About the Arabic Language

Arabic is the native language of about 300 million people who live in North Africa and West Asia. It is the national language of 20 countries extending from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. It is also spoken in Malta and in pockets in central Asia and East Africa. It was spoken in Sicily up to the 18th century and in Spain up to the 15th. It is also spoken by large Arab immigrant communities in the Americas and West Africa and is the liturgical language of over one billion Muslims. Finally, Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic sub-family of the Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) family of languages. Many Semitic languages are extinct. These include Akkadian, Ugaritic, and South Arabian Languages, among others. The living Semitic languages include Arabic, modern Hebrew, pockets of Aramaic dialects, Assyrian, some Southern Arabian languages (Mahri, Shahri, Harsusi, Bathari, Socotri) and the Ethiopic languages of Tigrinia, Tigre, Amharic, Agrobba, Gurage.

The Semitic languages share a great number of linguistic features, including sounds, word formation, sentence structure, and much of the vocabulary, particularly basic vocabulary such as house, water, sun, man, eye, etc.

Like other Semitic alphabets, the Arabic alphabet is primarily consonantal. It consists of 28 letters, representing 28 consonants. Three letters are also used to represent the three long vowels of the language. Short vowels are represented by diacritics written above or below the letters.

Literary and Spoken Arabic

Arabs use two varieties of their language side by side, literary or formal Arabic, generally known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the spoken dialects.

MSA is the language of virtually all reading, writing, and formal (scripted) speaking such as political speeches, religious sermons, and formal lectures. It is the modern version of what is known as Classical Arabic or Fusha, the language of the Qur'an, old poetry, and old scholarly and literary works. In spite of innovations in vocabulary and style in the past two centuries, the grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) of MSA does not differ in any significant way from that of its ancestor, Classical Arabic. Most of the vocabulary is also shared.

The term MSA is quite misleading. MSA is the standard language of reading, writing, and formal speaking, but it is not the standard spoken, i.e. conversational language of any speech community anywhere in the sense that Standard American English and High German are. The Arabic term Fusha is preferable because it refers unambiguously to the written language.

The fact that one written language exists in all Arab countries, namely Fusha, is of great importance to the Arabs; it is a symbol of Arab cultural and political unity and past glory. However, in spite of the fact that most Arabs wish to see Fusha spoken by all Arabs in their daily lives and in spite of attempts by individuals and organizations to legislate its mandatory use in schools, universities, and other institutions, there is no group of people anywhere in the Arab world or elsewhere who use MSA for ordinary conversation, with the exception of-Arabic-as-a foreign-language-classrooms. The practice of using Fusha for ordinary conversation (in the home, the market place, at work, etc.) is generally viewed as either ludicrous or admirable, depending on the individual listener and his or her views on the subject, and on the speaker's mastery of Fusha and its grammar.

For oral communication, Arabs from different areas of the Arab world use different dialects, which are, for the most part, mutually intelligible. In general, the closer the dialects of the speakers geographically and the higher their level of education is, the less likely they are to have problems understanding and speaking with one another. Certain dialects are understood more readily by a wider audience than others, due to factors such as the influence of films, radio, and television programs. This is particularly true of Egyptian and Levantine (Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian).

The religious and pan-Arab nationalist prestige of Fusha has prevented the dialects from playing the part of a literary language in any Arab country. Coloquial literature is basically oral. Even children's books are written in Fusha. When a dialectal work of importance is written, it is generally translated into the literary language.