Arabic languages

Arabic languages


North Arabic

North Arabic, or Arabic, was confined largely to the Arabian Peninsula until the 7th cent. A.D. Thereafter the spread of Islam took the Arabic language into the Fertile Crescent and across North Africa. Today Arabic is spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula and also in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, and Chad. It is the mother tongue of over 180 million people in Africa and Asia. In addition, Arabic plays an important part in the lives of all Muslims, for it is the sacred language of Islam and its holy book, the Qur'an.

The Arabic of the Qur'an and of subsequent Arabic literature is called classical or literary Arabic. It is uniform and standardized. Classical Arabic is still employed today as the written language, but it is restricted to formal usage as a spoken tongue. It differs considerably from its descendant, the modern colloquial Arabic that is the medium of general conversation. Modern colloquial Arabic has three principal groups of dialects: Eastern, Western, and Southern. A standardized form of modern Arabic is used by the mass media and official communications—it also is one of the languages used officially by the United Nations—but the colloquial dialects, which differ in many respects from Modern Standard Arabic, dominate in daily life.

Grammatically, Arabic has that distinctive feature of Semitic languages, the triconsonantal root consisting of three consonants separated by two vowels. The basic meaning of the root is furnished by the consonants and is altered by changes in, or omission of, the vowels and by the addition of various affixes. Gender is found in the Arabic verb, as well as in the noun, pronoun, and adjective. The modern Arabic dialects have considerably simplified classical Arabic, as by discarding the declension of the noun and other inflections.

Arabic has its own alphabet, which is composed of 28 consonants. Most of the characters have four different forms, one for beginning a word, another for ending a word, still another for a medial position, and a fourth for a letter used by itself. Vowels are shown by symbols above or below the consonants, but they are optional and are often not written. The direction of writing is from right to left. The Arabic alphabet evolved from the Nabataean script, which is a descendant of the Aramaic writing (see Aramaic). There are two major styles of the Arabic script, the angular Kufic (well-suited for decorative uses) and the cursive Naskhi. Arabic writing is also the basis of a number of scripts used by non-Arab peoples following the Muslim religion and has been adapted for the Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Malay, Hausa, and Swahili languages, among others.

South Arabian



For grammars see G. W. Thatcher (4th ed. 1942), F. J. Ziadeh and B. B. Winder (1957), and C. P. Caspari (3d. ed. 1967); A. G. Chejne, The Arabic Language, Its Role in History (1969); D. Justice, The Semantics of Form in Arabic in the Mirror of European Languages (1987).

The Judæo-Arabic languages are a collection of Arabic dialects spoken by Jews living or formerly living in the Arab world; the term also refers to more or less classical Arabic written in the Hebrew script, particularly in the Middle Ages. Just as with the rest of the Arab world, Arabic-speaking Jews had different dialects depending on where they lived. This phenomenon may be compared to cases such as different forms of Yiddish (Judæo-German) such as Western Yiddish and Eastern Yiddish, or forms of Ladino (Judæo-Spanish) in areas such as the Balkans, Thessaloníki/Istanbul, Morocco, etc.


The Arabic spoken by Jewish communities in the Arab world differed from the Arabic of their Muslim neighbours, as well as from the Arabic spoken by Christians. These differences were partly due to the incorporation of some words from Hebrew and other languages and partly geographically, in a way that may reflect a history of migration. For example, the Judeo-Arabic of Egypt, including in the Cairo community, resembled the dialect of Alexandria, which shares the first person singular imperfective initial Nun with Maghrebi Arabic dialects (Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian) rather than the initial Alif of other Egyptian Arabic vernaculars. Similarly the Jewish Iraqi Arabic of Baghdad was found reminiscent of the dialect of Mosul, which in some ways resembles Syrian Arabic rather than Baghdad Arabic or Gulf Arabic. For example, "I said" is qeltu in the speech of Baghdadi Jews and Christians, as well as in Mosul and Syria, as against Muslim Baghdadi gilit. Many Jews in Arab countries were bilingual in Judeo-Arabic and the dialect of the Arab Muslim majority.


Jews in Arab countries wrote—sometimes in their dialects, sometimes in a more classical style—in a mildly adapted Hebrew script (rather than using Arabic script), often including consonant dots from the Arabic alphabet to accommodate phonemes that did not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.

Some of the most important books of medieval Jewish thought were originally written in medieval Judæo-Arabic, as well as certain halakhic works and biblical commentaries. Only later were they translated into medieval Hebrew so that they could be read by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. These include:

Most communities also had a traditional translation of the Bible into Judeo-Arabic, known as a sharħ (meaning). The term sharħ sometimes came to mean "Judeo-Arabic" as such, in the same way that "Targum" was sometimes used to mean Aramaic.

Present day

In the years following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, most Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in Arab countries became Jewish refugees, fleeing mainly to France and Israel. Their dialects of Arabic did not thrive in either country, and most of their descendants now speak French or Modern Hebrew; as a result, the Judæo-Arabic dialects are now considered endangered languages.

See also


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