Why Study Arabic?

• Arabic is the national language of twenty countries, including those in which western civilization was born.
• It is the native language of approximately 300 million people.
• It is the liturgical language of over one billion Muslims.
• It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
• Arabic has a rich literary, poetic, and scholarly tradition.
• It plays a vital role in today's global political and economic landscape.
• Many common words in English and other European languages derive from Arabic.
• The Arabic writing system is at the heart of an entire art form.
• Along with its sister Semitic languages, Arabic is built on a unique linguistic system known as root and pattern morphology.
• Arabic exemplifies a sociolinguistic pattern known as diglossia, involving a complex relationship between literary and spoken forms of the language.