The Arabic alphabet (Arabic Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Syriac. In terms of speakers, Arabic is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as a first language and by 250 million more as a second language. Most native speakers live: أبجدية عربية‎) is the script Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps, and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Syriac. In terms of speakers, Arabic is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as a first language and by 250 million more as a second language. Most native speakers live, Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Bahrain and has official-language status in the first three countries under different names. Persian is a pluricentric language. The Persian language has been a medium for literary and, and Urdu Urdu ( pronunciation , اردو, trans. Urdū, historically spelled Ordu) is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is the national language and one of the two official languages (the other being English) of Pakistan. Spoken in five Indian states, it is also one of the 22. After the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world.[1]

The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼan The Qur’an is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind, and consider the original Arabic text to be the final revelation of God, the holy book of Islam Islam (Arabic: الإسلام‎ al-’islām, pronounced [ʔislæːm] [note 1]) is a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the teachings contained in a religious book, the Qur'an, considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of Allah (the sole divine entity in Islam) as revealed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a 7th century Arab. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write many other languages, even outside of the Semitic The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, the only branch of that family spoken in both Africa and Asia family to which Arabic belongs. Examples of non-Semitic languages written with the Arabic alphabet include Persian Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Bahrain and has official-language status in the first three countries under different names. Persian is a pluricentric language. The Persian language has been a medium for literary and, Urdu Urdu ( pronunciation , اردو, trans. Urdū, historically spelled Ordu) is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is the national language and one of the two official languages (the other being English) of Pakistan. Spoken in five Indian states, it is also one of the 22, Pashto Pashto , also known as Kabuli, or Afghani, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. There are nearly 40 million Pashtuns. As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, Pashto is a national and official language, Baloch, Malay Malay refers to a group of languages closely related to each other to the point of mutual intelligibility but that linguists consider to be separate languages. They are grouped into a group called "Local Malay", part of a larger group called "Malayan" within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. The, Hausa Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more (in West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries distributed over an area of approximately 5 million square km:), Mandinka The Mandink'a language, sometimes referred to as Mandingo, is a Mandé language spoken by millions of Mandinka people in Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau and Chad; it is the main language of The Gambia. It belongs to the Manding branch of Mandé, and is thus fairly similar to, Swahili Swahili is spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastline from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands. Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language, Swahili is also a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the (in East Africa East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:), Balti Balti is a language spoken in Baltistan, in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and adjoining parts of Ladakh, India. Baltistan - before 1948 - was part of Ladakh province. The language is a sub-dialect of Ladakhi and has many similarities with archaic dialects of the Tibetan language. It is mutually intelligible with Ladakhi and Burig. Many of the, Brahui Brahui is spoken in the south west region of Pakistan and border regions of Afghanistan and Iran with Pakistan. The 2005 edition of Ethnologue reports that some 2.2 million orators are in the world and 90% of whom live in only Pakistan, where it is mainly spoken in the Kalat region of Balochistan, Panjabi (in Pakistan Pakistan (Urdu: پاکستان Pākistān pronunciation ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country located in South Asia. It has a 1,046 kilometre (650 mile) coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south, and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, the Republic of India in the east and the People's), Kashmiri Kashmiri belongs to the Dardic languages and is spoken primarily in the Kashmir Valley, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. It had about 5,554,496 speakers in India according to the Census of 2001. Most of the 105,000 speakers or so in Pakistan are mostly immigrants from the Kashmir Valley and include only a few speakers residing in border, Sindhi Sindhi is the language of the Sindh region of Pakistan. It is spoken by approximately 18 million people in Pakistan, and is also spoken in India; it is the third most spoken language of Pakistan, and the official language of Sindh in Pakistan. It is also an official language of India. The government of Pakistan issues national identity cards to (in India and Pakistan), Arwi Arwi is an Arabic-influenced dialect of Tamil, that was used extensively by the Muslim minority of Tamil Nadu state of India and Sri Lanka. As a spoken language it is extinct, though a few madrasas still teach the basics of the language as part of their curricula. The Arwi alphabet utilises the Arabic alphabet together with the addition of (in Sri Lanka Sri Lanka , officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (pronounced /ˌʃriːˈlæŋkə/, Sinhalese: ශ්‍රී ලංකාව, Tamil: இலங்கை; known as Ceylon (/sɪˈlɒn/) before 1972 and as Taprobane (/təˈprɒbəniː/) in ancient times), is an island country in South Asia, located about 31 kilometres (19.3 mi)), Uyghur Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Central Asian region administered by China. In English, the name of the ethnicity and its language is spelled variously as Uyghur, Uighur, Uygur and Uigur, with the preferred spelling being Uyghur. Many English speakers pronounce it as /ˈwiː.ɡər/ (in China China has one of the world's oldest and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six millennia.[citation needed] It has the world's longest continuously used written language system,[citation needed] and is viewed as the source of many major inventions. Historically, China's cultural sphere has extended), Kazakh Kazakh is a language closely related to Kyrgyz and Karakalpak (in China), Kyrgyz Kyrgyz or Kirghiz is a Turkic language and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. Genetically it is most closely related to Altay and more distantly so to Kazakh; however, modern-day language convergence has resulted in an increasing degree of mutual intelligibility between Kyrgyz and Kazakh (in China), Azerbaijani Azerbaijani is a language belonging to the Turkic language family, spoken in southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran. Azeri is member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages and is closely related to Turkish (in Iran Iran (Persian: ايران [ʔiˈɾɒn] ), officially the Islamic Republic of Iran and formerly known internationally as Persia until 1935, is a country in Central Eurasia, located on the northeastern shore of the Persian Gulf, northwestern shore of the Gulf of Oman, and the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. Both "Persia" and "Iran&), Kurdish Kurdish is the language spoken by Kurds in western Asia. Unlike many other languages it does not have a single standardized linguistic entity with the status of an official or state language. On the contrary, it is a continuum of closely related dialects that are spoken in a large geographic area spanning several national states, in some of these (in Iraq and Iran) and the language of the former Ottoman Empire. In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new letters and other symbols were added to the original alphabet.

The Arabic script is written from right to left, in a cursive Cursive is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke. In fact, the word comes from the Latin cursivus, meaning "flowing" style, and includes 28 basic letters. Because some of the vowels are indicated with optional symbols, it can be classified as an abjad An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T. Daniels to replace the common terms consonantary or consonantal alphabet or syllabary to refer to the family of scripts called West Semitic. In popular usage, abjads. Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces In typography, a typeface is a set of one or more fonts, in one or more sizes, designed with stylistic unity, each comprising a coordinated set of glyphs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also include ideograms and symbols, or consist entirely of them, for example, mathematical or map- exist in the Roman alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language, the Arabic script has a number of different styles of calligraphy Islamic calligraphy, colloquially known as Arabic calligraphy, is the art of artistic handwriting, or calligraphy, and by extension, of bookmaking. This art, associated with Islam, has most often employed the Arabic script, throughout many languages including Arabic. Calligraphy is especially revered among Islamic arts since it was the primary, including Naskh Naskh is a specific calligraphic style for writing in the Arabic alphabet, thought to be invented by Ibn Muqlah. With small modifications, it is the style most commonly used for printing Arabic, and usually the first to be taught to children, Nastaʿlīq, Shahmukhi Shahmukhi is a local variant of the Arabic script, that is used to write and record the Punjabi language in Pakistan. It is based on the Nasta'liq style of the Persian script and has traditionally been used by the Punjabi Muslims of Pakistan and India. However, since the middle of the 20th century it has mainly been used by those in the Punjab, Ruq'ah Ruq'ah or Riq'a is a calligraphic variety of Arabic script. The Ruq`ah style of handwriting is one of the "modern" types of handwriting. It is known for its clipped letters composed of short, straight lines and simple curves, as well as its straight and even lines of text. It was probably derived from the Thuluth and Naskh styles. It is, Thuluth Thuluth is a script variety of Islamic calligraphy, which made its first appearance in the fourth century of the Hegira (11th century CE). The straight angular forms of Kufic were replaced in the new script by curved and oblique lines. In Thuluth, one-third of each letter slopes, from which the name (meaning "a third" in Arabic) comes, Kufic Kufic is the oldest calligraphic form of the various Arabic scripts and consists of a modified form of the old Nabataean script. Its name is derived from the city of Kufa, Iraq. although it was known in Mesopotamia at least 100 years before the foundation of Kufa. At the time of the emergence of Islam, this type of script was already in use in, Sini and Hijazi Hejazi is a form of Arabic script used in the early Origin and development of the Qur'an.[citation needed] The script is notably angular in comparison with other Arabic scripts and tends to slope to the right. As the name suggests, it is associated with the Hejaz region of Arabia.

Contents

Consonants

Collation

Main article: Abjad numerals The Abjad numerals are a decimal numeral system in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arabic-speaking world since before the 8th century Arabic numerals. In modern Arabic, the word ʾabjad means "alphabet" in general

There are two collating orders Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetisation, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet. Collating lists of words or names into alphabetical order is the basis of most office filing systems, library catalogs and reference books for the Arabic alphabet. The original abjadī order (أبجدي), used for numbering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BCE. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet has been classified as an abjad because it records only consonant sounds . However, the, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet (Alef Beis) (Hebrew: אָלֶף-בֵּית עִבְרִי‎, alephbet ivri) consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language and, in mildly adapted forms, for writing several languages of the Jewish diaspora, most famously Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic (for a full and detailed list, see Jewish languages). Five. The hijāʼī order (هجائي), used where lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries, groups letters by similarity of shape.

Primary letters

The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language. Written signs in other writing systems are best called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which denote a word or. Adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, such as the Malay Arabic script Jawi is an adapted Arabic alphabet for writing the Malay language, have additional letters. There are no distinct upper and lower case In orthography and typography, letter case is the distinction between majuscule (capital or upper-case) and minuscule (lower-case) letters. The term originated with the shallow drawers called type cases still used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing letter forms.

Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part, called iʿjam. These dots are an integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot below, ب‎, and t has two dots above, ت‎.

Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters. Unlike cursive writing based on the Latin alphabet, the standard Arabic style is to have a substantially different shape depending on whether it will be connecting with a preceding and/or a succeeding letter, thus all primary letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, six letters have only isolated or final form, and so force the following letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a word break. These forms are called:

Some letters look almost the same in all four forms, while others show considerable variation. Generally, the initial and middle forms look similar except that in some letters the middle form starts with a short horizontal line on the right to ensure that it will connect with its preceding letter. The final and isolated forms, are also similar in appearance but the final form will also have a horizontal stroke on the right and, for some letters, a loop or longer line on the left with which to finish the word with a subtle ornamental flourish. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), including lām-ʼalif.[2]

For compatibility with previous standards, all these forms can be encoded separately in Unicode; however, they can also be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The following table shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation).

The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Romanization of Arabic for details and various other transliteration schemes.

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the pronunciation of literary Arabic, the standard which is taught in universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably between the different varieties of Arabic. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology.

The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.

Six letters are not connected to the letter following them, therefore their initial form matches the isolated and their medial form matches the final. These letters are (أ,د,ذ,ر,ز,و).

Contextual forms Name Translit. Phonemic Value (IPA)
Isolated End Middle Beginning
أ‎ ـأ‎ ـأ‎ أ‎ ʾalif ʾ / ā various, including /aː/
ﺏ‎ ـب‎ ـبـ‎ بـ‎ bāʾ b /b/, also /p/ in some loanwords
ﺕ‎ ـت‎ ـتـ‎ تـ‎ tāʾ t /t/
ﺙ‎ ـث‎ ـثـ‎ ثـ‎ ṯāʾ ṯ /θ/
ﺝ‎ ـج‎ ـجـ‎ جـ‎ ǧīm ǧ (also j, g) [ɡ~dʒ~ʒ]
ﺡ‎ ـح‎ ـحـ‎ حـ‎ ḥāʾ ḥ /ħ/
ﺥ‎ ـخ‎ ـخـ‎ خـ‎ ḫāʾ ḫ (also kh, x) /x/
ﺩ‎ ـد‎ ـد‎ د‎ dāl d /d/
ﺫ‎ ـذ‎ ـذ‎ ذ‎ ḏāl ḏ (also dh, ð) /ð/
ﺭ‎ ـر‎ ـر‎ ر‎ rāʾ r /r/
ﺯ‎ ـز‎ ـز‎ ز‎ zāy z /z/
ﺱ‎ ـس‎ ـسـ‎ سـ‎ sīn s /s/
ﺵ‎ ـش‎ ـشـ‎ شـ‎ šīn š (also sh) /ʃ/
ﺹ‎ ـص‎ ـصـ‎ صـ‎ ṣād ṣ /sˁ/
ﺽ‎ ـض‎ ـضـ‎ ضـ‎ ḍād ḍ /dˁ/
ﻁ‎ ـط‎ ـطـ‎ طـ‎ ṭāʾ ṭ /tˁ/
ﻅ‎ ـظ‎ ـظـ‎ ظـ‎ ẓāʾ ẓ [ðˁ~zˁ]
ﻉ‎ ـع‎ ـعـ‎ عـ‎ ʿayn ʿ /ʕ/
ﻍ‎ ـغ‎ ـغـ‎ غـ‎ ġayn ġ (also gh) /ɣ/ (/ɡ/ in many loanwords)
ف‎ ـف‎ ـفـ‎ فـ‎ fāʾ f /f/, also /v/ in some loanwords
ﻕ‎ ـق‎ ـقـ‎ قـ‎ qāf q /q/
ﻙ‎ ـك‎ ـكـ‎ كـ‎ kāf k /k/
ﻝ‎ ـل‎ ـلـ‎ لـ‎ lām l /l/, ([lˁ] in Allah only)
ﻡ‎ ـم‎ ـمـ‎ مـ‎ mīm m /m/
ن‎ ـن‎ ـنـ‎ نـ‎ nūn n /n/
ﻩ‎ ـه‎ ـهـ‎ هـ‎ hāʾ h /h/
ﻭ‎ ـو‎ ـو‎ و‎ wāw w / ū /w/ / /uː/, sometimes /u/, /o/ and /oː/ in loanwords
ﻱ‎ ـي‎ ـيـ‎ يـ‎ yāʾ y / ī /j/ / /iː/, sometimes /i/, /eː/ and /e/ in loanwords

Further notes

In academic work, the glottal stop [ʔ] is transliterated with the right half ring sign (ʾ), while the left half ring sign (ʿ) represents a different pharyngeal, pharyngealized glottal, or epiglottal sound.

Modified letters

The following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters.

Conditional forms Name Translit. Phonemic Value (IPA)
Isolated Final Medial Initial
ﺁ‎ ـآ‎ ـآ‎ آ‎ ʾalif madda ʾā /ʔaː/
ﺓ‎ ـة‎ ‎ ‎ tāʾ marbūṭa‎ h or t / h / ẗ /a/, /at/
ﻯ‎ ـى‎ ‎ ‎ ʾalif maqṣūra ā / ỳ /aː/

Ligatures

The only compulsory ligature is lām + ʼalif. All other ligatures (yāʼ + mīm, etc.) are optional.

ﻻ‎
ـﻼ‎

Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature allāh (“God”), U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM:

ﷲ‎

The latter is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word Allāh, because it should compose a small ʼalif sign above a gemination šadda sign. Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):

لله‎
الله‎

Gemination

Further information: Shadda The shadda sign indicates a doubled consonant.

Gemination is the doubling of a consonant. Instead of writing the letter twice, as in English, Arabic places a w-shaped sign called šadda, or shadda, above it. (The generic term for such diacritical signs is harakat). When a shadda is used on a consonant which also takes a kasra (a dash below the consonant indicating that it takes a short /i/ as its vowel), the kasra may be written between the consonant and the šadda rather than in its normal place.

General Unicode Name Transliteration
0651 ّ‎ ّ šadda (consonant doubled)

Nunation

Further information: Nunation, ʾIʿrāb ـٌ /-un/, ـٍ /-in/ and ـً /-an/

Nunation (the Arabic term is تنوين, tanwīn) is the addition of a final /-n/ to a noun or adjective to indicate grammatical case. In written Arabic it is indicated by doubling the vowel diacritic at the end of the word. There are three of these vowel diacritics, and the signs indicate, from left to right, the endings /-un/ (nominative case), /-in/ (accusative), and /-an/ (genitive). The sign ـً‎ is most commonly written in combination with ا‎ ʼalif ‎ (ـًا‎), ةً‎ (tāʼ marbūṭa) or stand-alone ءً‎ hamza. Alif should always be written (except for words ending in tāʼ marbūṭa, hamza or diptotes), even if "un" is not. Nunation is used only in formal Arabic (including Modern Standard Arabic); it is absent in everyday spoken Arabic, and many Arabic textbooks introduce even standard Arabic without these endings.

Vowels

The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad. Long vowels are written, but short ones are not, so the reader must be familiar with the language to understand the missing vowels. However, in editions of the Qurʼan and in didactic works, vocalization marks are used, including the sukūn for vowel omission and the šadda for consonant gemination (consonant doubling).

Short vowels

Further information: Arabic diacritics

In the Arabic handwriting of everyday use, in general publications, and on street signs, short vowels are typically not written. Prints of the Qurʼan cannot be adorned by the religious institutes that review them, unless short vowels are properly marked. It is also generally preferred and customary that they be included whenever the Qurʼan is cited in print. Children's books, elementary-school texts, and Arabic-language grammars in general will include diacritics to some degree. These are known as "vocalized" texts.

Written Arabic cannot be considered truly complete without the notation of its short vowels, which are essential to it. They convey information not coded in any other way. Like dotted letters, diacritical marks were a later addition to the writing system.

Short vowels can be included in cases where word ambiguity could not easily be resolved from context alone, or simply wherever they might be considered aesthetically pleasing.

Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable, called harakat. All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; in Arabic, words like "Ali" or "alif", for example, start with a consonant: ʻAliyy, ʼalif.

Short vowels (fully vocalised text) Name Trans. Value
064E َ‎◌ fatḥa a /a/
064F ُ‎◌ ḍamma u /u/
0650 ِ‎◌ kasra i /i/

Long vowels

A long a following a consonant other than a hamza is written with a short a sign on the consonant plus an ʾalif after it; long i is written as a sign for short i plus a yāʾ; and long u as a sign for short u plus a wāw. Briefly, aʾ = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū. Long a following a hamza may be represented by an ʾalif madda or by a free hamza followed by an ʾalif.

In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a šadda sign. For clarity in the table below, the primary letter on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Please note that most consonants do connect to the left with ʾalif, wāw and yāʾ written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter yāʾ in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.

Long vowels (fully vocalised text) Name Trans. Value
064E 0627 َا‎◌ fatḥa ʾalif (ـَا) ā /aː/
064E 0649 َى‎◌ fatḥa ʾalif maqṣūra (ـَى) ā / aỳ /a/
064F 0648 ُو‎◌ ḍamma wāw ū / uw (ـُو) /uː/
0650 064A ِي‎◌ kasra yāʾ ī / iy (ـِي) /iː/

In unvocalized text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question: ʾalif, ʾalif maqṣūra (or yeh), wāw, or yāʾ. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalised text are treated like consonants with a sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.

Combinations وا and يا are always pronounced wā and yā respectively, the exception is when وا is the verb ending, where ʾalif is silent, resulting in ū.

Long vowels (unvocalised text) Name Trans. Value
0627 ا‎ (implied fatḥa) ʾalif ā /aː/
0649 ى‎ (implied fatḥa) ʾalif maqṣūra (Arabic) ā / aỳ /a/
0648 و‎ (implied ḍamma) wāw ū / uw /uː/
064A ي‎ (implied kasra) yāʾ ī / iy /iː/

Diphthongs

The diphthongs [ai] and [au] are represented in vocalised text as follows:

Diphthongs (fully vocalised text) Name Trans. Value
064E 064A َي‎◌ fatḥa yāʾ ay /aj/
064E 0648 َو‎◌ fatḥa wāw aw /aw/

Vowel omission

An Arabic syllable can be open (ending with a vowel) or closed (ending with a consonant).

When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a diacritic called sukūn ( ْ‎ ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalized. A normal text is composed only of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. The sukūn indicates where not to place a vowel: qlb could, in effect, be read qalab (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a sukūn over the l and the b (قلْبْ‎), it can only have the form qVlb. This is one step down from full vocalization, where the vowel a would also be indicated by a fatḥa: قَلْبْ‎.

The Qur’an is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qur’an, putting a sukūn above a yāʼ (representing [i:]), or above a wāw (representing [u:]) is extremely rare, to the point that yāʼ with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong [ai], and wāw with sukūn will be read [au]. For example, the letters m-w-s-y-q-ā (موسيقى‎ with an ʼalif maqṣūra at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word mūsīqā ("music"). If one were to write a sukūn above the wāw, the yāʼ and the ʼalif, one would get موْسيْقىْ‎, which would be read as *mawsaykāy (note however that the final ʼalif maqṣūra, because it is an ʼalif, never takes a sukūn). The word, entirely vocalized, would be written as مُوسِيقَى‎. The Quranic spelling would have no sukūn sign above the final ʼalif maqṣūra, but instead a miniature ʼalif above the preceding qaf consonant, which is a valid Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature ʼalif as of 2006.

No sukūn is placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalised texts are always written as if the ʼiʻrāb vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, ʼAḥmad zawǧ šarr, meaning “Ahmed is a bad husband”, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if still pronounced with full ʼiʻrāb, i.e. ʼAḥmadu zawǧun šarrun with the complete desinences.

General Unicode Name Translit. Phonemic Value (IPA)
0652 ْ‎◌ sukūn (no vowel with this consonant letter or diphthong with this long vowel letter) Ø / /a͡-/
0670 ٰ‎◌ ʾalif above (no vowel with next final consonant letter or diphthong with next final long vowel letter) Ø / /a͡-/

The sukūn is also used for transliterating words into the Arabic script. The Persian word ماسک‎ (mâsk, from the English word "mask"), for example, might be written with a sukūn above the ﺱ‎ to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the ک‎.

Additional letters

Additional modified letters, used in non-Arabic languages, or in Arabic for transliterating foreign words only, include:

Sometimes used in Arabic for transliterating foreign words only

Used only in languages other than Arabic

Numerals

Main article: Arabic numerals

There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals[clarification needed] (predominant in the Arab World), and Eastern Arabic numerals (used in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India). In Arabic, the former are referred to as "Indian numbers" (arqām hindiyyah, أرقام هندية‎). Arabic (or Hindu-Arabic) numerals are also used in Europe and the rest of the Western World in a third variant, the Western Arabic numerals, even though the Arabic alphabet is not. In most of present-day North Africa, the usual western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set was used, from which Western Arabic numerals derive, via Italy. Like Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from right to left, though the units are always right-most, and the highest value left-most, just as with Western "Arabic numerals". Telephone numbers are read from left to right.

Western (Maghreb, Europe) Central (Mideast) Eastern/Indian (Persian, Urdu)
0 ٠ ۰
1 ١ ۱
2 ٢ ۲
3 ٣ ۳
4 ٤ ۴
5 ٥ ۵
6 ٦ ۶
7 ٧ ۷
8 ٨ ۸
9 ٩ ۹

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals). This usage is based on the abjadī of the alphabet. أ‎ ʼalif is 1, ب bāʼ is 2, ج ǧīm is 3, and so on until ي yāʼ = 10, ك kāf = 20, ل lām = 30, …, ر rāʼ = 200, …, غ ġayn = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms.

History

Main article: History of the Arabic alphabet Evolution of early Arabic calligraphy (9th - 11th century). The Basmala was taken as an example, from kufic Qur’an manuscripts. (1) Early 9th century. script with no dots or diacritic marks [1]; (2) and (3)9th - 10th century under Abbasid dynasty, the Abu al-Aswad's system establish red dots with each arrangement or position indicating a different short vowel. Later, a second black dots system was used to differentiate between letters like "fāʼ" and "qāf" [2] [3]; (4) 11th century, In Al Farāhídi's system (system we know today) dots were changed into shapes resembling the letters to transcribe the corresponding long vowels [4].

The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabataean alphabet used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from Jabal Ramm (50 km east of Aqaba), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them. (The Aramaic language had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so that in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds; cf. the similarly ambiguous Pahlavi alphabet.) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qur’an were frequently memorized; this practice, which is still widespread among many Muslim communities today, probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script. (see Arabic Unicode)

Later still, vowel marks and the hamza were introduced, beginning some time in the latter half of the seventh century, preceding the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots indicated nunation. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.

Arabic printing presses

Although Napoleon Bonaparte generally is given the credit with introducing the printing press to the Arab world upon invading Egypt in 1798, and he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic script presses, to print the French occupation's official newspaper Al-Tanbiyyah (The Courier), the process was started several centuries earlier.

Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450 was followed up by Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, who in 1514 published an entire prayer book in Arabic script entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i intended for the eastern Christian communities. The script was said to be crude and almost unreadable.

Famed type designer Robert Granjon working for Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici succeeded in designing elegant Arabic typefaces and the Medici press published many Christian prayer and scholarly Arabic texts in the late sixteenth century.

The first Arabic books published using movable type in the Middle East were by the Maronite monks at the Maar Quzhayy Monastery in Mount Lebanon. They transliterated the Arabic language using Syriac script. It took a fellow goldsmith like Gutenberg to design and implement the first true Arabic script movable type printing press in the Middle East. The Greek Orthodox monk Abd Allah Zakhir set up an Arabic language printing press using movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first homemade press in Lebanon using true Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the elegant typeface. He created the first true Arabic script type in the Middle East. The first book off the press was in 1734; this press continued to be used until 1899.[4][5]

Languages written with the Arabic alphabet

Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet
→ Countries where the Arabic script is the only official orthography
→ Countries where the Arabic script is used officially alongside other orthographies. /aw/

The Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Kurdish, Malay, and Urdu, which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive (the [p] sound), so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas Indonesian languages tend to imitate those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.

In the case of Kurdish, vowels are mandatory, making the script an abugida rather than an abjad as it is for most languages. Kashmiri and Uyghur, also, write all vowels.

Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, developed with the penetration of Islam. To a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb (for instance the position of the dots in the letters fāʼ and qāf). Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language. The term Ajami, which comes from the Arabic root for "foreign", has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages.

Languages currently written with the Arabic alphabet

Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are the main non-Arab states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Persian, Dari, Punjabi, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Uyghur.

The Arabic alphabet is currently used for:

Middle East and Central Asia

East Asia

South Asia

Southeast Asia

Africa

Languages formerly written with the Arabic alphabet

Speakers of languages that were previously unwritten used Arabic script as a basis to design writing systems for their mother languages. This choice could be influenced by Arabic being their second language, the language of scripture of their faith, or the only written language they came in contact with. Additionally, since most education was once religious, choice of script was determined by the writer's religion; which meant that Muslims would use Arabic script to write whatever language they spoke. This led to Arabic script being the most widely used script during the Middle Ages.

In the 20th century, the Arabic script was generally replaced by the Latin alphabet in the Balkans, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, while in the Soviet Union, after a brief period of Latinisation,[6] use of the Cyrillic alphabet was mandated. Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Iran.[7]

Most languages of the Iranian languages family continue to use Arabic script, as well as the Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan and of Muslim populations in India, but the Bengali language of Bangladesh is written in the Bengali alphabet.

Africa

Europe

Central Asia and Russian Federation

Southeast Asia

South Asia

Middle East

Computers and the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6 and Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character.

Unicode

Main article: Arabic Unicode

As of Unicode 5.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:

The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621–U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode Qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" ۝ۖ and "start of rub el hizb" ۞. The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms.

Arabic Unicode.org chart (PDF)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+060x ؀ ؁ ؂ ؃ ؆ ؇ ؈ ؉ ؊ ؋ ، ؍ ؎ ؏
U+061x ؐ ؑ ؒ ؓ ؔ ؕ ؖ ؗ ؘ ؙ ؚ ؛ ؞ ؟
U+062x ء آ أ ؤ إ ئ ا ب ة ت ث ج ح خ د
U+063x ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ػ ؼ ؽ ؾ ؿ
U+064x ـ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ى ي ً ٌ ٍ َ ُ
U+065x ِ ّ ْ ٓ ٔ ٕ ٖ ٗ ٘ ٙ ٚ ٛ ٜ ٝ ٞ
U+066x ٠ ١ ٢ ٣ ٤ ٥ ٦ ٧ ٨ ٩ ٪ ٫ ٬ ٭ ٮ ٯ
U+067x ٰ ٱ ٲ ٳ ٴ ٵ ٶ ٷ ٸ ٹ ٺ ٻ ټ ٽ پ ٿ
U+068x ڀ ځ ڂ ڃ ڄ څ چ ڇ ڈ ډ ڊ ڋ ڌ ڍ ڎ ڏ
U+069x ڐ ڑ ڒ ړ ڔ ڕ ږ ڗ ژ ڙ ښ ڛ ڜ ڝ ڞ ڟ
U+06Ax ڠ ڡ ڢ ڣ ڤ ڥ ڦ ڧ ڨ ک ڪ ګ ڬ ڭ ڮ گ
U+06Bx ڰ ڱ ڲ ڳ ڴ ڵ ڶ ڷ ڸ ڹ ں ڻ ڼ ڽ ھ ڿ
U+06Cx ۀ ہ ۂ ۃ ۄ ۅ ۆ ۇ ۈ ۉ ۊ ۋ ی ۍ ێ ۏ
U+06Dx ې ۑ ے ۓ ۔ ە ۖ ۗ ۘ ۙ ۚ ۛ ۜ ۝ ۞ ۟
U+06Ex ۠ ۡ ۢ ۣ ۤ ۥ ۦ ۧ ۨ ۩ ۪ ۫ ۬ ۭ ۮ ۯ
U+06Fx ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹ ۺ ۻ ۼ ۽ ۾ ۿ

See also the notes of the section on modified letters.

Keyboards

Arabic keyboard layout

Keyboards designed for different nations have different layouts so that proficiency in one style of keyboard such as Iraq's does not transfer to proficiency in another keyboard such as Saudi Arabia's. Differences can include the location of non-alphabetic characters such as '

All Arabic keyboards allow typing Roman characters, e.g., for the URL in a web browser. Thus, each Arabic keyboard has both Arabic and Roman characters marked on the keys. Usually the Roman characters of an Arabic keyboard conform to the QWERTY layout, but in North Africa, where French is the most common language typed using the Roman characters, the Arabic keyboards are AZERTY.

When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms.

Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date.[9][10]

There are competing online tools, e.g. Yamli editor, allowing to enter Arabic letters without having Arabic support installed on a PC and without the knowledge of the layout of the Arabic keyboard. [11]

Handwriting recognition

The first software program of its kind in the world that identifies Arabic handwriting in real time has been developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University.

The prototype enables the user to write Arabic words by hand on an electronic screen, which then analyzes the text and translates it into printed Arabic letters in a thousandth of a second. The error rate is less than three percent, according to Dr. Jihad El-Sana, from BGU's department of computer sciences, who developed the system along with master's degree student Fadi Biadsy.[12]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Arabic Alphabet". Encyclopaedia Britannica online. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9008156/Arabic-alphabet. Retrieved on 2007-11-23.
  2. ^ Rogers, Henry (2005). Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell Publishing. pp. 135.
  3. ^ a b http://www1.ccls.columbia.edu/~cadim/ArabicDialectTutorialAMTA2006.pdf
  4. ^ Arabic and the Art of Printing — A Special Section, by Paul Lunde
  5. ^ A Bequest Unearthed, Phoenicia, Encyclopedia Phoeniciana
  6. ^ Alphabet Transitions — The Latin Script: A New Chronology — Symbol of a New Azerbaijan, by Tamam Bayatly
  7. ^ Tajik Language: Farsi or Not Farsi? by Sukhail Siddikzoda, reporter, Tajikistan.
  8. ^ Chechen Writing
  9. ^ For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at The Unicode website
  10. ^ See also MULTILINGUAL COMPUTING WITH ARABIC AND ARABIC TRANSLITERATION Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic & Solutions for the Transliteration Quagmire Faced by Arabic-Script Languages and A PowerPoint Tutorial (with screen shots and an English voice-over) on how to add Arabic to the Windows Operating System.
  11. ^ Yamli in the News
  12. ^ Israel 21c

External links

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Online Arabic keyboards

This article contains major sections of text from the very detailed article Arabic alphabet from the French Wikipedia, which has been partially translated into English. Further translation of that page, and its incorporation into the text here, are welcomed.

Arabic · العربية
Overviews Language · Alphabet · History · Transliteration · Numerology · Influence on other languages
Alphabet Western numerals · Eastern numerals · Diacritics · Hamza
Letters ʾAlif · Bāʾ · Tāʾ · Ṯāʾ · Ǧīm · Ḥāʾ · Ḫāʾ · Dāl · Ḏāl · Rāʾ · Zayn · Sīn · Šīn · Ṣād · Ḍād · Ṭāʾ · Ẓāʾ · ʿAyn · Ġain · Fāʾ · Qāf · Kāf · Lām · Mīm · Nūn · Hāʾ · Wāw · Yāʾ
Eras Ancient North Arabian · Classical · Modern
Major varieties Modern Standard Arabic (formal) · Maghrebi · Egyptian · Sudanese · Levantine · Arabian · Iraqi · Judeo-Arabic
Academic Literature · Names
Calligraphy and scripts Naskh · Kufic · Thuluth · Ruq'ah · Diwani · Muhaqqaq · Maghrebi · Hejazi · Mashq · Jawi
Linguistics Phonology · Sun and moon letters · ʼIʻrab (inflection) · IPA · Grammar · Triliteral root · Mater lectionis
Writing systems
Overview History of writing · History of the alphabet · Graphemes
Lists Writing systems · Languages by writing system / by first written account · Undeciphered writing systems · Inventors of writing systems
Types Alphabets · Abjads · Abugidas · Syllabaries · Ideogrammic · Pictographic · Logographic

Categories: Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes | Abjad writing systems | Arabic script

 

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