Arabic Language

I

Introduction

Arabic Language, the language of written communication and of most formal, oral communication for speakers of Arabic dialects from Morocco to Iraq. Among Muslims, Arabic is considered sacred since it is the language through which the Qur'an (Koran) is believed to have been revealed. With the rise of Islam as a dominant religion after ad 622, Arabic became the most widespread of the living Semitic languages. Arabic is related to Hebrew, a Semitic language spoken in Israel, and to Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, as well as to the ancient Semitic languages. The earliest written inscriptions in Arabic are found in the Arabian Peninsula and date from the early 4th century ad. Today, Standard Arabic is a unifying bond among Arabs, and it is the liturgical language of Muslims in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

II

Classical and Colloquial Arabic

Arabic exists in two main forms: classical and colloquial. Classical Arabic, which has many archaic words, is the sacred language of Islam and the lingua franca of educated people throughout the Arabic world. Standard Arabic is a somewhat more modern form of classical Arabic and the more widely spoken form. However, neither variation is spoken by anyone as a mother tongue. Standard Arabic is the variation learned in school. Colloquial Arabic refers to the form of the language spoken as a mother tongue and generally heard on television and radio. Colloquial Arabic varies considerably from country to country, especially from northern Africa to the Middle East. These colloquial languages differ from Standard Arabic and from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The differences are great enough that some linguists consider the various forms of Arabic distinct languages.

The colloquial Arabic languages are sometimes classified as Western and Eastern. Western Arabic extends across northern Africa from Morocco to Libya, and into the neighboring countries to the south. Eastern Arabic covers the Middle East, Asia, and the African countries of Egypt and Sudan. But other geographical groupings are also used. Within these broad classifications, the daily speech of city-dwellers, rural people, and nomads is distinctly different. Uneducated people from widely separated parts of the Arabic world may not understand one another, even though each is speaking a version of Arabic.

III

Arabic Sound System

The sound system of Arabic has 28 consonants, including all the Semitic guttural sounds produced far back in the mouth and throat. Three of these consonants—alif, wāw, and yā—also represent long vowels. Each of the three vowels in standard Arabic occurs in a long and short form, creating the long and short syllables so important to the meter of Arabic poetry. Although the dialects retain the long vowels, they have lost many of the short-vowel contrasts.

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IV

Arabic Grammar

All Arabic word formation is based on an abstraction, namely, the root, usually consisting of three consonants. These root sounds join with various vowel patterns to form simple nouns and verbs to which affixes can be attached for more complicated derivations. For example, the borrowed term bank is considered to have the consonantal root b-n-k; film is formed from f-l-m.

Arabic has a very regular system of conjugating verbs and altering their stems to indicate variations on the basic meaning. This system is so regular that dictionaries of Arabic can refer to verbs by a number system (I-X). From the root k-s-r, the form I verb is kasar, “he broke”; form II is kassar, “he smashed to bits”; and form VII is inkasar, “it was broken up.”

Nouns and adjectives are less regular in formation, and have many different plural patterns. The so-called broken plurals are formed by altering the internal syllable shape of the singular noun. For example, for the borrowed words bank and film, the plurals are, respectively, bunuk for banks and aflam for films.

Normal sentence word order in standard Arabic is verb-subject-object. In poetry and in some prose styles, this word order can be altered; when that happens, subject and object can be distinguished by their case endings, that is, by suffixes that indicate the grammatical function of nouns. These suffixes are only spelled out fully in school textbooks and in the Qur'an to ensure an absolutely correct reading. In all other Arabic texts, these case endings (usually short vowels) are omitted, as are all internal short-vowel markings. The Arabic script does not include letters for these vowels; instead, they are small marks set above and below the consonantal script.

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