Facts to Know about Arabic

Where is Arabic spoken?

Arabic is the official language of 22 countries, located in the middle east and north of  Africa. These countries are known as the Arab World. It is the sixth spoken language in the  world, with over 250 million of native speakers, and the sixth language of the United Nations.

Forms of Arabic
Formal or Classical Arabic ( Fus-ha الفصحى) is the language in which the Qur’an is written and is considered to be the base of the syntactic and grammatical norms of the Arabic language.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is much more commonly used and is understood across the Arab World.It is the language used by news presenters, newspapers, politicians.
In terms of spoken Arabic, like other languages, it has many different dialects spoken. Every country has a special way of speaking with different pronunciation and vocabularies.
The Written Arabic
The language is written and read from right to left, Arabic script is the second most widely used writing system in the word and words are always written with joined up letters.
There are 28 basic letters in the Arabic alphabet. Other languages which use the same alphabet include Farsi, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish.
Arabic was originally written without dots above or below letters. The dots have been introduced more recently.
Words You Know Already in Arabic
Arabic has contributed numerous words to the English language like
قطن [koton], cotton,                          سكر [succar], sugar, 
غزال [ghazal], gazelle,                      قيثارة [qithara], guitar, 
الكحول [alcoo’hool], alcohol,            صحراء [sahra’a], sahara, 
قيراط [qeerat], carat,                         ليمون [laymoon], lemon.
Is Arabic a difficult language to learn?
The pronunciation of some Arabic letters, like the
خ [kh] as  خوخ [khawkh], prune,
ع [a’a] as in  عنوان [a’anwan], address,
ح [ha’e] as in  حائط [ha’et], wall,
ق [qa] as in  قانون [qanoun], law, and
غ [gh] as in  غيمة [ghayma], cloud,
It may take some time to master as they are produced right at the very back of the throat.
In Arabic word order, the verb comes first, so to say "the boy eats the apple" you actually say "eat the boy the apple":
اكل الولد التفاحة [akala al walado attofaha]. Adjectives come after the noun, rather than before as in English:
السيارة الحمراء [assayara alhamra’a], literally the car red.
The Arabic language is written right to left and the front of an Arabic book is what would be considered the back by speakers of most western languages.

BuzzNet Tags: learn Arabic,language,spoken arabic,facts about arabic.

• Tweet
• Share
• Share
• Share
• Share

About Admin

LEARN, TEACH, SHARE: KNOWLEDGE IS FREE

Related Post