How Arabic Works

posted on: Feb 8, 2010

Written Arabic has existed for about 14 centuries without major change; its literature is vast and a key to understanding the development of world history. While Europe entered the dark ages after the fall of the Roman empire, Arabic carried the torch of classical learning, and much that we know today in the realms of chemistry, medicine, astronomy and other branches of scientific endeavour would have been lost, were it not for the achievements of Arab scholars and translators.

While written Arabic has remained much the same for centuries, spoken Arabic varies from place to place. Standard Arabic is the standard written language of more than 150 million inhabitants of the Arab states, ranging from Morocco in the west, to Iraq in the east.

In addition to this, it is used by Muslims all over the world as a language of religion. It is the literary language and is generally not spoken, though it survives in formal TV and radio broadcasts, political speeches and so on.

In modern everyday life in the Arab countries, so-called vernacular or dialect Arabic has supplanted Standard Arabic for spoken communication. Very roughly the Arabic dialects divide into the following groups: north Africa, from Morocco to Libya; Egypt and the Sudan; Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria; Iraq and the Arabian peninsula.

These related pages will give you an introduction to the latter group: the spoken Arabic of the Gulf region. This is a group of closely related dialects, concentrated on the nations of the Arab Gulf from Kuwait down through Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the Oman. Many of the dialects of Saudi Arabia are closely related, as is that of (especially southern) Iraq.

Many people are put off learning Arabic because of the apparently difficult script. In fact, this is one of the easiest and most rewarding aspects of learning Arabic. The Arabic alphabet consists of only 29 letters, and its spelling is 95% phonetic and therefore largely self-explanatory – something that could never be said for English.

Guardian.Co.UK