Arabic

• 1. Introduction

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  Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic family, and roughly 380 million people speak it. That figure makes it the fifth-most spoken language on Earth. Yet the speakers themselves draw a line that Western linguists draw differently. A scholar in a Western university separates Modern Standard Arabic from Classical Arabic. An Arabic speaker rarely does. To them, both are simply al-fuṣḥā, the eloquent Arabic.

  The International Organization for Standardization assigns codes to 32 varieties of this one language. Some of those varieties cannot understand one another at all. A speaker in Morocco and a speaker in Iraq may share a sacred written form while struggling to follow each other in speech. How did a single name come to cover so many tongues? Why does the language of the Quran differ from the language people use at home? And how did Arabic come to lend words like algebra, coffee, and admiral to English? The chapters ahead trace those questions through inscriptions in the desert, dictionaries counting thousands of roots, and a system that builds entire vocabularies from three bare consonants.

• 2. The Old Arabic Trail

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  Three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāh, found at En Avdat in present-day Israel, carry the earliest continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern script. They date to around 125 CE. The trail of Old Arabic runs through stone and sand, not through neat manuscripts.

  Arabia in antiquity held a wide variety of Semitic languages. Greek geographers first used the term "Arab" for people living in southern Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula. In the oases of the northern Hejaz, languages called Dadanitic and Taymanitic held prestige as inscriptional languages. Scholars long named desert dialects after the towns where their inscriptions surfaced: Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic.

  Safaitic and Hismaic share important isoglosses with later Arabic. That overlap led scholars to reclassify them as early forms of Arabic itself. For a time, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st-century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw in southern Saudi Arabia. That inscription, though, skips key innovations of the Arabic group, such as the shift from mimation to nunation in the singular. It is now best read as a separate language on the dialect continuum.

  The Namara inscription follows the En Avdat poetry. It is an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dated to 328 CE and found at Namara in Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script slowly became the Arabic script of the early Islamic era. An undotted, 17-letter form appears in 6th-century inscriptions at Zabad, Jebel Usays, Harran, and Umm el-Jimal. The oldest surviving Arabic papyrus, from 643 CE, already uses dots to give the full 28-letter alphabet.

• 3. Fixing The Language

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  Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali, who lived from roughly 603 to 689, is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar, known as an-naḥw, "the way." He pioneered a system of diacritics to tell consonants apart and to mark vocalization. The pointing for non-Arabs and the at-tashkīl marks both trace to his work.

  Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, who lived from 718 to 786, compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn, "The Book of the Letter ع." He also established the rules of Arabic prosody. His lexicon tried to exhaust every possible permutation of roots, marking those actually used as mustaʿmal and the unused ones as muhmal.

  Al-Jahiz, who lived from 776 to 868, proposed an overhaul of Arabic grammar to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar. That overhaul would wait two centuries to arrive. Standardization itself reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya was Sībawayhi's al-Kitāb, built on a corpus of poetic texts, Quranic usage, and Bedouin informants he judged reliable.

  Arabic spread alongside Islam. After the early Muslim conquests it gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish. In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered through translations at Baghdad's House of Wisdom. By the 8th century, knowing Classical Arabic had become a prerequisite for rising into the higher classes across the Islamic world, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Maimonides, the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, wrote in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic set down in Hebrew script.

• 4. One Language Or Many

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  Educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak two things at once: the Standard Arabic taught in school, and a native dialect that may be unintelligible to other Arabs. This double life is a textbook case of diglossia, the normal use of two varieties of one language in different social settings.

  When a Moroccan speaks with a Lebanese, many speakers code-switch between the dialectal and standard forms, sometimes inside a single sentence. Comprehension rises and falls with geography. Levantine and Gulf speakers follow each other far better than either follows a speaker from the Maghreb. Moroccan Arabic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya, though Egyptian films and media make the reverse easier.

  The question of whether Arabic is one language or many is politically charged. Speakers of the varieties of Arabic will often claim they all understand each other even when they cannot. That stance contrasts sharply with speakers of Hindi and Urdu, who may claim they cannot understand each other even when they can. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert a single shared language despite mutual incomprehensibility among spoken versions.

  Linguists often compare the spread of spoken Arabic to the Romance languages. The comparison fits the timescale: perhaps 1500 years of divergence for Arabic, against roughly 2000 years for Romance. Just as French is hard for a Spanish or Italian speaker yet relatively easy to learn, Moroccan Arabic sits beyond easy reach of Arabs from the Mashriq. Only three modern varieties have won official recognition: Hassaniya, Maltese, and Cypriot Arabic.

• 5. Roots And Patterns

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  The word katabtu means "I wrote," and it is built from the root k-t-b for "write" poured into the pattern -a-a-tu for "I Xed." Arabic has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology. A root is a bare set of consonants, usually three, fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form a word.

  From that single root k-t-b, the language spins out a whole family. Kitābun is "book," kutubun is "books," kātibun is "writer," maktabun is "desk, office," and maktabatun is "library, bookshop." Change the pattern and the meaning shifts while the three consonants hold steady. Kattabtu means "I had something written," kātabtu means "I corresponded with someone," and iktatabtu means "I subscribed."

  Verbs multiply through derived stems. A given root can appear in about fifteen of them, labeled by Western scholars as Form I through Form XV, with Forms XI to XV being rare. Each stem carries grammatical functions such as the causative, intensive, and reflexive. Form IX, for instance, is limited to colors and physical defects, as in iḥmarra, "he turned red," from the root ḥ-m-r.

  Nouns in Literary Arabic carry three grammatical cases, three numbers including a dual, two genders, and three states. Indefinite singular nouns add a final -n to the case vowel, giving -un, -an, or -in, the feature called nunation or tanwīn. This same machinery produces abstract nouns. From the root š-r-k for "share" comes the verb ishtaraka, "to cooperate," then ištirāk, then ištirākiyy for "socialist," and finally ishtirākiyyah, "socialism."

• 6. Words That Traveled

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  Admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, almanac, amber, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, hazard, magazine, mattress, sofa, tariff, and zenith all reached English from Arabic, most by way of other Mediterranean languages. Arabic became a major vehicle of culture and learning in the Middle Ages, especially in science, mathematics, and philosophy.

  Europe absorbed Arabic vocabulary most heavily in Spanish, and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, and Sicilian. The long Arabic presence in Southern Iberia during the Al-Andalus era left that mark. Maltese went further still, developing from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet. The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian, took in Arabic words mainly through Ottoman Turkish.

  The flow ran inward as well. Arabic borrowed mostly nouns from Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin, and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. The word madīnah, "city," comes from Aramaic. Jazīrah, "island," as in Al-Jazeera, traces to Syriac. Lāzaward comes from Persian lājvard, the name of the blue stone lapis lazuli, and it seeded the words azure, azur, and azul across Europe.

  Arabic words crossed the Sahara as Islam spread. Variants of kitāb, "book," reached African groups who never met an Arab trader. Loanwords often arrived indirectly: most Arabic loans in Hindustani and Turkish came through Persian, older Arabic loans in Hausa came through Kanuri, and most in Yoruba came through Hausa.

• 7. Renaissance And Reform

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  The Nahda was a cultural and literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin, Nahda writers tried to simplify the Arabic language and script so it might reach a wider audience.

  Muhammad Ali established the Amiri Press in 1819, and pioneering Arabic presses reshaped how Arabic literature spread. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed founding Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign. He pressed for new words to suit the industrial age, such as sayyārah for "automobile" and bākhirah for "steamship."

  Arabic academies modeled on the Académie française followed, charged with adding standardized terms to the lexicon. The first opened in Damascus in 1919, then Cairo in 1932, Baghdad in 1948, Rabat in 1960, and Amman in 1977, with two more in 1993, including Tunis. In 1997 a bureau of Arabization standardization joined the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan.

  This modernizing drive produced what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. The new vocabulary favors loan translations or coinages from existing roots over direct borrowing. The word jāmiʻah, "university," grows from jamaʻa, "to gather," and jumhūriyyah, "republic," grows from jumhūr, "multitude." An older habit of redefining an existing word has faded, as with hātif, "telephone," once meaning an invisible caller in Sufism.

• 8. Letters And Latin

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  The Arabic alphabet descends from Aramaic by way of Nabatean, bearing a loose resemblance to its parent much as Coptic or Cyrillic does to Greek. After Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi fixed the Arabic script around 786, many styles grew up, both for copying the Quran and for inscribing monuments. Calligraphy never fell out of use as it did in the Western world, and calligraphers are held in great esteem. Hassan Massoudy stands among the current masters of the form.

  Movements have repeatedly pushed to replace the Arabic script with Latin letters. The Beirut newspaper La Syrie called for the change in 1922. Louis Massignon, a French Orientalist, brought the proposal to the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. His attempt failed, viewed by the academy and the public as a Western bid to take over the country. Sa'id Afghani, an academy member, called the effort a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon. Said Akl built a Latin-based alphabet for Lebanese and used it in his newspaper, Lebnaan.

  Egypt saw a parallel debate. After colonialism, some Egyptians pushed to merge formal and colloquial Arabic and write the result in Latin script. Salama Musa supported a Latin alphabet, believing it would draw Egypt closer to the West and ease advances in science and technology. Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi carried the idea forward in 1944 as chairman of the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. The effort failed against a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet, especially among older generations.

  The written number reverses the eye's expectation. In most of North Africa the Western Arabic numerals are used, while Egypt and the countries east of it use the Eastern Arabic numerals. The number 24 is spoken as "four and twenty," much like the German vierundzwanzig, a small reversal that still governs how Arabic counts aloud.