Arabic has the following two meanings:
1. ( language ) a language originally from the Arabian peninsula and the language in which the Quran is supposed to be read
2. an alphabet derived from the Arametic language used for writing Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, and Uyghur Arabic
Arabic (العَرَبِيَّة) is a Semitic language spoken by about 225,000,000 people in the Middle East and North Africa . It is part of the Central Semitic subgroup , which also includes Hebrew and Neo -Aramaic . Closest to Arabic is the Maltese language , sometimes defined as an Arabic dialect.
Arabic is a Central Semitic language closely related to northwestern Semitic languages ( Aramaic , Hebrew , Ugaritic , Phoenician ), ancient South Arabic, and some other Semitic languages from Arabia, such as Dadan . Semitic languages vary considerably between Proto -Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages, especially in the field of grammar.
The earliest surviving texts in ancient North Arabic , the forerunner of modern Arabic, are the inscriptions in Al-Hasa in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula . They date back to the 8th century BC. and use the South Arabic alphabet , a script that is not related to today’s Arabic alphabet . Similar inscriptions on stone have been preserved from the following centuries throughout the Arabian Peninsula and in Sinai . In the 2nd century BC. the language used is beginning to approach classical Arabic .
In the 4th century, the Arab states of the Lachmids in southern Mesopotamia , the Hassanids in southern Syria and the Kindite Kingdom in central Arabia were formed. Some remarkable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry have been created in their royal courts, as well as some of the few surviving pre-Islamic inscriptions using the Arabic alphabet.
Classical Arabic was the main spoken form of Arabic until the time of the Abbasids . This is the language in which the Qur’an , the holy book of Islam , is written . According to Islamic theology, the Qur’an is the literal word of God and is therefore untranslatable. This determines the special role of classical Arabic in the religious and cultural life of the Islamic world . To this day, many Arabic writers strive to adhere to syntactic and grammatical norms and use the vocabulary of the classical language used in the Qur’an and described by early linguists such as Sibaweich .
The modern literary form of Arabic is called the modern standard Arabic language . It is based on classical Arabic, including foreign borrowings and neologisms that reflect the modern needs of the language. This is the literary form used in most modern Arabic publications and media and spoken by most educated people in the Arab world . In many places, standard Arab coexists in a state of diglossia with local dialects of Arabic, some of which are not mutually intelligible.
List of Acronyms Related to Arabic
