Introduction

     Arabic is spoken today by over 300 million people who inhabit the Middle East and North Africa. Arabic is also the liturgical language of Islam, the faith of more than one billion people around the world.

aims to provide as much as possible comprehensive information on the Arabic language.

  Arabic is the most widespread of the living Semitic languages. Classified as South Central Semitic, Arabic is related to Hebrew, spoken in Israel, and Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, as well as to the ancient Semitic languages. The earliest written inscriptions in Arabic were found in the Arabian Peninsula and date from the early 4th century ad.

  Many linguists consider Arabic to be the most Semitic of any modern Semitic languages in terms of how completely it preserves the features of Proto-Semitic: the common ancestor for all Semitic languages. However, the preservation of those features of Proto-Semitic can mean, unfortunately, that Arabic is not a very easy language to handle. The features include a set of sounds that can be hard to pronounce by a non-native; fricatives, plosives, and pharyngealized glottal stops: all the Semitic guttural sounds produced far back in the mouth and throat.

  Old languages in general tend to be very inflective, i.e. a single word exhibits many changes in form to suit different tenses, moods, genders, or numbers. This is another one of the preserved features of Proto-Semitic; formal Arabic is very inflective and it has a large collection of declensions (word endings) for different uses.

  In fact, there are three spoken varieties of the Arabic language today. Classical, or Koranic Arabic, is the form of Arabic which was used in the Koran, the Islamic holy book, as well as in numerous literary texts from the 7th to 9th centuries. This form of Arabic is difficult to understand by ordinary Arabs today. However, it is still used for reading and studying the Koran and for other religious purposes. It is still the language of religious preaching, mostly for the Salafist branch of Islam (Saudi Arabia).

  Modern Standard Arabic is a modern version used in formal speaking, most television and radio, and practically all written matter, including all books, newspapers, magazines, documents of every kind, and reading primers for small children. It differs minimally in morphology from classical Arabic but it has significant differences in syntax and lexicon, reflecting the influence of the modern spoken dialects and western languages.

  Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many regional varieties derived from old Arabian dialects, spoken daily across North Africa and the Middle East, which constitute the everyday spoken language. These dialects are not typically written, although a certain amount of literature (particularly plays and poetry) exists in many of them. They are often used to varying degrees in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows. Literary Arabic or formal Arabic is the official language of all Arab countries and is the only form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages.

   Modern dialects differ from standard Arabic and from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. They are are less complex and less inflective than classical Arabic and they are usually labeled according to major geographic areas, such as North African, Levantine, Egyptian, and Gulf. Within these broad classifications, the daily speech of urban, rural, and nomadic speakers is distinctively different.

  The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia–the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their local dialect and their school-taught literary Arabic (to an equal or lesser degree).

 These pages will try to cover the fundamentals of formal Arabic; both the classical and modern standard varieties. Those are the written forms that are universally understood. Later, however, I might expand it to include the features of the main spoken dialects.