Technical sheet

Name of the language in Arabic : العربية

Spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Palestine (West Bank and Gaza), Western Sahara (SADR), Yemen by a majority, and in many other countries, such as Israel and Iran, as a minority language; it is also the liturgical language of Islam.

by around 258.000.000 people

Particular features: Arabic is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. In the past, many languages - including non-Semitic ones - used its alphabet (Persian, Turkish, Maltese and Wolof in Africa), and still today various Indo-European languages are written using Arabic fonts. The alphabet has many consonants and few vowels, and these are pronounced so softly that it is often difficult for us to distinguish them. Many of the 28 letters are completely different to ours. The Arabic consonants can reproduce all the sounds the human throat is capable of producing, therefore from this point of view Arabic may be considered one of the richest languages in existence. Through the Koran, which has remained unaltered over the centuries, Arabic has managed to preserve this richness of sounds, avoiding the phonetic simplification undergone by many languages. Its alphabet contains 28 letters, only 3 of which are vowels: a, i, u. It is written from right to left, so that an Arabic book must be read starting from the last page. The script, which does not make use of capital letters, looks like a sort of short hand, in which the pronunciation of the words must be sensed on the basis of its consonants. In order to facilitate reading, consonants are often turned into "vowels" by placing small signs over or below the letters. The shape of the letters varies slightly depending on their position, either at the start, the middle or the end of a word. Arabic grammar, unlike its phonetics and script, has many elements in common with Italian, e.g. in the use of two genders (male and female), of adjectives matching nouns, of prepositions and articles, and in the conjugation of verbs. The main difference lies in the presence of three "numbers": singular, plural and dual, the latter used in the presence of two subjects. Verbs are placed before the subject, and take on a different forms to express the passive, the reflexive, etc. Adjectives come after nouns, and personal pronouns are affixed to the end of the verb. An unusual fact: Words are often formed by three letters, known as roots, which, combined in various ways, create other words with meanings that are more or less close to that of the original root. The official language is commonly known as "classical Arabic-اللغة العربية؛الفصحى". Some countries (North Africa, etc.) use our same numbering system ( 1234567890), while others (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc.), adopt the following numbers: ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠ (or ۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰).

Code ISO639-1: ar

encoding: iso-8859-6, windows-1256

script: Arabic

آ ـآ ا ـا ب بـبـب ت تـتـت ث ثـثـث ج جـجـج ح حـحـح خ خـخـخ د ـد ذ ـذ ر ـر ز ـز س سـسـس ش شـشـش ص صـصـص ض ضـضـض ط طـطـط ظ ظـظـظ ع عـعـع غ غـغـغ ف فـفـف ڤ ڤـڤـڤ ق قـقـق ك كـكـك ل لـلـل م مـمـم ن نـنـن ه هـهـه ة ـة و ـو ي يـيـي ( ی یـیـی ) ى ـى

Main search engines:
http://www.google.com/intl/ar/
http://dmoz.org/World/Arabic/
http://www.albawaba.com/

Other sites: Menara, Naseej