60 Fun Facts About Arabic

Arabic belongs to which language family?

Within Afroasiatic it is a Central Semitic language, a cousin of Hebrew and Aramaic.

In which direction is Arabic written?

Like other Semitic scripts, apart from Latin-written Maltese and the Ge'ez script languages, it runs right to left.

How many letters are in the basic Arabic alphabet?

Most letters change shape depending on whether they sit at the start, middle or end of a word.

What kind of writing system is the Arabic alphabet, in which letters record only consonants?

Because vowel marks are optional it is classed as an impure abjad.

Roughly how many people speak Arabic, native and non-native combined?

That makes it the fifth-most spoken language on Earth and the fourth-most used on the internet by users.

Arabic is one of how many official languages of the United Nations?

The others are English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese; Arabic joined in 1973.

On what date is UN Arabic Language Day observed?

It marks the day in 1973 when the General Assembly approved Arabic as an official UN language.

Which national language grew from an Arabic dialect but is written in the Latin alphabet?

It descends from extinct Siculo-Arabic and is the only Semitic language written in Latin script.

Which European language shows the heaviest Arabic influence, thanks to centuries of Al-Andalus?

Portuguese, Catalan and Sicilian picked up plenty too, and the Balkan languages got theirs via Ottoman Turkish.

Which of these English words is of Arabic origin?

Admiral, alcohol, algorithm, coffee, magazine, sofa and zenith all arrived the same way, mostly via other Mediterranean languages.

Which of these everyday English words also came from Arabic?

So did sherbet, candy, lemon, cotton and jar.

What do Arabic speakers call classical and modern standard Arabic, meaning "the eloquent"?

The split into Classical and Modern Standard Arabic is mainly a Western linguists' distinction.

What is the term for using two varieties of one language in different social settings, as in Arabic?

Educated Arabs speak their school-taught standard plus a native dialect, and switch between them, sometimes mid-sentence.

Which spoken dialect is among the most widely understood in the Arab world, thanks to its films and TV?

Around 67 million people speak it in Egypt alone.

Which North African dialect is hardest for Arabic speakers east of Libya to understand?

The reverse is not true, largely because Egyptian media is watched everywhere.

Maghrebi Arabic, spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, is also known by what name?

It has roughly 70 million speakers and, through extinct Sicilian Arabic, is the ancestor of Maltese.

Which Iraqi word means "there is", where a Levantine speaker would say fīh and a North African kayən?

All three descend from different Classical Arabic forms, much as Romance languages kept different Latin words.

Who is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar and pioneering the dots that distinguish consonants?

He lived from about 603 to 689; the standardization of the language was complete by around the end of the 8th century.

Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi compiled the first Arabic dictionary. What was it called?

Its title means 'The Book of the Letter ع'; al-Farahidi also set down the rules of Arabic prosody.

Ibn Manzur's great 1290 dictionary Lisān al-ʿArab has a title meaning what?

It records 9,273 roots; the later Tāj al-ʿArūs of 1774 lists 11,978.

Whose al-Kitāb was the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language?

He built it on a corpus of poetry, Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants he considered reliable speakers.

Most Arabic words are built from a root of how many consonants?

The root k-t-b ('write') plus the pattern -a-a-tu gives katabtu, 'I wrote'.

How many consonant phonemes does Modern Standard Arabic have?

It also has six vowel phonemes, and length is contrastive for both consonants and vowels.

Which script style is the one used in print and by computers?

Ruqʻah is the everyday handwriting style used for correspondence.

Which two letters form the only mandatory ligature in Arabic writing?

Six letters, including alif, dāl and wāw, can only join to the letter before them, never the one after.

Which three Arabic letters share one basic shape and differ only by their dots?

One dot below makes b, two above make t and three above make th; early Quran manuscripts often omitted the dots entirely.

Arabic script evolved from which earlier script between the 4th and 6th centuries?

Nabataean itself came from Aramaic, so the relationship is like that of Cyrillic to Greek.

The Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays, dates to which year?

It was found at Namaraa in Syria; the oldest surviving Arabic papyrus dates from 643 CE.

Where were the earliest known lines of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern script found?

They are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm'allāhe, dated to around 125 CE.

In Egypt and countries east of it, which set of digits is normally used?

Most of North Africa uses the 0-9 Western forms familiar in Europe.

How is the number 24 spoken in Arabic?

Units come before tens, just as in German vierundzwanzig.

Which Italian scholar's 13th-century Liber Abaci was crucial in spreading Arabic numerals in Europe?

He met the numerals in the Algerian city of Béjaïa.

In the informal online "Arabic chat alphabet", which numeral often stands in for the letter ⟨ع⟩ (ʿayn)?

Numerals were borrowed because early computers and phones could only type Latin letters.

Which 19th-century literary renaissance sought to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression?

Its writers tried to simplify the language and script to reach a wider audience.

Which city hosted the first Arabic language academy modelled on the Académie française, in 1919?

Cairo followed in 1932, Baghdad in 1948 and Rabat in 1960; the academies approve new words for standard dictionaries.

Which Baghdad institution translated Classical Greek terms into Arabic in the early Abbasid period?

Arabic had earlier absorbed vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish during the conquests.

Which Andalusi Jewish philosopher wrote in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew script?

By the 8th century Classical Arabic was a prerequisite for advancement in the Islamic world for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Which two languages did Bloomberg Businessweek rank above Arabic, after English, for business in 2011?

Arabic came fourth on that list.

Which two languages are ranked ahead of Arabic as the world's most widespread official languages?

It is also the liturgical language of roughly two billion Muslims.

The Arabic word al-hatif, once meaning an unseen voice, was repurposed to mean what?

Giving an old classical word a new shade of meaning is called tawleed.

Which Persian loanword for a blue stone gave English the colour word 'azure' via Arabic?

It names lapis lazuli and became azur in French and azul in Spanish and Portuguese.

The name of the broadcaster Al Jazeera comes from a Syriac-origin word meaning what?

Medina, meaning city, is another Arabic word with Aramaic roots.

Which British Arabist compiled the Arabic-English Lexicon in the second half of the 19th century?

He worked with the Egyptian scholar Ibrāhīm ad-Dasūqī; German Hans Wehr's dictionary of modern written Arabic came in 1952.

Which French Orientalist led a failed 1920s push to write Lebanese Arabic in Latin letters?

The Damascus academy saw the plan as a Western takeover attempt; poet Said Akl later invented his own Latin alphabet for Lebanese.

Which Semitic language, the main pre-Islamic loan source for Arabic, was the ancient Near East's lingua franca?

Ethiopic, Middle Persian and Greek also fed the vocabulary; the Greek khymia became kīmiyāʼ, alchemy.

Maltese speakers reportedly understand under a third of which Arabic dialect, the one closest to their own?

Tunisian speakers manage about 40 percent of Maltese; the intelligibility is asymmetric.

Which small community's Arabic dialect is spoken by only several hundred people in the Nablus region?

Cypriot Maronite Arabic has about 9,800 speakers, and Shirvani Arabic in Azerbaijan died out in the 1930s.

Most Qatari citizens speak which dialect, rather than the Gulf variety used around them?

Najdi Arabic has around 10 million speakers, mainly in central and northern Saudi Arabia.

Who led Cairo's Arabic academy when its historical dictionary's volume 1 appeared in 1956?

Al-Muʿjam al-Kabīr was still unfinished as of 2022, when volume 15, covering the letter ṣād, appeared.

After the early Muslim conquests, Arabic absorbed vocabulary from Turkish and which other language?

Greek terms arrived later via translations at Baghdad's House of Wisdom in the early Abbasid period.

Ancient South Palestinian, a Middle Arabic dialect of 9th-10th century monks, is heavily influenced by what?

The influence shows in both grammar and morphology of the texts produced by Christian monks in Palestine.

Which of these English words did NOT come from Arabic, per the article's list of loanwords?

Arabic gave English admiral, adobe, alchemy, algorithm, arsenal, assassin, candy, cipher, ghoul, hazard, kismet, sofa and tariff, among many others.

Besides Maltese, which other language derives ultimately from Arabic rather than merely borrowing from it?

Swahili, Hausa and Somali are among dozens of languages that borrow Arabic vocabulary without descending from it.

Through which language did most Arabic loanwords enter Hindustani and Turkish?

Similarly, older Arabic loans in Hausa came via Kanuri, and most Arabic words in Yoruba arrived through Hausa.

The Spanish placeholder word fulano, meaning 'so-and-so', is a borrowing from which language?

Spanish taza and French tasse for 'cup' are Arabic too, as is the Catalan expression a betzef, meaning 'galore'.

Modern Hebrew drew on Modern Standard Arabic for what during its revival?

Arabic occupied a place in the Islamic world much like Latin in Europe, so scholarly coinages from Arabic roots spread widely.

Around which year did Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi finally fix the Arabic script?

Calligraphy remains a major Arab art form; a current master of the genre is Hassan Massoudy.

How does the ALA-LC romanisation distinguish 's' followed by 'h' from the single sound 'sh'?

So as′hal, 'easier', avoids being read as 'ash-hal'; the Chat Alphabet instead uses numerals like 3 for ʿayn.

Which Egyptian scholar argued that writing Arabic in Latin letters would bring Egypt closer to the West?

Some Egyptians even floated reviving hieroglyphs instead; a 1944 push led by Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi also failed.

According to Charles Ferguson, the koiné behind modern dialects merged which two emphatic consonants?

Other koiné features include loss of the dual on verbs, new indirect-object suffixes and the relative pronoun illi.