Description

Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closelyrelated to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. Thestandardized written Arabic is distinct from and more conservativethan all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a stateknown as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societalfunctions.

Arabic is the only surviving member of the Ancient North Arabiandialect group attested in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions datingback to the 4th century. Arabic is written with the Arabicalphabet, which is an abjad script and is written fromright-to-left although the spoken varieties are sometimes writtenin ASCII Latin from left-to-right with no standardized forms.

Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughoutits history; some of the most influenced languages are Urdu,Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Somali, Swahili, Bosnian, Kazakh,Bengali, Hindi, Malay, Indonesian, Tigrinya, Pashto, Punjabi,Tagalog, Sindhi and Hausa. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabicwas a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science,mathematics and philosophy.

Details:

* The Arabic language introduction
* Pre-Islamic Arabic and Arabic Language
* Pre-Islamic Poetry and Early Islamic Literature
* The Islamic Conquests and Arabic Language
* Classical, Modern Standard and spoken Arabic
* Language and dialect
* Influence of Arabic on other languages
* Influence of other languages on Arabic
* Arabic alphabet and nationalism