Arabic is an official language of 27 countries located in North Africa and the Middle East. It is the first language of approximately 206 million speakers and ranks fifth in the world’s most widely spoken languages.
Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic branch of languages. It is most closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, although there is no mutual intelligibility between them. The term ‘Arabic’ is a generic term that refers to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Classical Arabic and Colloquial Arabic. MSA is the form used in formal situations, education and by the media while Classical Arabic refers primarily to the written language of the Qu’ran and other literary texts of the same era.
Colloquial Arabic, on the other hand, refers to localised spoken varieties of which 35 forms have been identified. Distinguished as North African or Middle Eastern, the major groups are: Egyptian Arabic, Maghreb Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Gulf Arabic, East Arabian Arabic
Arabic uses a script based originally on the Nabatean alphabet and is written from right-to-left although numbers and foreign language words, such as English words, are written from left-to-right within Arabic text. |