Arabic script

• 1. Introduction

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  The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and for several other languages across Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system on the planet, behind only the Latin script. By the number of countries that use it, it again ranks second in the world. By the number of people who use it, it ranks third, after the Latin and Chinese scripts. Yet the system began with a single, sacred purpose. It was first used to write the Quran, the holy book of Islam. From that origin a question opens up. How did a script built to carry one language come to serve Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Malay, Somali, and dozens more, some of which share no family resemblance with Arabic at all? And what happens when a script designed for consonants is asked to write languages that demand their vowels be spelled out loud?

• 2. A Right-To-Left Cursive

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  Written from right to left, the Arabic script flows in a cursive style where most letters change shape depending on their position. A letter standing alone looks slightly different from the same letter joined to one before it or after it. The script is unicase, meaning it has no distinction between capital and lowercase letters. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants with only a few vowels marked. That feature makes most Arabic alphabets abjads, writing systems that leave the reader to supply many of the vowels. This same script is the foundation of the tradition of Arabic calligraphy, with named styles such as Naskh, Nastaliq, and Kufic carrying its forms across regions and centuries.

• 3. From Petra To Papyrus

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  In the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, northern Arab tribes migrated and founded a kingdom centred around Petra, in Jordan. These people became known as the Nabataeans, after one of their tribes, the Nabatu, and they spoke Nabataean Arabic, a dialect of the Arabic language. In the 2nd or 1st centuries BCE, the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet appear, written in the Aramaic language, which served as the tongue of communication and trade. The Nabataeans did not write the language they actually spoke. They wrote in a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which kept evolving and split into two forms. One was a stiff style meant for inscriptions, known as monumental Nabataean. The other was cursive, written hurriedly with joined letters, meant for papyrus. The cursive form pressed on the monumental form more and more until it gradually became the Arabic alphabet. Trace the lineage back further and the chain runs through Aramaic to the Phoenician script, the same ancient source that gave rise to the Greek alphabet, and through it the Cyrillic and Latin scripts.

• 4. Carried By A Religion

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  With the spread of Islam, the script designed for Arabic became the primary writing system for many language families far beyond its origin. Adapting it meant inventing new letters and symbols, because these languages held sounds that Arabic phonology simply does not contain. Arabic lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive, the p sound, so many languages added their own letter for it, though the exact letter varies from one language to the next. The letter Pe, for example, serves that role in Persian, Pashto, Punjabi, Khowar, Sindhi, Urdu, Kurdish, and Kashmiri. The modifications tend to cluster into traditions. Indian and Turkic languages written in the script lean on the Persian modified letters, while the languages of Indonesia imitate those of Jawi. Scholars call the Persian-modified version the Perso-Arabic script. Among the many languages the script reached are Persian in its Farsi and Dari forms, Urdu, Uyghur, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi written as Shahmukhi, Sindhi, Azerbaijani known as Torki in Iran, Malay written as Jawi, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese and Indonesian written as Pegon, Balti, Balochi, Luri, Kashmiri, Cham, Rohingya, Somali, Mandinka, and Mooré.

• 5. Abjad Or Alphabet

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  Vowels become mandatory when the Arabic script is used to write Serbo-Croatian, Sorani, Kashmiri, Mandarin Chinese, or Uyghur. In those languages the script stops behaving like an abjad and works as a true alphabet, every vowel written out rather than left to the reader. The popular link between this script and the abjad is therefore strong but mistaken, a habit born from the fact that it was first used only for Arabic. The Sorani dialect of Kurdish, Kashmiri, Gorani, Uyghur, Mandarin, and Serbo-Croatian all fall on the alphabet side of that line. The Uyghur case shows how deliberate this can be. Uyghur changed to a Latin script in 1969, then switched back to a simplified, fully voweled Arabic script in 1983.

• 6. Adapting Across Africa

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  Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, grew with the spread of Islam. The style and usage there tend to follow those of the Maghreb, down to small details like the position of the dots in the letters fāʼ and qāf. Additional diacritics came into use to capture sounds that Arabic itself does not represent. The term ʻAjamī, drawn from the Arabic root meaning foreign, was applied to these Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. The Hausa language uses such an adaptation, called Ajami, for many purposes that reach well past religion, including newspapers, mass mobilization posters, and public information. The script also reached the writings of African American slaves. Omar Ibn Said, born in 1770 and a native of Senegal, left writings in it. The Bilali Document, a handwritten Arabic manuscript on West African Islamic law written by Bilali Mohammet in the 19th century, is now housed in the library at the University of Georgia.

• 7. Scripts In Retreat

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  Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928, a move Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. The older form, written in Arabic script and heavy with Persian and Arabic loanwords, is now called Ottoman Turkish and treated by many as a separate language. The 20th century saw the Arabic script give way to the Latin alphabet across the Balkans, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. In the Soviet Union, after a brief flirtation with Latinisation, the use of Cyrillic was mandated instead. Languages followed crooked paths through these reforms. Turkmen changed to Latin in 1929, then to Cyrillic, then back to Latin in 1991. Northern Kurdish in Turkey and Syria was written in Arabic script until 1932, when Jaladat Ali Badirkhan introduced a modified Kurdish Latin alphabet in Syria. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Turkic languages tried to follow Turkey toward a Latin alphabet. Tajik, by contrast, saw a limited revival of the Arabic alphabet, because its close resemblance to Persian lets readers use publications straight from Afghanistan and Iran.

• 8. Where It Holds Today

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  Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan stand today as the main non-Arabic speaking states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages. Those languages include Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Brahui, Persian, Pashto, Central Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Punjabi. Inside India and China, particular regions keep the script alive for particular tongues. India uses it for Kashmiri in Jammu and Kashmir, and for Urdu in Uttar Pradesh and Telangana. China uses it for Uyghur in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The Hui people write Chinese itself in the Arabic-derived Xiao'erjing alphabet. In Brunei, Jawi is used for reading and writing in Islamic religious education from primary school through university, and it appears in announcements, advertisements, news, and Islamic television programming. Urdu, written in the flowing Nastaliq style, is the national language of Pakistan and a scheduled language in India, a single thread tying this ancient script to the daily life of hundreds of millions.