Ara-bic and how texts were recorded. To solve this problem,grammarians and scholars asked Bedouins to recite po-

ems in order to hear how they pronounced the poem astheir voices were believed to be pure. Consensus was thenused to determine the correct pronunciation of a word sothat the word could also be spelt correctly.[21] Eventually,scholars and grammarians developed a system for stan-dardizing Classical Arabic so that texts and words wouldbe written in a way that the majority of the populationcould understand.[21] Muslims believe that the Quran wasrevealed to Muhammad in 632 CE.[22][23] Both a formaland informal version of Arabic existed during the Pre-Islamic Period. The informal dialect was used on coinand tomb inscriptions while the formal variety of Ara-bic was used on letters and contracts. However, contractswere sometimes written in a mixture of Formal and In-formal Arabic, reflecting the large influence dialects hadon the written language in Pre-Islamic Arabia.[24]

1.3 The Islamic conquests and Arabic lan-guage

The GallandManuscript of One Thousand and One Nights, 14thcentury

The Islamic conquests introduced Arabic to new non-Arab regions, such as North Africa, Spain and Persia. Asa result, Osmanli, Kurdish, Persian, Urdu, Malay, Berber,Swahili and Hausa all adopted some Arabic alphabet intotheir writing systems and Arabic adopted 12 letters fromothers (for example, Persian P CH Zh and Ga). Thesesounds entered Arabic through loanwords.[25] In the 8thcentury Islamic scholars in Lower Iraq feared the influ-ence that the recently conquered non-Arabs would haveon the language and scholars became more conservativeand a more standardized Classical Arabic writing systemdeveloped.[22] However, non-Arabs had a huge influenceon the religious writings at the time since many of theintellectual elite were non-Arab.[22]

1.4 Modern era

During the colonial era, the European powers occupy-ing Arab nations actively encouraged the public spreadand use of colloquial Arabic dialects and suppressed the

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use and teaching of classical Arabic. This caused greatdiversity in dialects throughout the near east, northernAfrica, and even eastern European dialects of Arabic likeCzech Arabic and Slavo-Anderski Arabic.[26] After wip-ing out a third of the Algerian population between 1830and 1872 for example, the French then closed all Qur'anicschools and banned public usage of Arabic; Arabic wasactually declared a foreign language in 1938 and whileabout half the population was literate in Arabic at the be-ginning of French colonization, 90% of the native popu-lation was illiterate in both Arabic and French by its endin the 1960s.[27]

2 Classical, Modern Standard andspoken Arabic

See also: List of Arabic dictionaries

Arabic usually designates one of three main variants:Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and colloquialor dialectal Arabic. Classical Arabic is the languagefound in the Quran, used from the period of Pre-IslamicArabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Theoretically,Classical Arabic is considered normative, according tothe syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by clas-sical grammarians (such as Sibawayh) and the vocabu-lary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisānal-ʻArab). In practice, however, modern authors almostnever write in pure Classical Arabic, instead using aliterary language with its own grammatical norms and vo-cabulary, commonly known as Modern Standard Arabic(MSA).MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabicpublications, spoken by some of the Arabic media acrossNorth Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East,and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. “Lit-erary Arabic” and “Standard Arabic” فصحى) fuṣḥá) areless strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Stan-dard 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 haveno counterpart in any modern dialect (e.g., theenergetic mood) are almost never used in ModernStandard Arabic.

• No modern spoken variety of Arabic has case dis-tinctions. As a result, MSA is generally composedwithout case distinctions in mind, and the propercases are added after the fact, when necessary. Be-cause most case endings are noted using final shortvowels, which are normally left unwritten in the Ara-bic script, it is unnecessary to determine the propercase of most words. The practical result of this is

that MSA, like English and Standard Chinese, iswritten in a strongly determined word order and al-ternative orders that were used in CA for emphasisare rare. In addition, because of the lack of casemarking in the spoken varieties, most speakers can-not consistently use the correct endings in extempo-raneous speech. As a result, spoken MSA tends todrop or regularize the endings except when readingfrom a prepared text.

• The numeral system in CA is complex and heavilytied in with the case system. This system is neverused in MSA, even in the most formal of circum-stances; instead, a significantly simplified system isused, approximating the system of the conservativespoken varieties.

MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'togo') that is not present in the spoken varieties. In addition,MSA has borrowed or coined a large number of terms forconcepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSAcontinues to evolve.[28] Some words have been borrowedfrom other languages—notice that transliteration mainlyindicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فيلم fīlm'film' or ديموقراطية dīmūqrāṭiyyah 'democracy').However, the current preference is to avoid direct bor-rowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g.,فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a companyor organization; جناح jināḥ 'wing', is also used for thewing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coinnew words using forms within existing roots استماتة) istimā-tah 'apoptosis', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put intothe Xth form, or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمعjamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; ية جمهور jumhūriyyah 'republic',based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendencywas to repurpose older words; that 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 nationalor regional varieties which constitute the everyday spokenlanguage. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants;geographically distant varieties usually differ enough tobe mutually unintelligible, and some linguists considerthem distinct languages.[29] The varieties are typically un-written. They are often used in informal spoken media,such as soap operas and talk shows,[30] as well as occa-sionally in certain forms of written media such as poetryand printed advertising.The only variety of modern Arabic to have acquiredofficial language status is Maltese, which is spoken in(predominately Roman Catholic) Malta and written withthe Latin script. It is descended from Classical Ara-bic through Siculo-Arabic, but is not mutually intelligiblewith any other variety of Arabic. Most linguists list it as aseparate language rather than as a dialect of Arabic. His-torically, Algerian Arabic was taught in French Algeriaunder the name darija.

4 4 INFLUENCE OF ARABIC ON OTHER LANGUAGES

Flag of the Arab League, used in some cases for the Arabic lan-guage.

Flag used in some cases for the Arabic language

Even during Muhammad’s lifetime, there were dialectsof spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the dialect ofMecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it was inthis dialect that the Quran was written down. However,the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were consid-ered the most prestigious at the time, so the language ofthe Quran was ultimately converted to follow the easternphonology. It is this phonology that underlies the modernpronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phonological dif-ferences between these two dialects account for some ofthe complexities of Arabic writing, most notably the writ-ing of the glottal stop or hamzah (which was preserved inthe eastern dialects but lost in western speech) and the useof alif maqṣūrah (representing a sound preserved in thewestern dialects but merged with ā in eastern speech).

3 Language and dialect

The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern timesprovides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenonof diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate vari-eties of the same language, usually in different social sit-uations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any na-tionality can be assumed to speak both their school-taughtStandard Arabic as well as their native, mutually unintel-ligible “dialects";[31][32][33][34][35] these dialects linguisti-

cally constitute separate languages which may have di-alects of their own.[36] When educated Arabs of differentdialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccanspeaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switchback and forth between the dialectal and standard vari-eties of the language, sometimes even within the samesentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiar-ity with other dialects via music or film.The issue of whether Arabic is one language or manylanguages is politically charged, similar to the issue withthe varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian andCroatian, Scots and English, etc. Similar to how speak-ers of Hindi and Urdu will claim they cannot understandeach other even when they can, speakers of the varietiesof Arabic will claim they can all understand each othereven when they cannot.[37] The issue of diglossia betweenspoken and written language is a significant complicatingfactor: A single written form, significantly different fromany of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a num-ber of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For politicalreasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a singlelanguage, despite significant issues of mutual incompre-hensibility among differing spoken versions.[38]

From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the var-ious spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each othercollectively about as much as the Romance languages.[39]

This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The pe-riod of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Ro-mance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible topeople from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative va-riety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incompre-hensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French isincomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but rela-tively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spo-ken varieties may linguistically be considered separatelanguages.

4 Influence of Arabic on other lan-guages

Main article: Influence of Arabic on other languagesSee also: List of Arabic loanwords in English

The influence of Arabic has been most importantin Islamic countries, because it is the language ofthe Islamic sacred book, Quran. Arabic is alsoan important source of vocabulary for languagessuch as Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Catalan,Chechen, Dagestani, English, French, German, Gujarati,Hausa, Hindustani, Italian, Indonesian, Kazakh, Kurdish,Kutchi, Malay, Malayalam, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese,Punjabi, Rohingya, Saraiki, Sicilian, Sindhi, Somali,Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek andWolof, as well as other languages in countries where these

5

languages are spoken.In addition, English has many Arabic loanwords, somedirectly but most through the medium of other Mediter-ranean languages. Examples of such words include admi-ral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline,almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher,coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah,magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff and manyother words. Other languages such as Maltese[40] andKinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merelyborrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.Terms borrowed range from religious terminology (likeBerber taẓallit 'prayer' < salat) صلاة) ṣalāh), academicterms (like Uyghur mentiq 'logic'), economic items (likeEnglish coffee) to placeholders (like Spanish fulano 'so-and-so') and everyday terms (like Hindustani lekin 'but',or Spanish taza meaning 'cup'and hasta meaning 'until'),and expressions (like Catalan a betzef 'galore, in quan-tity'). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along withSwahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Is-lamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic,such as صلاة salat 'prayer' and إمام imam 'prayer leader.'In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world,Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly viaother languages rather than being transferred directlyfrom Arabic. For example, most Arabic loanwords inHindustani entered through Persian though Persian is anIndo-Iranian language. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausawere borrowed from Kanuri.Some words in English and other European languagesare derived from Arabic, often through other Europeanlanguages, especially Spanish and Italian. Among themare commonly used words like "coffee" قهوة) qahwah),"cotton" قطن) quṭn) and “magazine” مخازن) makhāzin).English words more recognizably of Arabic origin in-clude "algebra", "alcohol", "alchemy", "alkali", "zenith,”and "nadir".Arabic words also made their way into several WestAfrican languages as Islam spread across the Sahara.Variants of Arabic words such as كتاب kitāb (book) havespread to the languages of African groups who had nodirect contact with Arab traders.[41]

As, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a po-sition similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of theArabic concepts in the field of science, philosophy, com-merce etc. were coined from Arabic roots by non-nativeArabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian trans-lators, and then found their way into other languages.This process of using Arabic roots, especially in Kurdishand Persian, to translate foreign concepts continued rightuntil the 18th and 19th century, when swaths of Arab-inhabited lands were under Ottoman rule.

5 Influence of other languages onArabic

The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are from the related (Semitic) languagesAramaic,[42] which used to be the principal, internationallanguage of communication throughout the ancient Nearand Middle East, Ethiopic, and to a lesser degree Hebrew(mainly religious concepts). In addition, many cultural,religious and political terms have entered Arabic fromIranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and(Classical) Persian,[43] and Hellenistic Greek (kīmiyāʼ hasas origin the Greek khymia, meaning in that languagethe melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, Histoire de laMédecine de l'Antiquité au XXe siècle, Tallandier, 2008,p. 251), alembic (distiller) from ambix (cup), almanac(climate) from almenichiakon (calendar). (For the ori-gin of the last three borrowed words, see Alfred-Louisde Prémare, Foundations of Islam, Seuil, L'Univers His-torique, 2002.) Some Arabic borrowings from Semiticor Persian languages are, as presented in De Prémare’sabove-cited book:

• madīnah/medina ,مدينة) city or city square), aword of Aramaic or Hebrew origin;

• jazīrah ,(جزيرة) as in the well-known form “Al-Jazeera,” means “island” and has its origin in theSyriac gazīra.

• lāzaward (لازورد) is taken from Persian lājvard, thename of a blue stone, lapis lazuli. This word wasborrowed in several European languages to mean(light) blue - azure in English, azur in French andazul in Spanish.

6 Arabic alphabet and nationalism

There have been many instances of national movementsto convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanizethe language.

6.1 Lebanon

The Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the changefrom Arabic script to Latin script in 1922. The majorhead of this movement was Louis Massignon, a FrenchOrientalist, who brought his concern before the ArabicLanguage Academy in Damacus in 1928. Massignon’sattempt at Romanization failed as the Academy and pop-ulation viewed the proposal as an attempt from the West-ern world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, amember of the Academy, mentioned that the movementto Romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominateLebanon.[44][45]

6 8 EXTERNAL HISTORY

6.2 Egypt

After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians werelooking for a way to reclaim and re-emphasize Egyp-tian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed foran Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which theformal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be com-bined into one language and the Latin alphabet wouldbe used.[44][45] There was also the idea of finding a wayto use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, butthis was seen as too complicated to use.[44][45] A scholar,Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin al-phabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egyptto have a closer relationship with the West. He also be-lieved that Latin script was key to the success of Egyptas it would allow for more advances in science and tech-nology. This change in script, he believed, would solvethe problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack ofwritten vowels and difficulties writing foreign words thatmade it difficult for non-native speakers to learn.[44][45]

Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyp-tian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported thepush for Romanization.[44][46] The idea that Romaniza-tion was necessary for modernization and growth in Egyptcontinued with Abd Al Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was thechairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee forthe Arabic Language Academy of Cairo.[44][46] However,this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cul-tural tie to the Arabic alphabet.[44][46] In particular, theolder Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic al-phabet had strong connections to Arab values and his-tory, which is easy to believe due to the long history ofthe Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189).

7 Arabic and Islam

Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an. Arabicis closely associated with the religion of Islam becausethe Qur'an is written in the language, but it is neverthe-less also spoken by Arab Christians, Mizrahi Jews andIraqi Mandaeans. Most of the world’s Muslims do notspeak Arabic as their native language, but many can readthe Quranic script and recite the Quran. Among non-Arab Muslims, translations of the Quran are most oftenaccompanied by the original text.Some Muslims present a monogenesis of languages andclaim that the Arabic language was the language revealedby God for the benefit of mankind and the original lan-guage as a prototype system of symbolic communication,based upon its system of triconsonantal roots, spoken byman from which all other languages were derived, havingfirst been corrupted.[47][48] Judaism has a similar accountwith the Tower of Babel.

8 External history

See also: Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptionsAmong the earliest surviving texts in Ancient North Ara-

Soqotri

MehriShehri

Tigre

Tigrinya

Ge'ez

Dahlak

AmharicGafat

Argobba

Silt'e

Harari

Soddo

Chaha

Sabaean

Minaean

Qahtanian Hadhramautic

Arabic

Ancient North Arabic

Akkadian

EblaiteAramaic

AmoriteUgaritic

Nabatean

Ammonite

MoabiteEdomite

Hebrew

PhoenicianMaltese

Punic

Eastern

Southern

Living language

Extinct

Philistine

ZayInor

Hobyót

Bathari

Harsusi

Northwest

Eteocypriot

Arabic

Aramaic

Eastern South

Western SouthOld South

EthiopianNorthSouth

?

Canaanite

? ? Origin uncertain

Central

?

>150m

20m-100m5m-20m

1m-5m 0.5m-1m0.1m-0.5m <100,000

Native Speakers

Arabic languages (brown) within Semitic languages.

bian, a group of languages closely related to but not adirect predecessor of Arabic, are the Hasaean inscrip-tions of in eastern Arabia, from about the 4th centuryBC, written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor inits Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the epigraphicSouth Arabian musnad. More numerous are the 6th-century BC Lihyanite texts from southeastern Arabia andthe Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and theSinai, and not actually connected with Thamud.Classical Arabic co-existed with the Old North Arabianlanguages. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus (HistoriesI,131; III,8) quotes the epithet of a goddess in its pre-classical Arabic form as Alilat (Ἀλιλάτ, i. e.,ʼal-ʼilat),which means “the goddess”.[49] Apart from this iso-lated theonym, Arabic is first attested in an inscrip-tion in Qaryat al-Fāw (formerly Qaryat Dhat Kahil, nearSulayyil, Saudi Arabia) in the 1st century BC.[50][51] Latercome the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions beginning inthe 1st century AD (in the South Arabian script) and themany Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean in-scriptions (which inscriptions are, however, Aramaic).The oldest inscription in Classical Arabic known in 1985goes back to 328 AD and is known as the Namārah in-scription, written in the Nabataean alphabet and namedafter the place where it was found in southern Syriain April 1901.[52] By the fourth century AD, the Arabkingdoms of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq and the

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Ghassanids in southern Syria appeared. The KinditeKingdom emerged in Central Arabia. Their courts wereresponsible for some notable examples of pre-IslamicArabic poetry and for some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic script.[53]

9 Internal history

Bilingual traffic sign in Qatar.

The Semitic languages changed a great deal betweenProto-Semitic and the establishment of the CentralSemitic languages, particularly in terms of grammar. In-novations of the Central Semitic languages—all main-tained in Classical Arabic—include

• The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative for-mation into a past tense.

• The conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.

• The elimination of other prefix-conjugatedmood/aspect forms (e.g., a present tense formedby doubling the middle root, a perfect formedby infixing a /t/ after the first root consonant,probably a jussive formed by a stress shift) in favorof new moods formed by endings attached to theprefix-conjugation forms (e.g., -u for indicative, -afor subjunctive, no ending for jussive, -an or -annafor energetic).

• The development of an internal passive.

9.1 Phonological history

Of the 29 Proto-Semitic consonants, only one has beenlost: */ʒ/, which merged with /ʃ/.[54] But the consonant*/ʒ/ is still found in many colloquial Arabic dialects. Var-ious other consonants have changed their sound too, buthave remained distinct. An original */p/ lenited to /f/,and */ɡ/ - consistently attested in pre-Islamic Greek tran-scription of Arabic languages[55] - became palatalized to

/ɡʲ/ or /ɟ/ by the time of the Quran and /dʒ/, /ɡ/, /ʒ/ or /ɟ/in MSA (see Arabic phonology#Local variations for moredetail).[56] An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative*/ɬ/ became /ʃ/.[57] Its emphatic counterpart /ɬˠ~ɮˤ/ wasconsidered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound inArabic (Hence the Classical Arabic’s appellation lughatal-ḍād or “language of the ḍād”); for most modern di-alects, it has become an emphatic stop /dˤ/ with loss ofthe laterality[57] or with complete loss of any pharyngeal-ization or velarization, /d/. (The classical ḍād pronun-ciation of pharyngealization /ɮˤ/ still occurs in the Mehrilanguage and the similar sound without velarization existsin other Modern South Arabian languages.)Other changes may also have happened. Classical Ara-bic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and differ-ent reconstructions of the sound system of Proto-Semiticpropose different phonetic values. One example is theemphatic consonants, which are pharyngealized in mod-ern pronunciations but may have been velarized in theeighth century and glottalized in Proto-Semitic.[57]

Reduction of /j/ and /w/ between vowels occurs in anumber of circumstances and is responsible for much ofthe complexity of third-weak (“defective”) verbs. EarlyAkkadian transcriptions of Arabic names shows that thisreduction had not yet occurred as of the early part of the1st millennium BC.The Classical Arabic language as recorded was a poetickoine that reflected a consciously archaizing dialect, cho-sen based on the Bedouin tribes in the eastern part of theArabian Peninsula, who spoke the most conservative vari-ants of Arabic. Even at the time of Mohammed and be-fore, other dialects existed with many more changes, in-cluding the loss of most glottal stops, the loss of case end-ings, the reduction of the diphthongs /aj/ and /aw/ intomonophthongs /eː, oː/, etc. Most of these changes arepresent in most or all modern varieties of Arabic.An interesting feature of the writing system of the Quran(and hence of Classical Arabic) is that it contains certainfeatures of Muhammad’s native dialect of Mecca, cor-rected through diacritics into the forms of standard Clas-sical Arabic. Among these features visible under the cor-rections are the loss of the glottal stop and a differingdevelopment of the reduction of certain final sequencescontaining /j/: Evidently, final /-awa/ became /aː/ as inthe Classical language, but final /-aja/ became a differentsound, possibly /eː/ (rather than again /aː/ in the Clas-sical language). This is the apparent source of the alifmaqṣūrah 'restricted alif' where a final /-aja/ is recon-structed: a letter that would normally indicate /j/ or somesimilar high-vowel sound, but is taken in this context tobe a logical variant of alif and represent the sound /aː/.

8 10 DIALECTS AND DESCENDANTS

Gulf Arabic

Bahrani

Najdi

Omani

Shihhi

Dhofari

Yemeni and Somali

Chadic and Shuwa

Sudanese

Sa'idi

Egyptian

Judeo Arabic

Nubi

Cypriot Arabic

Juba

Iraqi

Levantine

North Mesopotamian

Badawi

Moroccan

Tunisian

Algerian

Libyan

Hassaniya

Saharans

Hijazi and Rashaida

Different dialects of Arabic.

10 Dialects and descendants

Main article: Varieties of Arabic

Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken vari-eties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, whichdiffer radically from the literary language. The maindialectal division is between the varieties within andoutside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that be-tween sedentary varieties and the much more conserva-tive Bedouin varieties. All of the varieties outside of theArabian peninsula (which include the large majority ofspeakers) have a large number of features in commonwith each other that are not found in Classical Arabic.This has led researchers to postulate the existence of aprestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries imme-diately following the Arab conquest, whose features even-tually spread to all of the newly conquered areas. (Thesefeatures are present to varying degrees inside the Ara-bian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula vari-eties have much more diversity than the non-peninsulavarieties, but have been understudied.)Within the non-peninsula varieties, the largest differenceis between the non-Egyptian North African dialects (es-pecially Moroccan Arabic) and the others. MoroccanArabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabicspeakers east of Libya (although the converse is not true,in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and othermedia).One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influ-ence from the languages previously spoken in the areas,which have typically provided a significant number ofnew words and have sometimes also influenced pronun-ciation or word order; however, a much more significantfactor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages,retention (or change of meaning) of different classicalforms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh and North Africankayən all mean 'there is’, and all come from Classical Ara-bic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now soundvery different.

10.1 Examples

Transcription is a broad IPA transcription, so minor dif-ferences were ignored for easier comparison.

10.2 Koine

According to Charles A. Ferguson,[58] the following aresome of the characteristic features of the koine that un-derlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabianpeninsula. Although many other features are common tomost or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that thesefeatures in particular are unlikely to have evolved inde-pendently more than once or twice and together suggestthe existence of the koine:

• Loss of the dual (grammatical number) except onnouns, with consistent plural agreement (cf. femi-nine singular agreement in plural inanimates).

• Change of a to i in many affixes (e.g., non-past-tenseprefixes ti- yi- ni-; wi- 'and'; il- 'the'; feminine -it inthe construct state).

• Loss of third-weak verbs ending in w (which mergewith verbs ending in y).

• Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., ḥalaltu 'I un-tied' → ḥalēt(u).

• Conversion of separate words lī 'to me', laka 'toyou', etc. into indirect-object clitic suffixes.

• Certain changes in the cardinal number system,e.g., khamsat ayyām 'five days’ → kham(a)s tiyyām,where certain words have a special plural with pre-fixed t.

• Loss of the feminine elative (comparative).

• Adjective plurals of the form kibār 'big' → kubār.

• Change of nisba suffix -iyy > i.

• Certain lexical items, e.g., jāb 'bring' < jāʼa bi-'come with'; shāf 'see'; ēsh 'what' (or similar) < ayyushayʼ 'which thing'; illi (relative pronoun).

• Merger of /ɮˤ/ and /ðˤ/.

10.3 Dialect groups

• Egyptian Arabic is spoken by around 53 millionin Egypt (55 million worldwide).[59] It is one ofthe most understood varieties of Arabic, due inlarge part to the widespread distribution of Egyptianfilms and television shows throughout the Arabic-speaking world

9

• Levantine Arabic includes North Levantine Arabic,South Levantine Arabic and Cypriot Arabic. Itis spoken by about 21 million people in Lebanon,Syria, Jordan, Palestinian Territories, Israel, Cyprusand Turkey.

• Maghrebi Arabic, also called "Darija" spoken byabout 70 million people in Morocco, Algeria,Tunisia, Libya and Malta. It is very hard to un-derstand for Arabic speakers from the Mashriq orMesopotamia, the easiest being Libyan Arabic andthe hardest Moroccan Arabic and Maltese language(which is close to Tunisian Arabic) . The others suchas Algerian Arabic can be considered “in between”.

• Maltese, spoken on the island of Malta, is the onlydialect to have established itself as a fully separatelanguage, with independent literary norms. SicilianArabic, spoken on the island of Sicily until the 14thcentury, developed into Maltese in Malta. In thecourse of its history the language has adopted nu-merous loanwords, phonetic and phonological fea-tures, and even some grammatical patterns, fromItalian, Sicilian and English. It is also the onlySemitic language written in the Latin script. Fur-thermore, Maltese or Sicilian Arabic are closely re-lated to Tunisian Arabic due to the cultural and his-torical ties between Tunisia and Malta,[60] and thelanguages are partially mutually intelligible.[61]

• Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken by about 7 millionpeople in Iraq (where it is called “Aamiyah”), east-ern Syria and southwestern Iran (Khuzestan).

• Sudanese Arabic is spoken by 17 million people inSudan and some parts of southern Egypt. SudaneseArabic is quite distinct from the dialect of its neigh-bor to the north; rather, the Sudanese have a dialectsimilar to the Hijazi dialect.

• Gulf Arabic, spoken by around four million peo-ple, predominantly in Kuwait, Bahrain, some partsof Oman, eastern Saudi Arabia coastal areas andsome parts of UAE and Qatar. Also spoken inIran's Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. AlthoughGulf Arabic is spoken in Qatar, most Qatari citizensspeak Najdi Arabic (Bedawi).

• Yemeni Arabic spoken in Yemen, Somalia, Djiboutiand southern Saudi Arabia by 15 million people.Similar to Gulf Arabic.

• Najdi Arabic, spoken by around 10 million people,mainly spoken in Najd, central and northern SaudiArabia. Most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic(Bedawi).

• Hejazi Arabic (6 million speakers), spoken in Hijaz,western Saudi Arabia

• Hassaniya Arabic (3 million speakers), spoken inMauritania, Western Sahara, some parts of northernMali, southern Morocco and south-western Algeria.

• Bahrani Arabic (600,000 speakers), spoken byBahrani Shiʻah in Bahrain and Qatif, the dialect ex-hibits many big differences from Gulf Arabic. It isalso spoken to a lesser extent in Oman.

• Judeo-Arabic dialects - these are the dialects spo-ken by the Jews that had lived or continue to live inthe Arab World. As Jewish migration to Israel tookhold, the language did not thrive and is now consid-ered endangered.

• Central Asian Arabic, spoken in Uzbekistan,Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is highly endangered

• Samaritan Arabic, spoken by only several hundredin the Nablus region

• Shirvani Arabic, spoken in Azerbaijan and Dagestanuntil the 1930s, now extinct.

• Andalusian Arabic, spoken in Spain and Portugaluntil the 16th century.

11 Phonology

Main article: Arabic phonology

The “colloquial” spoken varieties of Arabic are learnedat home and constitute the native languages of Arabicspeakers. “Formal” Literary Arabic (usually specificallyModern Standard Arabic) is learned at school; althoughmany speakers have a native-like command of the lan-guage, it is technically not the native language of anyspeakers. Both varieties can be both written and spoken,although the colloquial varieties are rarely written downand the formal variety is spoken mostly in formal circum-stances, e.g., in radio broadcasts, formal lectures, parlia-mentary discussions and to some extent between speak-ers of different colloquial varieties. Even when the lit-erary language is spoken, however, it is normally onlyspoken in its pure form when reading a prepared textout loud. When speaking extemporaneously (i.e. mak-ing up the language on the spot, as in a normal discus-sion among people), speakers tend to deviate somewhatfrom the strict literary language in the direction of thecolloquial varieties. In fact, there is a continuous range of“in-between” spoken varieties: from nearly pure ModernStandard Arabic (MSA), to a form that still uses MSAgrammar and vocabulary but with significant colloquialinfluence, to a form of the colloquial language that im-ports a number of words and grammatical constructionsin MSA, to a form that is close to pure colloquial but withthe “rough edges” (the most noticeably “vulgar” or non-Classical aspects) smoothed out, to pure colloquial. The

10 11 PHONOLOGY

particular variant (or register) used depends on the socialclass and education level of the speakers involved and thelevel of formality of the speech situation. Often it willvary within a single encounter, e.g., moving from nearlypure MSA to a more mixed language in the process of aradio interview, as the interviewee becomes more com-fortable with the interviewer. This type of variation ischaracteristic of the diglossia that exists throughout theArabic-speaking world.

11.1 Literary Arabic

Although Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a unitarylanguage, its pronunciation varies somewhat from coun-try to country and from region to region within a country.The variation in individual “accents” of MSA speakerstends to mirror corresponding variations in the colloquialspeech of the speakers in question, but with the distin-guishing characteristics moderated somewhat. Note thatit is important in descriptions of “Arabic” phonology todistinguish between pronunciation of a given colloquial(spoken) dialect and the pronunciation of MSA by thesesame speakers. Although they are related, they are notthe same. For example, the phoneme that derives fromProto-Semitic /g/ has many different pronunciations inthe modern spoken varieties, e.g., [dʒ ~ ʒ ~ j ~ ɡʲ ~ ɡ].Speakers whose native variety has either [dʒ] or [ʒ] willuse the same pronunciation when speaking MSA. Evenspeakers from Cairo, whose native Egyptian Arabic has[ɡ], normally use [ɡ] when speaking MSA. The [j] of Per-sian Gulf speakers is the only variant pronunciation whichisn't found in MSA; [dʒ~ʒ] is used instead.Another example: Many colloquial varieties are knownfor a type of vowel harmony in which the presence ofan "emphatic consonant" triggers backed allophones ofnearby vowels (especially of the low vowels /aː/, whichare backed to [ɑ(ː)] in these circumstances and very oftenfronted to [æ(ː)] in all other circumstances). In many spo-ken varieties, the backed or “emphatic” vowel allophonesspread a fair distance in both directions from the trigger-ing consonant; in some varieties (most notably EgyptianArabic), the “emphatic” allophones spread throughoutthe entire word, usually including prefixes and suffixes,even at a distance of several syllables from the trigger-ing consonant. Speakers of colloquial varieties with thisvowel harmony tend to introduce it into their MSA pro-nunciation as well, but usually with a lesser degree ofspreading than in the colloquial varieties. (For exam-ple, speakers of colloquial varieties with extremely long-distance harmony may allow a moderate, but not extreme,amount of spreading of the harmonic allophones in theirMSA speech, while speakers of colloquial varieties withmoderate-distance harmony may only harmonize imme-diately adjacent vowels in MSA.)

11.1.1 Vowels

Modern Standard Arabic has six pure vowels, with short/a i u/ and corresponding long vowels /aː iː uː/. There arealso two diphthongs: /aj/ and /aw/.The pronunciation of the vowels differs from speaker tospeaker, in a way that tends to reflect the pronunciation ofthe corresponding colloquial variety. Nonetheless, thereare some common trends. Most noticeable is the differingpronunciation of /a/ and /aː/, which tend towards fronted[æ(ː)], [a(ː)] or [ɛ(ː)] in most situations, but a back [ɑ(ː)]in the neighborhood of emphatic consonants. Some ac-cents and dialects, such as those of the Hijaz, have central[ä(ː)] in all situations. The vowels /u/ and /i/ are oftenaffected somewhat in emphatic neighborhoods as well,with generally more back or centralized allophones, butthe differences are less great than for the low vowels. Thepronunciation of short /u/ and /i/ tends towards [ʊ~o] and[ɪ~e] in many dialects.The definition of both “emphatic” and “neighborhood”vary in ways that reflect (to some extent) correspond-ing variations in the spoken dialects. Generally, theconsonants triggering “emphatic” allophones are thepharyngealized consonants /tˤ dˤ sˤ ðˤ/; /q/; and /r/, ifnot followed immediately by /i(ː)/. Frequently, the uvularfricatives /x ɣ/ also trigger emphatic allophones; occa-sionally also the pharyngeal consonants /ʕ ħ/ (the for-mer more than the latter). Many dialects have multi-ple emphatic allophones of each vowel, depending onthe particular nearby consonants. In most MSA accents,emphatic coloring of vowels is limited to vowels im-mediately adjacent to a triggering consonant, althoughin some it spreads a bit farther: e.g., وقت waqt [wɑqt]'time'; وطن waṭan [wɑtˤɑn] 'homeland'; المدينة وسط wasṭal-madīnah [wæstˤɑl-mædiːnɐ] 'downtown' (sometimes[wɑstˤɑl-mædiːnæ] or similar).In a non-emphatic environment, the vowel /a/ in the diph-thong /aj/ tends to be fronted even more than elsewhere,often pronounced [æj] or [ɛj]: hence سيف sayf [sajf ~sæjf ~ sɛjf] 'sword' but صيف ṣayf [sˤɑjf] 'summer'. How-ever, in accents with no emphatic allophones of /a/ (e.g.,in the Hijaz), the pronunciation [äj] occurs in all situa-tions.

11.1.2 Consonants

The phoneme /ʒ~dʒ~ɟ~ɡʲ~ɡ/ is represented by the Arabicletter jīm (ج) and has many standard pronunciations. [dʒ]is characteristic of north Algeria, Iraq, also in most of theArabian peninsula but with an allophonic [ʒ] in some po-sitions; [ʒ] occurs in most of the Levant and most NorthAfrica; and [ɡ] is used in most of Egypt and some re-gions in Yemen and Oman. Generally this correspondswith the pronunciation in the colloquial dialects.[63] Insome regions in Sudan and Yemen, as well as in someSudanese and Yemeni dialects, it may be either [ɡʲ] or

11.1 Literary Arabic 11

[ɟ], representing the original pronunciation of ClassicalArabic. Foreign words containing /ɡ/ may be transcribedwith , ج , غ , ك , ق , گ or ݣ , ڨ mainly depending on theregional spoken variety of Arabic or the commonly dia-criticized Arabic letter. Note also that in northern Egypt,where the Arabic letter jīm (ج) is normally pronounced[ɡ], a separate phoneme /ʒ/, which may be transcribedwith ,چ occurs in a small number of mostly non-Arabicloanwords, e.g., /ʒakitta/ 'jacket'./θ/ (ث) can be pronounced as [t] or even [s]. In someplaces of Maghreb it can be also pronounced as [ts]./x/ and /ɣ/ غ خ,) ) are velar, post-velar, or uvular.[62]

In many varieties, /ħ, ʕ/ ع ح,) ) are actually epiglottal [ʜ,ʢ] (despite what is reported in many earlier works)./l/ is pronounced as velarized [ɫ] in الله /ʔallaːh/, thename of God, q.e. Allah, when the word follows a, ā, uor ū (after i or ī it is unvelarized: الله بسم bismi l–lāh/bismillaːh/). Some speakers velarize other occurrencesof /l/ in MSA, in imitation of their spoken dialects.The emphatic consonant /dˤ/ was actually pronounced[ɮˤ], or possibly [dɮˤ][64]—either way, a highly unusualsound. The medieval Arabs actually termed their lan-guage lughat al-ḍād 'the language of the Ḍād' (the nameof the letter used for this sound), since they thought thesound was unique to their language. (In fact, it also existsin a few other minority Semitic languages, e.g., Mehri.)Arabic has consonants traditionally termed “emphatic”/tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/ ض, ط,) ص, ظ ), which exhibit simultaneouspharyngealization [tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ] as well as varying degreesof velarization [tˠ, dˠ, sˠ, ðˠ], so they may be written withthe “Velarized or pharyngealized” diacritic ( ) as: /t, d,s, ð/. This simultaneous articulation is described as “Re-tracted Tongue Root” by phonologists.[65] In some tran-scription systems, emphasis is shown by capitalizing theletter, for example, /dˤ/ is written ⟨D⟩; in others the letteris underlined or has a dot below it, for example, ⟨ḍ⟩.Vowels and consonants can be phonologically short orlong. Long (geminate) consonants are normally writtendoubled in Latin transcription (i.e. bb, dd, etc.), reflect-ing the presence of the Arabic diacritic mark shaddah,which indicates doubled consonants. In actual pronunci-ation, doubled consonants are held twice as long as shortconsonants. This consonant lengthening is phonemicallycontrastive: قبل qabala 'he accepted' vs. قبل qabbala 'hekissed'.

11.1.3 Syllable structure

Arabic has two kinds of syllables: open syllables (CV)and (CVV)—and closed syllables (CVC), (CVVC) and(CVCC). The syllable types with three morae (units oftime), i.e. CVC and CVV, are termed heavy syllables,while those with four morae, i.e. CVVC and CVCC, aresuperheavy syllables. Superheavy syllables in Classical

Arabic occur in only two places: at the end of the sen-tence (due to pausal pronunciation) and in words such asحار ḥārr 'hot', māddahمادة 'stuff, substance', تحاجوا taḥājjū'they disputed with each other', where a long ā occurs be-fore two identical consonants (a former short vowel be-tween the consonants has been lost). (In less formal pro-nunciations of Modern Standard Arabic, superheavy syl-lables are common at the end of words or before cliticsuffixes such as -nā 'us, our', due to the deletion of finalshort vowels.)In surface pronunciation, every vowel must be precededby a consonant (which may include the glottal stop [ʔ]).There are no cases of hiatus within a word (where twovowels occur next to each other, without an interveningconsonant). Some words do have an underlying vowel atthe beginning, such as the definite article al- or words suchas اشترا ishtarā 'he bought', اجتماع ijtimāʻ 'meeting'. Whenactually pronounced, one of three things happens:

• If the word occurs after another word ending ina consonant, there is a smooth transition from fi-nal consonant to initial vowel, e.g., اجتماع al-ijtimāʻ'meeting' /alidʒtimaːʕ/.

• If the word occurs after another word ending in avowel, the initial vowel of the word is elided, e.g.,المدير بيت baytu (a)l-mudīr 'house of the director' /ba-jtulmudiːr/.

• If the word occurs at the beginning of an utterance,a glottal stop [ʔ] is added onto the beginning, e.g.,هو البيت al-baytu huwa ... 'The house is ...' /ʔalbaj-tuhuwa ... /.

11.1.4 Stress

Word stress is not phonemically contrastive in StandardArabic. It bears a strong relationship to vowel length. Thebasic rules for Modern Standard Arabic are:

• A final vowel, long or short, may not be stressed.

• Only one of the last three syllables may be stressed.

• Given this restriction, the last heavy syllable (con-taining a long vowel or ending in a consonant) isstressed, if it is not the final syllable.

• If the final syllable is super heavy and closed (of theform CVVC or CVCC) it receives stress.

• If no syllable is heavy or super heavy, the first pos-sible syllable (i.e. third from end) is stressed.

• As a special exception, in Form VII and VIII verbforms stress may not be on the first syllable, despitethe above rules: Hence inkatab(a) 'he subscribed'(whether or not the final short vowel is pronounced),

12 11 PHONOLOGY

yankatib(u) 'he subscribes’ (whether or not the fi-nal short vowel is pronounced), yankatib 'he shouldsubscribe (juss.)'. Likewise Form VIII ishtarā 'hebought', yashtarī 'he buys’.

Examples:kitāb(un) 'book', kā-ti-b(un) 'writer', mak-ta-b(un) 'desk', ma-kā-ti-b(u) 'desks’, mak-ta-ba-tun 'library'(but mak-ta-ba(-tun) 'library' in short pronunciation), ka-ta-bū (Modern Standard Arabic) 'they wrote' = ka-ta-bu(dialect), ka-ta-bū-h(u) (Modern Standard Arabic) 'theywrote it' = ka-ta-bū (dialect), ka-ta-ba-tā (Modern Stan-dard Arabic) 'they (dual, fem) wrote', ka-tab-tu (Mod-ern Standard Arabic) 'I wrote' = ka-tabt (short form ordialect). Doubled consonants count as two consonants:ma-jal-la-(tan) 'magazine', ma-ḥall(-un) “place”.These rules may result in differently stressed syllableswhen final case endings are pronounced, vs. the normalsituation where they are not pronounced, as in the aboveexample of mak-ta-ba-tun 'library' in full pronunciation,but mak-ta-ba(-tun) 'library' in short pronunciation.The restriction on final long vowels does not apply tothe spoken dialects, where original final long vowels havebeen shortened and secondary final long vowels havearisen from loss of original final -hu/hi.Some dialects have different stress rules. In the Cairo(Egyptian Arabic) dialect a heavy syllable may not carrystress more than two syllables from the end of a word,hence mad-ra-sah 'school', qā-hi-rah 'Cairo'. This alsoaffects the way that Modern Standard Arabic is pro-nounced in Egypt. In the Arabic of Sanaa, stress is of-ten retracted: bay-tayn 'two houses’, mā-sat-hum 'theirtable', ma-kā-tīb 'desks’, zā-rat-ḥīn 'sometimes’, mad-ra-sat-hum 'their school'. (In this dialect, only syllables withlong vowels or diphthongs are considered heavy; in a two-syllable word, the final syllable can be stressed only if thepreceding syllable is light; and in longer words, the finalsyllable cannot be stressed.)

11.1.5 Levels of pronunciation

The final short vowels (e.g., the case endings -a -i -u andmood endings -u -a) are often not pronounced in this lan-guage, despite forming part of the formal paradigm ofnouns and verbs. The following levels of pronunciationexist:

Full pronunciation

Full pronunciation with pausa This is the most for-mal level actually used in speech. All endings are pro-nounced as written, except at the end of an utterance,where the following changes occur:

• Final short vowels are not pronounced. (But possi-bly an exception is made for feminine plural -na and

shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative of defec-tive verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'".)

• The entire indefinite noun endings -in and -un (withnunation) are left off. The ending -an is left off ofnouns preceded by a tāʾ marbūṭah ة (i.e. the -t in theending -at- that typically marks feminine nouns), butpronounced as -ā in other nouns (hence its writingin this fashion in the Arabic script).

• The tāʼ marbūṭah itself (typically of feminine nouns)is pronounced as h. (At least, this is the case in ex-tremely formal pronunciation, e.g., some Quranicrecitations. In practice, this h is usually omitted.)

Formal short pronunciation This is a formal level ofpronunciation sometimes seen. It is somewhat like pro-nouncing all words as if they were in pausal position (withinfluence from the colloquial varieties). The followingchanges occur:

• Most final short vowels are not pronounced. How-ever, the following short vowels are pronounced:

• feminine plural -na

• shortened vowels in the jussive/imperative ofdefective verbs, e.g., irmi! 'throw!'

• second-person singular feminine past-tense -tiand likewise anti 'you (fem. sg.)'

• sometimes, first-person singular past-tense -tu

• sometimes, second-person masculine past-tense -ta and likewise anta 'you (masc. sg.)'

• final -a in certain short words, e.g., laysa 'isnot', sawfa (future-tense marker)

• The nunation endings -an -in -un are not pro-nounced. However, they are pronounced in adver-bial accusative formations, e.g., taqrīban تقريبا'almost, approximately', ʻādatan عادة 'usually'.

• The tāʾ marbūṭah ending ة is unpronounced, exceptin construct state nouns, where it sounds as t (and inadverbial accusative constructions, e.g., ʻādatan عادة'usually', where the entire -tan is pronounced).

• The masculine singular nisbah ending -iyy is actuallypronounced -ī and is unstressed (but plural and fem-inine singular forms, i.e. when followed by a suffix,still sound as -iyy-).

• Full endings (including case endings) occur when aclitic object or possessive suffix is added (e.g., -nā'us/our').

11.2 Colloquial varieties 13

Informal short pronunciation This is the pronunci-ation used by speakers of Modern Standard Arabic inextemporaneous speech, i.e. when producing new sen-tences rather than simply reading a prepared text. Itis similar to formal short pronunciation except that therules for dropping final vowels apply even when a cliticsuffix is added. Basically, short-vowel case and moodendings are never pronounced and certain other changesoccur that echo the corresponding colloquial pronuncia-tions. Specifically:

• All the rules for formal short pronunciation apply,except as follows.

• The past tense singular endings written formally as -tu -ta -ti are pronounced -t -t -ti. But masculine ʾantais pronounced in full.

• Unlike in formal short pronunciation, the rules fordropping or modifying final endings are also appliedwhen a clitic object or possessive suffix is added(e.g., -nā 'us/our'). If this produces a sequence ofthree consonants, then one of the following happens,depending on the speaker’s native colloquial variety:

• A short vowel (e.g., -i- or -ǝ-) is consistentlyadded, either between the second and third orthe first and second consonants.

• Or, a short vowel is added only if an other-wise unpronounceable sequence occurs, typ-ically due to a violation of the sonority hi-erarchy (e.g., -rtn- is pronounced as a three-consonant cluster, but -trn- needs to be brokenup).

• Or, a short vowel is never added, but conso-nants like r l m n occurring between two otherconsonants will be pronounced as a syllabicconsonant (as in the English words “butter bot-tle bottom button”).

• When a doubled consonant occurs before an-other consonant (or finally), it is often short-ened to a single consonant rather than a voweladded. (But note that Moroccan Arabic nevershortens doubled consonants or inserts shortvowels to break up clusters, instead tolerat-ing arbitrary-length series of arbitrary conso-nants and hence Moroccan Arabic speakersare likely to follow the same rules in their pro-nunciation of Modern Standard Arabic.)

• The clitic suffixes themselves tend also to bechanged, in a way that avoids many possible occur-rences of three-consonant clusters. In particular, -ka-ki -hu generally sound as -ak -ik -uh.

• Final long vowels are often shortened, merging withany short vowels that remain.

• Depending on the level of formality, the speaker’seducation level, etc., various grammatical changesmay occur in ways that echo the colloquial variants:

• Any remaining case endings (e.g. masculineplural nominative -ūn vs. oblique -īn) willbe leveled, with the oblique form used every-where. (However, in words like ab 'father' andakh 'brother' with special long-vowel case end-ings in the construct state, the nominative isused everywhere, hence abū 'father of', akhū'brother of'.)

• Feminine plural endings in verbs and clitic suf-fixes will often drop out, with the masculineplural endings used instead. If the speaker’snative variety has feminine plural endings,they may be preserved, but will often be mod-ified in the direction of the forms used in thespeaker’s native variety, e.g. -an instead of -na.

• Dual endings will often drop out except onnouns and then used only for emphasis (simi-lar to their use in the colloquial varieties); else-where, the plural endings are used (or femininesingular, if appropriate).

11.2 Colloquial varieties

Further information: Varieties of Arabic

11.2.1 Vowels

As mentioned above, many spoken dialects have aprocess of emphasis spreading, where the “emphasis”(pharyngealization) of emphatic consonants spreads for-ward and back through adjacent syllables, pharyngealiz-ing all nearby consonants and triggering the back allo-phone [ɑ(ː)] in all nearby low vowels. The extent of em-phasis spreading varies. For example, in Moroccan Ara-bic, it spreads as far as the first full vowel (i.e. soundderived from a long vowel or diphthong) on either side;in many Levantine dialects, it spreads indefinitely, butis blocked by any /j/ or /ʃ/; while in Egyptian Arabic,it usually spreads throughout the entire word, includingprefixes and suffixes. In Moroccan Arabic, /i u/ also haveemphatic allophones [o~ɔ e~ɛ].Unstressed short vowels, especially /i u/, are deleted inmany contexts. Many sporadic examples of short vowelchange have occurred (especially /a/→/i/ and interchange/i/↔/u/). Most Levantine dialects merge short /i u/ into/ǝ/ in most contexts (all except directly before a single fi-nal consonant). In Moroccan Arabic, on the other hand,short /u/ triggers labialization of nearby consonants (espe-cially velar consonants and uvular consonants), and thenshort /a i u/ all merge into /ǝ/, which is deleted in many

14 12 GRAMMAR

contexts. (The labialization plus /ǝ/ is sometimes inter-preted as an underlying phoneme /ŭ/.) This essentiallycauses the wholesale loss of the short-long vowel distinc-tion, with the original long vowels /aː iː uː/ remaining ashalf-long [aˑ iˑ uˑ], phonemically /a i u/, which are used torepresent both short and long vowels in borrowings fromLiterary Arabic.Most spoken dialects have monophthongized original /ajaw/ to /eː oː/ (in all circumstances, including adjacent toemphatic consonants). In Moroccan Arabic, these havesubsequently merged into original /iː uː/.

11.2.2 Consonants

In some dialects, there may be more or fewer phonemesthan those listed in the chart above. For example, non-Arabic [v] is used in the Maghrebi dialects as well in thewritten language mostly for foreign names. Semitic [p]became [f] extremely early on in Arabic before it waswritten down; a few modern Arabic dialects, such as Iraqi(influenced by Persian and Kurdish) distinguish between[p] and [b]. The Iraqi Arabic also uses sounds [ɡ], [tʃ] anduses Persian adding letters, e.g.: گوجة gawjah – a plum;چمة chimah – a truffle and so on.

Early in the expansion of Arabic, the separate em-phatic phonemes [ɮˤ] and [ðˤ] coalesced into a singlephoneme [ðˤ]. Many dialects (such as Egyptian, Lev-antine, and much of the Maghreb) subsequently lostinterdental fricatives, converting [θ ð ðˤ] into [t d dˤ].Most dialects borrow “learned” words from the Standardlanguage using the same pronunciation as for inheritedwords, but some dialects without interdental fricatives(particularly in Egypt and the Levant) render original [θð ðˤ ɮˤ] in borrowed words as [s z zˤ dˤ].Another key distinguishing mark of Arabic dialects ishow they render the original velar and uvular plosives /q/,/dʒ/ (Proto-Semitic /ɡ/), and /k/:

• ق /q/ retains its original pronunciation in widelyscattered regions such as Yemen, Morocco, and ur-ban areas of the Maghreb. It is pronounced as aglottal stop [ʔ] in several prestige dialects, such asthose spoken in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus. Butit is rendered as a voiced velar plosive [ɡ] in Per-sian Gulf, Upper Egypt, parts of the Maghreb, andless urban parts of the Levant (e.g. Jordan). In IraqiArabic it sometimes retains its original pronuncia-tion and is sometimes rendered as a voiced velarplosive, depending on the word. Some tradition-ally Christian villages in rural areas of the Levantrender the sound as [ɫ], as do Shiʻi Bahrainis. Insome Gulf dialects, it is palatalized to [dʒ] or [ʒ].It is pronounced as a voiced uvular constrictive [ʁ]in Sudanese Arabic. Many dialects with a modifiedpronunciation for /q/ maintain the [q] pronunciationin certain words (often with religious or educational

overtones) borrowed from the Classical language.

• ج /dʒ/ is pronounced as an affricate in Iraq and muchof the Arabian Peninsula, but is pronounced [ɡ] inmost of North Egypt and parts of Yemen and Oman,[ʒ] in Morocco, Tunisia and the Levant, and [j], [i]in most words in much of the Persian Gulf.

• ك /k/ usually retains its original pronunciation, butis palatalized to /tʃ/ in many words in Israel and thePalestinian Territories, Iraq, and much of the Ara-bian Peninsula. Often a distinction is made betweenthe suffixes /-ak/ ('you', masc.) and /-ik/ ('you',fem.), which become /-ak/ and /-itʃ/, respectively.In Sana'a, Omani, and Bahrani /-ik/ is pronounced/-iʃ/.

Pharyngealization of the emphatic consonants tends toweaken in many of the spoken varieties, and to spreadfrom emphatic consonants to nearby sounds. In addition,the “emphatic” allophone [ɑ] automatically triggers pha-ryngealization of adjacent sounds in many dialects. As aresult, it may difficult or impossible to determine whethera given coronal consonant is phonemically emphatic ornot, especially in dialects with long-distance emphasisspreading. (A notable exception is the sounds /t/ vs. /tˤ/in Moroccan Arabic, because the former is pronouncedas an affricate [ts] but the latter is not.)

12 Grammar

Main article: Arabic grammar

12.1 Literary Arabic

Main article: Modern Standard Arabic

As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex andunusual morphology (i.e. method of constructing wordsfrom a basic root). Arabic has a nonconcatenative “root-and-pattern” morphology: A root consists of a set of bareconsonants (usually three), which are fitted into a discon-tinuous pattern to form words. For example, the wordfor 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root k-t-b'write' with the pattern -a-a-tu 'I Xed' to form katabtu'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typicallyhave the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g.qaraʼtu 'I read', akaltu 'I ate', dhahabtu 'I went', althoughother patterns are possible (e.g. sharibtu 'I drank', qultu'I said', takallamtu 'I spoke', where the subpattern usedto signal the past tense may change but the suffix -tu isalways used).From a single root k-t-b, numerous words can be formedby applying different patterns:

12.1 Literary Arabic 15

root meaning ➔ a a a a h فعالة machine

th l j snow ➔ th a l l a a j a h ثلةجة fridge

n Z r see ➔ n a Z Z a a r a h نظارة glasses

gh s l wash ➔ gh a s s a a l a h غسالة

s y r travel ➔ s a y y a a r a h سيارة car

d r j ➔ d a r r a a j a h دراةجة bicycle

فعل ➔ t a i i تفعيل process

سوق ➔ t a s w i i q تسويق marketing

سكر ➔ t a s k i i r تسكير saccharification

شكل ➔ t a sh k i i l تسكير

نظم ➔ t a n Z i i m تنظيم

a a a a do together ➔ m u a a i coactor

r a a s a l a ➔ m u r a a s i l correspondant

f a a ع a l a react ➔ m u f a a ع i l reactor

s a a b a q a race ➔ m u s a a b i q competitor

w a a T a n a ➔ m u w a a T i n fellow citizen

a i i a h ➔ a a a ' i plural فعائل

q a dh i i f a h ➔ q a dh a a ' i f قذائف

w a Z i i f a h ➔ w a Z a a ' i f jobs, posts وظائف

washing machine

stepping by degrees

formation, shaping

organisation (the act of)

correspond

share same nationality

missiles, projectiles

Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works.

• katabtu 'I wrote'

• kattabtu 'I had (something) written'

• kātabtu 'I corresponded (with someone)'"

• aktabtu 'I dictated'

• iktatabtu 'I subscribed'

• takātabnā 'we corresponded with each other'

• aktubu 'I write'

• ukattibu 'I have (something) written'

• ukātibu 'I correspond (with someone)'

• uktibu 'I dictate'

• aktatibu 'I subscribe'

• natakātabu 'we correspond each other'

• kutiba 'it was written'

• uktiba 'it was dictated'"

• maktūb 'written'

• muktab 'dictated'

• kitāb 'book'

• kutub 'books’

• kātib 'writer'

• kuttāb 'writers’

• maktab 'desk, office'

• maktabah 'library, bookshop'

• etc.

12.1.1 Nouns and adjectives

Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases(nominative, accusative, and genitive [also used whenthe noun is governed by a preposition]); three numbers(singular, dual and plural); two genders (masculine andfeminine); and three “states” (indefinite, definite, andconstruct). The cases of singular nouns (other than thosethat end in long ā) are indicated by suffixed short vowels(/-u/ for nominative, /-a/ for accusative, /-i/ for genitive).The feminine singular is often marked by /-at/, which isreduced to /-ah/ or /-a/ before a pause. Plural is indicatedeither through endings (the sound plural) or internal mod-ification (the broken plural). Definite nouns include allproper nouns, all nouns in “construct state” and all nounswhich are prefixed by the definite article /al-/. Indefinitesingular nouns (other than those that end in long ā) add afinal /-n/ to the case-marking vowels, giving /-un/, /-an/or /-in/ (which is also referred to as nunation or tanwīn).Adjectives in Literary Arabic are marked for case, num-ber, gender and state, as for nouns. However, the plural ofall non-human nouns is always combined with a singularfeminine adjective, which takes the /-ah/ or /-at/ suffix.Pronouns in Literary Arabic are marked for person, num-ber and gender. There are two varieties, independent pro-nouns and enclitics. Enclitic pronouns are attached to theend of a verb, noun or preposition and indicate verbal andprepositional objects or possession of nouns. The first-person singular pronoun has a different enclitic form usedfor verbs (/-ni/) and for nouns or prepositions (/-ī/ afterconsonants, /-ya/ after vowels).Nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives agree with eachother in all respects. However, non-human plural nounsare grammatically considered to be feminine singular.Furthermore, a verb in a verb-initial sentence is markedas singular regardless of its semantic number when thesubject of the verb is explicitly mentioned as a noun.Numerals between three and ten show “chiasmic” agree-ment, in that grammatically masculine numerals havefeminine marking and vice versa.

12.1.2 Verbs

Verbs in Literary Arabic are marked for person (first,second, or third), gender, and number. They areconjugated in two major paradigms (past and non-past); two voices (active and passive); and six moods

16 12 GRAMMAR

(indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, shorterenergetic and longer energetic), the fifth and sixth moods,the energetics, exist only in Classical Arabic but not inMSA.[66] There are also two participles (active and pas-sive) and a verbal noun, but no infinitive.The past and non-past paradigms are sometimes alsotermed perfective and imperfective, indicating the factthat they actually represent a combination of tense andaspect. The moods other than the indicative occur only inthe non-past, and the future tense is signaled by prefixingsa- or sawfa onto the non-past. The past and non-past dif-fer in the form of the stem (e.g., past katab- vs. non-past-ktub-), and also use completely different sets of affixesfor indicating person, number and gender: In the past,the person, number and gender are fused into a singlesuffixal morpheme, while in the non-past, a combinationof prefixes (primarily encoding person) and suffixes (pri-marily encoding gender and number) are used. The pas-sive voice uses the same person/number/gender affixesbut changes the vowels of the stem.The following shows a paradigm of a regular Arabic verb,kataba 'to write'. Note that in Modern Standard Arabic,many final short vowels are dropped (indicated in paren-theses below), and the energetic mood (in either long orshort form, which have the same meaning) is almost neverused.

12.1.3 Derivation

Unlike most languages, Arabic has virtually no means ofderiving words by adding prefixes or suffixes to words.Instead, they are formed according to a finite (but fairlylarge) number of templates applied to roots.For verbs, a given root can construct up to fifteen dif-ferent verbs, each with one or more characteristic mean-ings and each with its own templates for the past andnon-past stems, active and passive participles, and verbalnoun. These are referred to by Western scholars as “FormI”, “Form II”, and so on through “Form XV” (althoughForms XI to XV are rare). These forms encode conceptssuch as the causative, intensive and reflexive. These formscan be viewed as analogous to verb conjugations in lan-guages such as Spanish in terms of the additional com-plexity of verb formation that they induce. (Note, how-ever, that their usage in constructing vocabulary is some-what different, since the same root can be conjugated inmultiple forms, with different shades of meaning.)Examples of the different verbs formed from the root k-t-b 'write' (using ḥ-m-r 'red' for Form IX, which is limitedto colors and physical defects):Form II is sometimes used to create transitivedenominative verbs (verbs built from nouns); FormV is the equivalent used for intransitive denominatives.The associated participles and verbal nouns of a verb arethe primary means of forming new lexical nouns in Ara-

bic. This is similar to the process by which, for example,the English gerund “meeting” (similar to a verbal noun)has turned into a noun referring to a particular type ofsocial, often work-related event where people gather to-gether to have a “discussion” (another lexicalized verbalnoun). Another fairly common means of forming nounsis through one of a limited number of patterns that can beapplied directly to roots, such as the “nouns of location”in ma- (e.g. maktab 'desk, office' < k-t-b 'write', maṭbakh'kitchen' < ṭ-b-kh 'cook').The only three genuine suffixes are as follows:

• The feminine suffix -ah; variously derives termsfrom women from related terms for men, or moregenerally terms along the same lines as the corre-sponding masculine, e.g. maktabah 'library' (also awriting-related place, but different from maktab, asabove).

• The nisbah suffix -iyy-. This suffix is extremely pro-ductive, and forms adjectives meaning “related toX”. It corresponds to English adjectives in -ic, -al,-an, -y, -ist, etc.

• The feminine nisbah suffix -iyyah. This is formedby adding the feminine suffix -ah onto nisba adjec-tives to form abstract nouns. For example, from thebasic root sh-r-k 'share' can be derived the FormVIII verb ishtaraka 'to cooperate, participate', andin turn its verbal noun ishtirāk 'cooperation, partici-pation' can be formed. This in turn can be made intoa nisbah adjective ishtirākī 'socialist', from whichan abstract noun ishtirākiyyah 'socialism' can be de-rived. Other recent formations are jumhūriyyah'republic' (lit. “public-ness”, < jumhūr 'multitude,general public'), and the Gaddafi-specific variationjamāhīriyyah 'people’s republic' (lit. “masses-ness”,< jamāhīr 'the masses’, pl. of jumhūr, as above).

12.2 Colloquial varieties

Main article: Varieties of Arabic

The spoken dialects have lost the case distinctions andmake only limited use of the dual (it occurs only on nounsand its use is no longer required in all circumstances).They have lost the mood distinctions other than impera-tive, but many have since gained new moods through theuse of prefixes (most often /bi-/ for indicative vs. un-marked subjunctive). They have also mostly lost the in-definite “nunation” and the internal passive.The following is an example of a regular verb paradigmin Egyptian Arabic.

13.2 Romanization 17

13 Writing system

Main articles: Arabic alphabet and Arabic BrailleThe Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic through

Islamic calligraphy written by a Malay Muslim in Malaysia. Thecalligrapher is making a rough draft.

Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like thatof Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script. Tradition-ally, there were several differences between the West-ern (North African) and Middle Eastern versions of thealphabet—in particular, the faʼ had a dot underneath andqaf a single dot above in the Maghreb, and the order ofthe letters was slightly different (at least when they wereused as numerals).However, the old Maghrebi variant has been abandonedexcept for calligraphic purposes in the Maghreb it-self, and remains in use mainly in the Quranic schools(zaouias) of West Africa. Arabic, like all other Semiticlanguages (except for the Latin-written Maltese, and thelanguages with the Ge'ez script), is written from right toleft. There are several styles of script, notably naskh,which is used in print and by computers, and ruqʻah,which is commonly used in handwriting.[67]

13.1 Calligraphy

Main article: Islamic calligraphy

After Khalil ibn Ahmad al Farahidi finally fixed the Ara-bic script around 786, many styles were developed, bothfor the writing down of the Quran and other books, andfor inscriptions on monuments as decoration.Arabic calligraphy has not fallen out of use as calligraphyhas in the Western world, and is still considered by Arabsas a major art form; calligraphers are held in great esteem.Being cursive by nature, unlike the Latin script, Arabicscript is used to write down a verse of the Quran, a hadith,or simply a proverb. The composition is often abstract,but sometimes the writing is shaped into an actual formsuch as that of an animal. One of the current masters of

the genre is Hassan Massoudy.

13.2 Romanization

Main article: Romanization of Arabic

There are a number of different standards for theromanization of Arabic, i.e. methods of accuratelyand efficiently representing Arabic with the Latin script.There are various conflicting motivations involved, whichleads to multiple systems. Some are interested intransliteration, i.e. representing the spelling of Arabic,while others focus on transcription, i.e. representing thepronunciation of Arabic. (They differ in that, for exam-ple, the same letter ي is used to represent both a con-sonant, as in "you” or "yet”, and a vowel, as in “me" or"eat”.) Some systems, e.g. for scholarly use, are intendedto accurately and unambiguously represent the phonemesof Arabic, generally making the phonetics more explicitthan the original word in the Arabic script. These sys-tems are heavily reliant on diacritical marks such as "š"for the sound equivalently written sh in English. Othersystems (e.g. the Bahá'í orthography) are intended to helpreaders who are neither Arabic speakers nor linguists withintuitive pronunciation of Arabic names and phrases.[68]

These less “scientific” tend to avoid diacritics and usedigraphs (like sh and kh). These are usually simpler toread, but sacrifice the definiteness of the scientific sys-tems, and may lead to ambiguities, e.g. whether to inter-pret sh as a single sound, as in gash, or a combination oftwo sounds, as in gashouse. The ALA-LC romanizationsolves this problem by separating the two sounds with aprime symbol ( ′ ); e.g., as′hal 'easier'.During the last few decades and especially since the1990s, Western-invented text communication technolo-gies have become prevalent in the Arab world, such aspersonal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletinboard systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phonetext messaging. Most of these technologies originally hadthe ability to communicate using the Latin script only,and some of them still do not have the Arabic script asan optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking userscommunicated in these technologies by transliterating theArabic text using the Latin script, sometimes known asIM Arabic.To handle those Arabic letters that cannot be accuratelyrepresented using the Latin script, numerals and othercharacters were appropriated. For example, the numeral“3” may be used to represent the Arabic letter .⟨ع⟩ Thereis no universal name for this type of transliteration, butsome have named it Arabic Chat Alphabet. Other sys-tems of transliteration exist, such as using dots or capital-ization to represent the “emphatic” counterparts of cer-tain consonants. For instance, using capitalization, theletter ,⟨د⟩ may be represented by d. Its emphatic coun-terpart, ,⟨ض⟩ may be written as D.

18 18 REFERENCES

13.3 Numerals

In most of present-day North Africa, the Western Arabicnumerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) are used. How-ever, in Egypt and Arabic-speaking countries to the eastof it, the Eastern Arabic numerals (٠ – ١ – ٢ – ٣ – ٤ – ٥ – ٦ – ٧ – ٨ – ٩ ) are in use. When representing a num-ber in Arabic, the lowest-valued position is placed on theright, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right scripts. Sequences of digits such as telephone num-bers are read from left to right, but numbers are spokenin the traditional Arabic fashion, with units and tens re-versed from the modern English usage. For example, 24is said “four and twenty” just like in the German language(vierundzwanzig) and Classical Hebrew, and 1975 is said“a thousand and nine-hundred and five and seventy” or,more eloquently, “five and seventy and nine-hundred anda thousand.”

14 Language-standards regulators

Academy of the Arabic Language is the name of a num-ber of language-regulation bodies formed in the ArabLeague. The most active are in Damascus and Cairo.They review language development, monitor new wordsand approve inclusion of new words into their publishedstandard dictionaries. They also publish old and historicalArabic manuscripts.See also: Arabic Language International Council

15 As a foreign language

Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementaryand secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Uni-versities around the world have classes that teach Arabicas part of their foreign languages, Middle Eastern studies,and religious studies courses. Arabic language schoolsexist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the aca-demic world. There are many Arabic language schoolsin the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Becausethe Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are inArabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab)study the language. Software and books with tapes arealso important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabiclearners may live in places where there are no academicor Arabic language school classes available. Radio seriesof Arabic language classes are also provided from someradio stations. A number of websites on the Internet pro-vide online classes for all levels as a means of distance ed-ucation; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but someteach regional varieties from numerous countries.[69]

16 Arabic speakers and other lan-guages

In Bahrain, Arabic is largely used in educational settings.

Historically, Arab linguists considered the Arabic lan-guage to be superior to all other languages, and took al-most no interest in learning any language other than Ara-bic . With the sole example of Medieval linguist AbuHayyan al-Gharnati - who, while a scholar of the Ara-bic language, was not ethnically Arab - scholars of theArabic language made no efforts at studying comparativelinguistics, considering all other languages inferior.[70]

In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arabworld have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleimanwrote in 2011 that “studying and knowing English orFrench in most of the Middle East and North Africahave become a badge of sophistication and modernityand ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facil-ity in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status,class, and perversely, even education through a mélangeof code-switching practises.”[71] Arab-American profes-sor Franck Salamah went as far as to declare Arabic adead language conveying dead ideas, blaming its stagna-tion for Arab intellectual stagnation and lamenting thatgreat writers in Arabic are judged by their command ofthe language and not the merit of the ideas they expresswith it.[72]

17 See also

18 References

Notes

[1] “Världens 100 största språk 2010” (The World’s 100Largest Languages in 2010), in Nationalencyklopedin

[2] Wright (2001:492)

[3] Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel,Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). “Arabic”.Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolution-ary Anthropology.

19

[4] https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/arabic

[5] “Arabic language.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. En-cyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved on 29 July 2009.

[6] “World Arabic Language Day”. UNESCO. 18 December2014. Retrieved 12 February 2014.

[7] Egyptian Arabic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)

[8] “The World Factbook”. www.cia.gov. Retrieved 2015-09-14.

[9] “Executive Summary”. The Future of the Global MuslimPopulation. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 22 Decem-ber 2011.

[10] “Table: Muslim Population by Country | Pew Re-search Center’s Religion & Public Life Project”. Fea-tures.pewforum.org. 2011-01-27. Retrieved 2014-05-18.

[11] “UN official languages”. Un.org. Retrieved 18 October2015.

[12] Versteegh (1997:33)

[13] Al-Jallad, Ahmad (2015). An Outline of the Grammar ofthe Safaitic Inscriptions. Leiden: Brill., 11–14

[14] Al-Jallad, 41-7

[15] Al-Jallad, 20

[16] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand-book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p.54.

[17] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand-book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p.55.

[18] Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003). Arabic Language Hand-book. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p.57.

[19] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func-tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer-sity Press. p. 3.

[20] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func-tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer-sity Press. p. 11.

[21] Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Func-tions and Varieties. Washington DC: Georgetown Univer-sity Press. p. 12.

[22] Beeston, A. F. L.. The Arabic language today. Washing-ton, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2006. Print.

[23] A.F.L, Beeston (1970). The Arabic Language Today.Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. 3.

[24] A.F.L, Beeston (1970). The Arabic Language Today.Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. p. 4.

[25] Bateson, Mary Catherine. Arabic language handbook.Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2003.Print. p. 58

[26] John Andrew Morrow, Islamic Images and Ideas: Essayson Sacred Symbolism, pg. 257. Jefferson: McFarland &Company, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4766-1288-1

[27] John Andrew Morrow, Islamic Images and Ideas, pg. 258.

[28] Kaye (1991:?)

[29] “Arabic Language.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclo-pedia 2009. Retrieved on 29 July 2009.

[30] Jenkins, Orville Boyd (18 March 2000), Population Anal-ysis of the Arabic Languages

[31] Janet C. E. Watson, The Phonology and Morphology ofArabic, Introduction, pg. xix. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-160775-2

[32] Proceedings and Debates of the 107th United StatesCongress Congressional Record, pg. 10,462. Washing-ton, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office,2002.

[33] Shalom Staub, Yemenis in New York City: The Folkloreof Ethnicity, pg. 124. Philadelphia: Balch Institute forEthnic Studies, 1989. ISBN 978-0-944190-05-0

[34] Daniel Newman, Arabic-English Thematic Lexicon, pg.1. London: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 978-1-134-10392-8

[35] Rebecca L. Torstrick and Elizabeth Faier, Culture andCustoms of the Arab Gulf States, pg. 41. Santa Barbara:ABC-CLIO, 2009. ISBN 978-0-313-33659-1

[36] Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in theEvolution of Consciousness and Culture, pg. 32. Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8014-6630-4

[37] Clive Holes, Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, andVarieties, pg. 3. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univer-sity Press, 2004. ISBN 978-1-58901-022-2

[38] Nizar Y. Habash,Introduction to Arabic Natural LanguageProcessing, pgs. 1–2. San Rafael: Morgan & ClaypoolPublishers, 2010. ISBN 978-1-59829-795-9

[39] Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic:Democratic Practice in South India, pgs. 14–15. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-231-51940-3

[40] EB staff. “Maltese language – Britannica Online Encyclo-pedia”. Britannica.com. Retrieved 4 May 2010.

[41] Gregersen (1977:237)

[42] See the seminal study by Siegmund Fraenkel, Diearamäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen, Leiden 1886(repr. 1962)

[43] See for instance Wilhelm Eilers, “Iranisches Lehngut imArabischen”, Actas IV. Congresso des Estudos Árabes etIslâmicos, Coimbra, Lisboa, Leiden 1971, with earlier ref-erences.

[44] Shrivtiel, Shraybom (1998). The Question of Romanisa-tion of the Script and The Emergence of Nationalism in theMiddle East. Mediterranean Language Review. pp. 179–196.

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[45] Shrivtiel, p. 188

[46] Shrivtiel, p. 189

[47] “Arabic – the mother of all languages – Al Islam Online”.Alislam.org. Archived from the original on 30 April 2010.Retrieved 4 May 2010.

[48] Coffman, James (December 1995). “Does the ArabicLanguage Encourage Radical Islam?". Middle East Quar-terly. Retrieved 5 December 2008.

[49] Woodard, Roger D. Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestineand Arabia. p 208

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[54] Lipinski (1997:124)

[55] Al-Jallad, 42

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[57] Watson (2002:2)

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[59] Arabic, Egyptian Spoken (18th ed.). Ethnologue. 2006.

[60] Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander Maltese (1997:xiii) “Theimmediate source for the Arabic vernacular spoken inMalta was Muslim Sicily, but its ultimate origin appearsto have been Tunisia. In fact Maltese displays some arealtraits typical of Maghrebine Arabic, although during thepast eight hundred years of independent evolution it hasdrifted apart from Tunisian Arabic”.

[61] Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander Maltese (1997:xiii)

[62] Watson (2002:18)

[63] Watson (2002:16)

[64] Ferguson, Charles (1959), “The Arabic Koine”, Language35 (4): 630, doi:10.2307/410601

[65] e.g., Thelwall (2003:52)

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19 External links

• Arabic: a Category III language Languages whichare difficult for native English speakers.

• Dr. Nizar Habash’s, Columbia University, Introduc-tion to Arabic Natural Language Processing

• Google Ta3reeb – Google Transliteration

• Transliteration Arabic language pronunciation ap-plet

• USA Foreign Service Institute Arabic basic course

• How to speak Arabic

• Alexis Neme (2011), A lexicon of Arabic verbs con-structed on the basis of Semitic taxonomy and usingfinite-state transducers

• Alexis Neme and Eric Laporte (2013), Pattern-and-root inflectional morphology: the Arabic broken plu-ral

• Alexis Neme and Eric Laporte (2015), Do com-puter scientists deeply understand Arabic morphol-ogy? -

, available also in Arabic,Indonesian, French

• Jastrow, Morris (1905). "Arabic Language and Lit-erature". New International Encyclopedia.

22 20 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

20 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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20.1 Text 23

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24 20 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

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