Arabic Language Guide

Official language in
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen
Script
Arabic

Where it's spoken

Arabic is the official language of every member of the Arab League, an intergovernmental organization whose members span North Africa and the Arabian Gulf; among those states, the constitutions of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco each name Arabic as the country's official language, and Iraq's constitution names Arabic and Kurdish as the country's two official languages. Because these countries are separated by great distances and by land barriers such as deserts and mountains, each major region of the Arab world — among them the Levant, the Arabian Gulf, the western Arabian peninsula, western North Africa, Egypt and Sudan — has developed its own everyday spoken vernacular, which coexists with the shared written standard, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA); this coexistence of an everyday vernacular and a higher literary form is called diglossia. Neighboring vernaculars, such as Jordanian and Syrian, are easily mutually intelligible to native Arabic speakers, while distant ones, such as Moroccan and Kuwaiti, have grown far enough apart that speakers must make a conscious effort to accommodate each other. This app's cards are written in MSA rather than in any single country's colloquial variety — its card for "bus," حافلة (Ḥāfila), is glossed as the MSA word used on signs and in the news, next to which people say "bāṣ" or "otobīs" depending on the region — except for a handful of vehicle and slang cards that use dialect words for things with no everyday MSA equivalent: a shared taxi is سرفيس (Servīs) in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine, and a shared minivan is ميكروباص (Mīkrōbāṣ) in Egypt.

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Script & pronunciation

Arabic is written right to left in a cursive script: even in print, most letters connect to their neighbors, and the same letter takes a different shape depending on whether it stands alone or joins on one or both sides, as an isolated, initial, medial, or final form. Short vowels are historically left out of ordinary Arabic writing; when marked at all, they appear as small diacritics placed above or below a consonantal letter, and one such mark, doubled to form tanwīn (nunation), marks a noun, adjective, or adverb as indefinite, as in this app's card مرحبًا (Marḥaban, "Hello"), whose grammar note identifies the final mark as tanwīn. Because short vowels usually go unwritten, a single spelling can stand for more than one reading: this app's card for "you," أنت, is spelled the same for a man and a woman, and only its romanization, anta / anti, shows which vowel — and therefore which gender — is meant. This app's romanization spells out the vowels the Arabic text leaves unwritten, marking long vowels with a macron (ā, ī, ū) and consonants absent from English, such as ʿ and ḥ, with their own letters; a card that gives the numbers one to three with every short vowel marked in the Arabic text itself, وَاحِد، اِثْنَان، ثَلَاثَة, romanizes them as Wāḥid, ithnān, thalātha.

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Grammar essentials

Arabic's basic word order in a verbal sentence is Verb-Subject-Object (VSO): if a sentence states both a subject and an object, the verb comes first, though the order can also shift to Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) or Verb-Object-Subject under certain conditions. To negate a present-tense verb, Arabic places the particle لا (lā) directly before it, as in this app's card لا أفهم (lā afham, "I don't understand"); a sentence with no verb of its own — an equational sentence — is instead negated with the verb لَيْسَ (laysa, "to not be"), as in this app's card ليس لدي حجز (laysa ladayya ḥajz, "I don't have a reservation"). A further particle, ما (mā), can also negate a sentence, but doing so in writing is rare and belongs mainly to the spoken vernaculars; this app's own card for "I have no change" notes that its colloquial ما عندي corresponds to the formal ليس عندي. Questions place the question word at the very start of the sentence with no other change in word order: yes/no questions begin with هل (hal), and other questions begin with a question word such as أين (ayna, "where"), as in this app's card مِنْ أَيْنَ أَنْتَ؟ (Min ayna anta?, "Where are you from?"). Arabic numerals from three to ten show what is called gender polarity: a numeral takes the feminine ending when it counts a masculine noun, and the plain, unmarked form when it counts a feminine noun, as in this app's card أُرِيدُ ثَلَاثَ قِطَع (Urīdu thalātha qiṭaʿ, "I would like three pieces"), where the feminine noun قطع ("pieces") is counted with the unmarked ثلاث rather than the form ending in ة.

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Politeness & etiquette

Arabic's second-person pronoun changes form with the gender of the person being addressed: أنتَ (anta) is used for a man and أنتِ (anti) for a woman; this app's own card for "you" notes exactly this distinction. Adjectives and other words describing the addressee agree with this same gender: this app's compliment أنت لطيف جدًا (Anta laṭīf jiddan, "You are very kind") takes a feminine ending, أنتِ لطيفة جدًا (anti laṭīfa jiddan), when said to a woman, and its card for "please," من فضلك (min faḍlik), similarly becomes من فضلكِ (min faḍliki) when addressed to a woman. The set greeting السلام عليكم (as-salāmu ʿalaykum, "Peace be upon you") is answered with the same words in reverse order, وعليكم السلام (wa-ʿalaykum as-salām, "and upon you, peace"); this exchange appears as a worked example in a reference grammar of MSA, and this app's own card for the greeting gives the same reply.

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