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Arabic is the official language of the 22 countries which form the Arab League: It’s the native language of over 200m people residing in this geographical region, which stretches from Southwest...
- Videos
The Arabic alphabet. All the sounds, from alif to ya and...
- The Alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, or الأبجدية [el abjadiyya], consists of...
- Key Phrases
BBC Languages - Learn Arabic in your own time and have fun...
- Middle East
Get the latest BBC News from the Middle East: breaking news,...
- Videos
- There's No Agreement on How Old The Language Is
- The Oldest Arabic Inscription Dates to 470 CE
- Arabic Is Related to Hebrew and Amharic
- There Are Dozens of Arabic Dialects
- There's An EU Language Closely Related to Arabic
- Arabic Was Once Spoken as Far East as Central Asia
- Arabic Loanwords Are Found in Many Languages
Depending on who you ask, the earliest records of Arabic appear as far back as the second millenium BCE, around the eighth-century BCEor as late as the fourth-century BCE. The reason for the debate is establishing what constitutes the Arabic language as we know it today. Languages spoken today are evolved versions of languages that were spoken thou...
A 2014 discovery by a French-Saudi-led team unearthed the world’s oldest known inscription written in the Arabic script – "Thawban Ibn Malik" were the three words etched into stone, alongside what is thought to be a Christian cross. The stone slab was discovered in Najran in Saudi Arabia and is said to date from around 470 CE. The text is thought ...
Arabic is a member of the Semitic language family, which itself is a member of the Afro-Asiatic family. The Semitic family includes languages still spoken today, such as Hebrew in Israel and Amharic in Ethiopia, as well as extinct languages that were once widely spoken, such as Akkadian and Phoenician. Belonging to a language family means that at s...
Modern Standard Arabic remains a unifying dialect across the Arab world and is used in formal broadcasts, religious sermons and literature, but in day-to-day life Arabs speak a diverse array of dialects. Sometimes differences between dialects can be so big that two native Arabic speakers cannot communicate without resorting to formal Arabic or a mo...
Maltese, the national language of Malta, was given official language status when the island joined the European Union in 2004, and is the only Semitic language to have that designation. The country’s 450,000 natives speak a language that has its roots in Arabic, as it was spoken when the nearby island of Sicily was ruled by North African Muslims. A...
After the founding of Islam, successive Arab empires established control over a territory that spanned from Morocco in the west to the borders of what is now China. This led to mass movements of people from the interior of the Middle East to areas on the periphery of the Islamic world to work as soldiers, administrators, religious leaders and merch...
Alcohol, arsenal, algebra, coffee, gauze, mascarade and safari are just a selection of words used in everyday English that have their roots in Arabic. Safari for example comes from the Arabic for "journey" or safar, while Arsenal comes from the Arabic dar al-sina'or "house of production". Some languages owe more of their vocabulary to Arabic than o...
Oct 25, 2024 · Arabic language, a Semitic language spoken in areas including North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Middle East. The language of the Qur’an (the sacred book of Islam) is often considered the ideal archetype of Arabic’s many varieties, and the literary standard closely approaches that archetype.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Surprising and revealing facts about the Arabic language, key phrases to get started, details on the Arabic alphabet and useful videos about the Arabic language.
- Choose a dialect from the beginning and stick with it. If you’re reading this and you’ve decided to learn Arabic but don’t know anything about it, it’s important that you know there are lots of different ‘Arabics’.
- I would not attempt to learn Modern Standard Arabic first. Or even at the same time as learning a spoken dialect. I say choose a variety of Arabic and stick with it but if your goal is to learn to speak Arabic, then forget about Modern Standard Arabic and focus on something people actually speak.
- Learn the alphabet immediately and not just resort to Arabizi / Franco Arabic. If you want to learn Arabic, don’t be put off by the alphabet! Arabic script is actually what’s called an abjad which means it’s an alphabet primarily made up of consonants without vowels.
- I would recognize and practice the importance of Arab acculturation and assimilation from day 1. This is one of the most important things I’ll tell you.
Modern Standard Arabic (اللغة العربية الفصحى / al-luġatu l-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā) - the universal language of the Arabic-speaking world which is understood by all Arabic speakers. It is the language of the vast majority of written material and of formal TV shows, lectures, etc.
Dec 18, 2015 · Arabic is the official language of the 22 countries that form the Arab League. There are more than 300 million Arabic speakers across the world, though they predominantly live in the region stretching across the Middle East and North Africa.
