27 Facts About Arabic language

Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard prestige language—i.

Combined, Arabic dialects have 362 million native speakers, while MSA is spoken by 274 million L2 speakers, making it the sixth most spoken language in the world.

Arabic language is traditionally written with the Arabic language alphabet, a right-to-left abjad.

Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic language was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat Al-Faw, in southern present-day Saudi Arabia.

In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic language emerged in the Hejaz, which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic language had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition .

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The standardization of Arabic language reached completion around the end of the 8th century.

Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language.

Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages.

Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic language, descended from Siculo-Arabic language, though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently with English.

Issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots and English, etc.

The issue of diglossia between spoken and written Arabic language is a significant complicating factor: A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms.

From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.

Arabic language has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools.

Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world.

Influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran.

Classical Arabic language pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and different reconstructions of the sound system of Proto-Semitic propose different phonetic values.

The point is, Arabic language has only three short vowel phonemes, so those phonemes can have a very wide range of allophones.

Arabic language has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology: A root consists of a set of bare consonants, which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words.

Nouns in Literary Arabic language have three grammatical cases ; three numbers ; two genders ; and three "states" .

Adjectives in Literary Arabic language are marked for case, number, gender and state, as for nouns.

Arabic language alphabet derives from the Aramaic through Nabatean, to which it bears a loose resemblance like that of Coptic or Cyrillic scripts to Greek script.

Originally Arabic language was made up of only rasm without diacritical marks Later diacritical points were added .

In modern times the intrinsically calligraphic nature of the written Arabic form is haunted by the thought that a typographic approach to the language, necessary for digitized unification, will not always accurately maintain meanings conveyed through calligraphy.

However, in Egypt and Arabic language-speaking countries to the east of it, the Eastern Arabic language numerals are in use.

When representing a number in Arabic language, the lowest-valued position is placed on the right, so the order of positions is the same as in left-to-right scripts.

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Arabic language believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology.

In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic language alphabet had strong connections to Arab values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic language alphabet in Muslim societies.