Arabic · العربية

About Arabic

Language family

Afroasiatic, Semitic

Where it's spoken

The Middle East and North Africa, across 25+ countries

Speakers

roughly 370 million speakers across dialects

Modern Standard Arabic descends from the Classical Arabic of the Quran and pre-Islamic poetry, and it functions today as a shared literary and news register across a region where everyday spoken dialects (Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi, and others) can differ enough to hinder mutual understanding. Its Semitic cousin Hebrew shares root-and-pattern grammar and a fair amount of vocabulary. Arabic script, written right to left, was also adapted for Persian, Urdu, and historically Ottoman Turkish.