Arabic
Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as or simply .
Arabic is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations, and the liturgical language of Islam. Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world and the fourth most used language on the Internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims. In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic the fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese, and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script that is written from right to left.
During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet. The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian, have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has also influenced other languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam had a historic presence. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay, Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia, Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, Tamazight, and Swahili. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to a lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian.
Classical Arabic is considered a conservative language among Semitic languages; it preserved the complete Proto-Semitic three grammatical cases and declension, and it was used in the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic since it preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes.
Classification
Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language. Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and the emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include:- The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense.
- The conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.
- The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms.
- The development of an internal passive.
- negative particles ' * ; ' * to Classical Arabic
- G-passive participle
- prepositions and adverbs ', ', ', ', '
- a subjunctive in -'
- '-demonstratives
- leveling of the -' allomorph of the feminine ending
- ' complementizer and subordinator
- the use of '- to introduce modal clauses
- independent object pronoun in
- vestiges of nunation
History
Old Arabic
Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in southern Syria, Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family were spoken. It is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested.In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic. On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B, Thamudic D, Safaitic, and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.
Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic", a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age. Previously, 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 present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as the conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum.
It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced—epigraphic Ancient North Arabian, which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after the towns where the inscriptions were discovered. However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to the fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic.
The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garmallāhe found in En Avdat, Israel, and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmids king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria. The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical Arabic".
Classical Arabic
In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz, which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition. This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi.In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax.