Arabic Language HistoryCopy
The Arabic language is spoken by almost 422 speakers around the world. It’s the official language of 22 countries in the Middle East and Africa. One of the most celebrated languages in the world and the language of the Qur’aan, the holy book of the Islamic religion. The Arabic language has a rich and complex history that spans over 1,500 years. It is a Semitic language that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest known form of the Arabic language is Old Arabic, which was spoken in the 4th century CE. Old Arabic was the language of the Qur’aan. As Islam spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula and beyond, the Arabic language became the language of scholarship, trade, and administration. The Arabic language developed into several different dialects, including Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and various regional dialects.
The word “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha & beta and it is a set of graphs, or characters, used to represent the phonemic structure of a language. In the usual case, each alphabetic character represents either a consonant or a vowel, but this is not the case of the Arabic letters and that is why we call them abjad and not alphabet (they represent consonants only and no vowels at all). Then with time, Arabic writing system developed an impure abjad meaning that vowel markings (represented as symbols above or below the consonants) can be present or absent for learning purposes.
The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters, all representing consonants as stated earlier (vowels are optional). Arabic is written from right to left in a cursive style; that means, when writing a word, the letters are joined together in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. The Arabic abjad does not use upper or lowercase letters as in the Latin alphabet.
Early Arabic letters included no dots. The dots found today were one of the first innovations that came after the spread of the Islam into non-Arab lands. These dots made it clear what consonant was to be pronounced. Before the dots, native Arabic speakers read the text without any dots. They could do this through experience, and using context to differentiate between words that sound different and look the same.
In the below table, observe the individual words on the right side without the dots and then look at the numerous options it can lead to on the left side when the dots were added. Crazy, huh? All of them can be read in 6 different ways.
