Language

Arabic

al ah-rah-BEE-yah

Also Known As al-arabiyyah

Semitic Languages

Arabic is a Central Semitic language whose classical form, fixed by the text of the Quran in the seventh century, remains the liturgical and literary standard across the Arab world, while everyday spoken Arabic exists as a continuum of regional vernaculars, from Moroccan to Gulf Arabic, that differ from one another by roughly as much as separate Romance languages do. Modern Standard Arabic, the form used in formal writing, broadcasting and education across the Arab world, is a direct descendant of Classical Arabic rather than of any one spoken vernacular. It is written right to left in the Arabic script, an abjad in which short vowels are normally left unwritten.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

ara 2

Ethnologue and ISO 639-3 treat Arabic as a macrolanguage, ara, covering some thirty distinct individual language codes for its regional spoken varieties; whether these varieties are properly separate languages or dialects of one Arabic language is a live and partly political classification question, not a settled linguistic one.

Speaker Count

274,000,000 2

Figure is for first-language speakers of Arabic's varieties combined, per Ethnologue's macrolanguage total; several hundred million more use Modern Standard Arabic as a learned second register.

Status

Living 2

Attested From (Year)

from 125 1

Circa; the earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script, three lines of poetry found at En Avdat, Israel.

Region

The Arab world; official in 24 states and territories including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Yemen 1

Classification

Official Status

Official Language 1

Wikipedia 'Arabic': the third-most widespread official language, one of six official languages of the United Nations; checked 2026-09-27.

Connections

Ancestor Of

Gulf Arabic

Gulf Arabic (Khaleeji) is a variety of Arabic spoken in Eastern Arabia.

Source Wikipedia: Gulf Arabic

Hejazi Arabic

Source Wikipedia: Hejazi Arabic

Iraqi Arabic

Iraqi Arabic (Mesopotamian Arabic) is one of the varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mesopotamian basin.

Source Wikipedia: Mesopotamian Arabic

Maghrebi Arabic

Maghrebi Arabic is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken across the Maghreb.

Source Wikipedia: Maghrebi Arabic

Moroccan Arabic

Source Wikipedia: Moroccan Arabic

Najdi Arabic

Source Wikipedia: Najdi Arabic

Tunisian Arabic

Source Wikipedia: Tunisian Arabic

Yemeni Arabic

Source Wikipedia: Yemeni Arabic

Associated With

Hindi

This source names Arabic directly: "Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic, and in script, Devanagari against the Perso-Arabic alphabet; whether Hindi and Urdu are one spoken language with two literary standards or two languages is..."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Ibn Malik

Sibawayh

Swahili

This source names Arabic directly: "between Bantu-speaking communities and Arabic-speaking traders, absorbing a substantial layer of Arabic vocabulary in the process."

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

In Family

Afro-Asiatic

Source Glottolog

Written In

Arabic Script

Source Omniglot: The Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages

In the Other Atlases

Cases Where Used

Rome Statute

Also in History Atlas: used in this subject.

Alawites

Also in Society and Culture Atlas: used in this subject.

Bedouin

Also in Society and Culture Atlas: used in this subject.

Copts

Also in Society and Culture Atlas: used in this subject.

Druze

Also in Society and Culture Atlas: used in this subject.

Showing 51 to 55 of 55 in Cases Where Used, page 2 of 2.

Original Language Of

Cairo Station

Also in Film and Media Atlas: a work originally in this language.

Capernaum (2018 film)

Also in Film and Media Atlas: a work originally in this language.

Chronicle of the Years of Fire

Also in Film and Media Atlas: a work originally in this language.

The Battle of Algiers

Also in Film and Media Atlas: a work originally in this language.

The Message

Also in Film and Media Atlas: a work originally in this language.

Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadhani