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‎العربية ┃ Arabic ▢𓏺｜Definition｜1st｜20260117143503-00-◊

Arabic - Wikipedia

Arabic

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Arabic1 is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world.2 The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic,3 which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā (اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ الْفُصْحَى4 “the eloquent Arabic”) or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَى).

Arabic is the third–most widespread official language after English and French,5 one of six official languages of the United Nations,6 and the liturgical language of Islam.7 Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media.7 Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world,[^1] making it the fifth–most spoken language in the world8 and the fourth–most used language on the Internet in terms of users.910 It also serves as the liturgical language of around two billion Muslims.6 In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic the fourth–most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese, and French.11 Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script that is written from right to left.

During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, and Sicilian) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet.12 The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian, have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has also influenced other languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam had a historic presence. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu),13 Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia,14 Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, Tamazight, and Swahili. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to a lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian.

Classical Arabic (and Modern Standard Arabic) is considered a conservative language among Semitic languages; it preserved the complete Proto-Semitic three grammatical cases and declension (ʾiʿrāb), and it was used in the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic since it preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes.15

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, romanized: al-ʿarabiyyah, pronounced [æl ʕɑrɑˈbɪj.jæ], or عَرَبِيّ, ʿarabiyy, pronounced [ˈʕɑrɑbiː] or [ʕɑrɑˈbɪj] ↩

  2. Al-Jallad, Ahmad (16 November 2015). “Al-Jallad. The earliest stages of Arabic and its linguistic classification”. Routledge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics, forthcoming. p. 315. ISBN 978-1-315-14706-2. Archived from the original on 23 October 2017. Retrieved 15 July 2016. ↩

  3. “Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: ara”. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 20 March 2018. ↩

  4. Kamusella, Tomasz (2017). “The Arabic Language: A Latin of Modernity?” (PDF). Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics. 11 (2): 117–145. doi:10.1515/jnmlp-2017-0006. hdl:10023/12443. ISSN 2570-5857. S2CID 158624482. Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 December 2019. Retrieved 28 June 2019. ↩

  5. Wright (2001:492) ↩

  6. “What are the official languages of the United Nations? – Ask DAG!”. ask.un.org. Archived from the original on 5 February 2016. Retrieved 21 December 2019. ↩ ↩2

  7. World, I.H. “Arabic”. IH World. Retrieved 7 July 2021. ↩ ↩2

  8. Lane, James (2 June 2021). “The 10 Most Spoken Languages In The World”. Babbel. Retrieved 29 June 2021. ↩

  9. “Internet: most common languages online 2020”. Statista. Retrieved 26 November 2021. ↩

  10. “Top Ten Internet Languages in The World - Internet Statistics”. www.internetworldstats.com. Archived from the original on 7 September 2019. Retrieved 26 November 2021. ↩

  11. “Mandarin Chinese Most Useful Business Language After English - Bloomberg Business”. Bloomberg News. 29 March 2015. Archived from the original on 29 March 2015. Retrieved 2 January 2022. ↩

  12. “Maltese language”. Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 24 September 2019. Retrieved 21 December 2019. ↩

  13. Versteegh, Kees; Versteegh, C. H. M. (1997). The Arabic Language. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-11152-2… of the Qufdn; many Arabic loanwords in the indigenous languages, as in Urdu and Indonesian, were introduced mainly through the medium of Persian. ↩

  14. Bhabani Charan Ray (1981). “Appendix B Persian, Turkish, Arabic words generally used in Oriya”. Orissa Under the Mughals: From Akbar to Alivardi: a Fascinating Study of the Socio-economic and Cultural History of Orissa. Orissan studies project, 10. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak. p. 213. OCLC 461886299. ↩

  15. Versteegh, Cornelis Henricus Maria “Kees” (1997). The Arabic Language. Columbia University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-231-11152-2. ↩

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