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Arabic

Arabic belongs to the Central Semitic family of languages and is closely related to Aramaic and Hebrew. Modern Standard Arabic is derived from the language of Quran and is known as Classical or Quranic Arabic, as it follows the grammatical standards of Quran and uses similar vocabulary. Throughout the history, Arabic has “borrowed” many words from other languages, such as Hebrew, Persian and Greek, while in the modern era, various English and French words often find their way into Arabic lexicon. The language is divided mostly into Literary Arabic, used for “official” purposes, such as media broadcasts throughout the Arab world, and the spoken Arabic, which includes an enormous amount of dialects.

Arabic is the main official language of many Middle Eastern countries. It is the second official language in Israel and one of the official languages of the United Nations. There are over 300 million Arabic speakers worldwide and its dialects vary not only from country to country, but even from town to town.

As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a unique system of constructing words from a basic root. The root of a word may contain a meaning that could take a few sentences to translate into another language. The beauty of it is that such linguistic approach allows to convey a depth of both meaning and emotion that are unmatched by many other languages.

English has many words acquired either directly from Arabic or indirectly from Arabic words that have entered into Romance languages before finding their way into English. For example, racquet, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, (the article ‘al’ in Arabic has a similar use to the English ‘the’), amber, arsenal, candy, coffee, cotton, hazard, lemon, magazine, sherbet, sofa, tariff and many more. It is also worth mentioning that the numeral system used today was introduced to Europeans by Arab merchants.