Arabic Language

Arabic is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum. Its speech area covers North Africa, most of the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Middle East. More than 450 million people speak it, and it holds official status in nearly 25 countries.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, the family of languages spread across North Africa and Southwest Asia. Within that branch it is the most widely spoken language. Its classification as a macrolanguage in the ISO 639 standard reflects the fact that a single code may stand for one language in some usage contexts and for two or more individual languages in others; the standard assigns Arabic the three-letter code ara. Under that macrolanguage fall many individual languages, each with its own code, among them Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Hijazi Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Chadian Arabic, Cypriot Arabic and Standard Arabic.

An Arabic word combines a root of generally three consonants with a pattern of vowels, so that the root k-t-b yields kitab, "book," under one pattern and katib, "one who writes," under another. Verbs are regular in conjugation, with a perfect and an imperfect tense, and are inflected for three persons, three numbers — singular, dual, and plural — and two genders. The alphabet consists of 28 letters, all representing consonants, and is written from right to left. Its 17 characters, with dots added above or below, provide those 28 letters, while short vowels are indicated by signs rather than letters. Short vowels are generally left unmarked in the alphabet; diacritical marks for short vowels and grammatical endings developed in the 8th century CE.

Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an and of most pre-modern literary works, and it stands as the base of Arabic syntactic and grammatical norms. The written language of Islamic scholarship took the language of the Qur'an as its inimitable yardstick, a belief that developed into the critical doctrine of the inimitability of the Qur'an and produced a literary language that has changed remarkably little over the centuries. Modern Standard Arabic is similar to but easier than Classical Arabic; it is understood across the Arab world and used by television presenters and politicians, in newspapers and in works of modern Arabic literature.

The spoken varieties of Arabic differ significantly from one another, and roughly four major regional dialect groups have been identified — Maghreb, Egyptian, Levantine and Iraqi/Gulf — which can differ greatly to the point of mutual unintelligibility. An Arabic speaker from Iraq can find it almost impossible to understand a local Algerian, and vice versa, but both are able to communicate in Modern Standard Arabic. The result is a diglossic situation in which a primarily written, formal register coexists with purely spoken forms.

Together these make up the six cursive scripts naskh, thuluth, muhaqqaq, rayhani, tawqi', and riqa'. With the official recension of the Qur'an completed during the reign of the third caliph 'Uthman (r. 644-56), the written circulation of the Holy Book complemented and facilitated its oral transmission.

By the late 19th century reproduction of the text by mechanical printing techniques was permitted, but even then the text to be printed was written out by a scribe working in the traditional manner.

The Arabic script is a North Semitic script that is likely descended from the Nabataean alphabet and was adapted to the sound system of Arabic. Although it probably developed in the 4th century CE as a direct descendant of the Nabataean alphabet, its origins and early history are vague: some scholars take the earliest extant example to be a royal Nabataean funerary inscription of 328 CE, while others hold that the earliest extant example of Arabic is a trilingual inscription in Greek, Syriac and Arabic dating from 512 CE. The Nabataean script in turn gave rise to the neo-Sinaitic alphabet, the ancestor of the Arabic alphabet.

Calligraphy occupies the most elevated position among the arts of the Islamic world, a standing bound to the transmission of the Qur'an in Arabic and to the script's own capacity for ornamental variation. Even at its most decorative, it remains principally a means of conveying a text, and its use as ornament carried a talismanic dimension beneath its aesthetic appeal. The craft was never confined to religious purposes: inscriptions record poems, praise for rulers and aphorisms, and the calligrapher's pen on paper was imitated across a wide range of materials.

Two scripts dominated the early period. Kufic, a thick and bold monumental style, took shape in Kufah in Iraq toward the end of the 7th century CE, while Naskhi, a flowing script suited to papyrus and paper, emerged in Mecca and Medina and stands as the direct ancestor of modern Arabic writing. Kufic fell out of general use about the 11th century. By about 1000 the cursive naskhi had been established for copying the Qur'an and became the most popular script in the Arab world.

From the 10th century calligraphers set aside the primitive and defective Kufi script in favour of the cursive scripts pioneered by Ibn Muqla and refined by Ibn al-Bawwab and Yaqut al-Musta'simi. Further styles followed: Thuluth and Maghribi, Diwani as adapted by the Ottomans for official documents, and Taliq with its descendant Nastaliq, the primary style for Persian, Dari, Pashto and Urdu in modern times.

Nasta'liq developed on Persian grounds at the hands of Persian calligraphers, its invention attributed to Mir' Ali Tabrizi. First called naskh ta'liq, it was formed from the properties of naskh and ta'liq. In the 15th century it was carried from Western Iran to the Ottoman capital, where it was known as ta'liq, and to India for writing Urdu. Its elegance, balance and beauty earned it the name bride of Islamic calligraphy.

During the Prophet's lifetime close companions wrote down verses he had recited, but the transmission of the Qur'an among the early Muslim community was by recitation and spoken word until the caliph Uthman ibn Affan collected the verses into the book's current form. Presenting the words of the Qur'an with precision and clarity is of great importance to Muslims.

For most of Islamic history the Qur'an has been preserved in manuscript; a distinctive form established by the 8th century, exemplified by pages written in Kufic script, continued until the 10th century, when changes in materials, script and format made copies of the Qur'an more like other fine manuscripts. From about the same time more fluid styles of script were developed, and by the 13th century these had replaced the older hands in Qur'an production, while a gradual process of refinement gave rise to distinctive regional or dynastic styles.

The earliest surviving examples of Arabic literary composition consist of a highly elaborate system of poetry and a series of oratorical and often homiletic utterances whose elevated language was later reflected in the style of the Qur'anic revelations.

After the rapid spread of the Islamic faith across Africa and into Asia, written and spoken Arabic came to inhabit opposite ends of a linguistic spectrum, and the spoken language displayed enormous variety from Spain and Morocco in the west to the Arabian Gulf and Iraq in the east.

Standard Arabic remains almost exclusively the only recognized language of literacy across the Arabic-speaking world and is the language of a large body of texts from the golden age of Islamic civilization, including major medieval scholarly works in fields such as science, medicine, astronomy, mathematics and sociology.

The caliph al-Mamun founded an academy in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom, where al-Khwarizmi and his colleagues the Banu Musa translated Greek scientific manuscripts and studied algebra, geometry and astronomy. Al-Khwarizmi compiled astronomical tables covering calendars and the positions of the sun, moon and planets, and a geographical work giving latitudes and longitudes for 2402 localities as the basis for a world map. The Latin translation Algoritmi de numero Indorum describes the Hindu place-value system based on the nine digits and zero and gave rise to the word algorithm from al-Khwarizmi's name in its title.

Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, an Arab philologist born about 718 in Oman and died about 791 in Basra, compiled the first Arabic dictionary and is credited with formulating the rules of Arabic prosody; his Kitab al-ayn is arranged according to a novel alphabetical order based on a letter's place of articulation in the mouth. Al-Kitab fi an-nahw by Sibawayh of Basra was long used by later scholars of Arabic. Al-Khwarizmi's Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala, dedicated to the caliph al-Mamun, was the first book written on the subject. The Indian numerals did not pass directly from India to Europe but came first to the Arabic and Islamic peoples and reached Europe through the western Arabic lands by way of Spain.

In the 7th and 8th centuries the Arab followers of Muhammad conquered territories from the Atlantic to Sindh, spreading written and spoken Arabic, which became the official language of administration and the language of religion and learning. Arabic belongs to the Semitic family of languages, and the Arab Conquests beginning in the 7th century CE carried it across the Middle East and North Africa, where it became the prominent language while older tongues such as Aramaic and Coptic shrank. In turn many languages, among them Persian, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish and Portuguese, borrowed words from Arabic.

In time the scholarship of the Islamic world served to fuel the greatest minds of Europe and the rebirth of learning known as the Renaissance.

Arabic is the official language of the 22 countries which form the Arab League and is the native language of over 200 million people in a region stretching from Southwest Asia to Northwest Africa. It is spoken today by over 250 million people in the Middle East and North Africa, and it also serves the world's Muslims, around one billion people, as a religious and liturgical language.

The 2025 World Arabic Language Day event took place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris under the theme Innovative Pathways for Arabic with support from the Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Foundation. The 2024 World Arabic Language Day programme included sessions on Arabic AI innovation, cultural and linguistic preservation and digital empowerment. The UNESCO Director-General described Arabic as a language of profound history and boundless creativity that will remain a source of inspiration and a bridge between cultures.

• 7th–8th century
  Arab conquests
  The Arab conquests spread the script.^{6Calligraphy: Arabic calligraphy · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}
• 8th–10th century
  Earliest surviving Qur'ans
  The earliest surviving Qur'ans, written on parchment.^{6Calligraphy: Arabic calligraphy · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}
• 13th century
  Fluid styles
  Fluid styles replaced older hands.^{11Calligraphy in Islamic art · Victoria and Albert Museum ↗}
• 15th century
  Nasta'liq travels
  Nasta'liq was taken to the Ottoman capital and India.^{14Nasta'liq · World History Encyclopedia ↗}
• 18 December 1973
  UN resolution 3190 (XXVIII)
  United Nations resolution 3190 (XXVIII).^{21World Arabic Language Day · United Nations ↗}
• 18 December, since 2012
  World Arabic Language Day
  World Arabic Language Day celebrated every year.^{21World Arabic Language Day · United Nations ↗}
• 1202
  Fibonacci's Liber abaci
  Fibonacci's Liber abaci.^{19The Arabic numeral system · MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews ↗}