Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual forms. Unlike the modern Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. The Arabic alphabet is an abjad, with only consonants required to be written ; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad.
Letters
The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters which behave either as a full-fledged letter or as a diacritic. Forms using the Arabic script to write other languages added and removed letters: for example ⟨پ⟩ is often used to represent in adaptations of the Arabic script. Unlike Greek-derived alphabets, Arabic has no distinct upper and lower case letterforms.Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters ب, ت, and ث have the same basic shape, but with one dot added below, two dots added above, and three dots added above respectively. The letter ن also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot added above, though it is somewhat different in its isolated and final forms. Historically, they were often omitted, in a writing style called rasm.
Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most letters within a word directly joined to adjacent letters.
Alphabetical order
There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet:, and.The Hija'i order is the more common order and it is used when sorting lists of words and names, such as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries.
The original order derives from that used by the Phoenician alphabet and therefore resembles the sequence of letters in Hebrew and Greek. Letters are also assigned numerical values for purposes of numerology, as is done in Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy. Letters in the Hija'i order are not considered to have numerical values.
Hijaʼi
Modern dictionaries and reference books use the alphabetical order instead of the Abjadi alphabetical order, in which letters are arranged mainly by similarity of shape. The hijaʼi order is never used for numerals.A different hijaʼi order was used in the Maghreb but is now considered obsolete. The sequence is:
The al-iklīl order, now obsolete, also arranged letters mainly by shape. It was first used in the 10th-century work Kitāb al-Iklīl. The sequence is:
Abjadi
The abjadi order is the usual Arabic order in dictionaries and reference books of the late 1st millennium to the early 2nd millennium. However, this Arabic adjadi order is not a simple correspondence with the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, as the latter has a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter samek ?, which has no cognate letter in the Arabic alphabet historically because Proto-Semitic fricatives *š and *s had merged into Arabic s س, while Proto-Semitic *ś became Arabic š ش.The loss of was compensated for:
- In the Mashriqi abjad sequence, by splitting the letter šīn ? into two independent Arabic letters: ش and س, with the latter taking the place of ?;
- And in the Maghrebi abjad sequence, by splitting the letter ṣāḏē ? into two independent Arabic letters: ض and ص, with the latter taking the place of ?.
This is commonly vocalized as follows:
Another vocalization is:
This can be vocalized as:
Notes:
Letter forms
The Arabic alphabet is always cursive and letters vary in shape depending on their position within a word. Letters can exhibit up to four distinct forms corresponding to an initial, medial, final, or isolated position. While some letters show considerable variations, others remain almost identical across all four positions. Generally, letters in the same word are linked together on both sides by short horizontal lines, but six letters can only be linked to their preceding letter. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures, notably لا, which is the only mandatory ligature.Table of basic letters
Notes- See the article Romanization of Arabic for details on various transliteration schemes. Arabic language speakers may usually not follow a standardized scheme when transcribing words or names. Some Arabic letters which do not have an equivalent in English are often spelled as numbers when Romanized. Also names are regularly transcribed as pronounced locally, not as pronounced in Literary Arabic.
- Regarding pronunciation, the phonemic values given are those of Modern Standard Arabic, which is taught in schools and universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably from region to region. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the articles Arabic phonology and varieties of Arabic.
- The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.
- Six letters do not have a distinct medial form and have to be written with their final form without being connected to the next letter. Their initial form matches the isolated form. The following letter is written in its initial form, or isolated form if it is the final letter in the word.
- The letter originated in the Phoenician alphabet as a consonant-sign indicating a glottal stop. Today it has lost its function as a consonant, and, together with and, is a mater lectionis, a consonant sign standing in for a long vowel, or as support for certain diacritics.
- Arabic currently uses a punctuation mark called the to denote the glottal stop, written alone or with a carrier:
- * alone: ء
- * with a carrier: إ أ, ؤ, ئ.
Hamza forms
Modified letters
The following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters.Long vowels
In the fully vocalized Arabic text found in texts such as the Quran, a long following a consonant other than a hamza| is written with a short sign on the consonant plus an after it; long is written as a sign for short plus a ; and long as a sign for short plus a. Briefly, = ; = ; and =. Long following a may be represented by an or by a free followed by an .The table below shows vowels placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a Shadda| sign. For clarity in the table, the primary letters on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Most consonants do connect to the left with, and written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual representative glyph and joining types.
In unvocalized text, the long vowels are represented by the vowel in question:,, or. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalized text are treated like consonants with a in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.
Combinations وا and يا are always pronounced and respectively. The exception is the suffix ـوا۟ in verb endings where is silent, resulting in or. In addition, when transliterating names and loanwords, Arabic language speakers write out most or all the vowels as long, meaning it approaches a true alphabet.
Diphthongs
The diphthongs حروف اللين and are represented in vocalized text as follows:A final is usually written at the end of words for nisba which is a common suffix to form adjectives of relation or pertinence. The suffix is ـِيّ ' for masculine ; for example اِشْتِرَاكِيّ ' "socialist", it is also used for a singulative ending that applies to human or other sentient beings as in جندي jundiyy "a soldier". However nowadays this final is mostly pronounced with a long ' as in اِشْتِرَاكِي ' instead of اِشْتِرَاكِيّ '. A similar mistake happens at the end of some third person plural verbs as in جَرَوْا ' "they ran" which is pronounced nowadays as جَرُوا .
Ligatures
The use of ligature in Arabic is common. There is one compulsory ligature, that for ل + ا, which exists in two forms. All other ligatures, of which there are many, are optional.A more complex ligature that combines as many as seven distinct components is commonly used to represent the word الله. The only ligature within the primary range of Arabic script in Unicode is +. This is the only one compulsory for fonts and word-processing. Other ranges are for compatibility to older standards and contain other ligatures, which are optional.
Note: Unicode also has in its Presentation Form B FExx range a code for this ligature. If your browser and font are configured correctly for Arabic, the ligature displayed above should be identical to this one,
U+FEFB