Arabic

Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, al-ʿarabiyyah [al ʕaraˈbijːa] (listen) or عَرَبِيّ, ʿarabīy [ˈʕarabiː] (listen) or [ʕaraˈbij]) is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE.^[3] It is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam.^[4] It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the Arabian Peninsula bounded by eastern Egypt in the west, Mesopotamia in the east, and the Anti-Lebanon mountains and northern Syria in the north, as perceived by ancient Greek geographers.^[5] The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic,^[6] also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized 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 ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ^[7] "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).

Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media.^[8] Arabic, in its Modern Standard Arabic form, is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory, the third most after English and French;^[9]it is also the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and the Hadiths were written in Classical Arabic.^[10]

During the early Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in the Mediterranean region, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many 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 both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arabized civilizations and the long-lasting Muslim culture and Arabic language presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. The Maltese language is a Semitic language developed from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet.^[11] The Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significant number of words of Arabic origin through contact with Ottoman Turkish.

Arabic has influenced many other languages around the globe throughout its history especially languages of Muslim cultures and countries that were conquered by Muslims. Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu),^[12] Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia^[13] Hebrew and Hausa and some languages in parts of Africa (e.g. Swahili, Somali). Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Aramaic as well as Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Persian and to a lesser extent Turkish (due to the Ottoman Empire), English and French (due to their colonization of the Levant) and other Semitic languages such as Abyssinian.

Arabic is the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims, and Arabic^[14] is one of six official languages of the United Nations.^{[15][16][17][18]} All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world,^[19] making it the fifth most spoken language in the world,^[20] and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users.^[21][22] In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic the fourth most useful language for business, after English, Standard Mandarin Chinese, and French.^[23] Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography.