5 Rockstar Tips to Learn the Arabic Language at Home
All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, and Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. It is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to thirty varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā. Throughout its history, Arabic has inspired many other languages around the world. Persian, Turkish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia, and Hausa, as well as several African languages, are among the most affected. In contrast, Arabic has borrowed vocabulary from other languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Persian in mediaeval times, and English and French in modern times.