01
Old Arabic
Before Islam, Arabic was a group of dialects of the nomads and oasis towns of northern and central Arabia. It is known mainly from thousands of short graffiti in the deserts of Syria, Jordan and Arabia, the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions of roughly the 1st century BCE to the 4th century CE, written in scripts related to South Arabian. The Namara inscription (328 CE), an epitaph for a 'king of all the Arabs', is Arabic written in the Nabataean script. From Nabataean cursive developed the Arabic script itself.
02
The Qur'an and the Grammarians
With the Qur'an in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of a scripture and, within a century, of an empire. To protect the reading of the text, scholars added dots to distinguish letters and marks for short vowels. In 8th-century Basra, the grammarians produced one of the great early traditions of linguistic analysis. Sibawayh's al-Kitāb ('The Book') described Arabic sounds, morphology and syntax with a precision that is still admired. Classical Arabic, fixed in this period, remains the model of the written language today.
03
One Language or Many
The conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries carried Arabic from Spain to Central Asia. The spoken dialects that grew up in each region have lost the case endings and much else, and a Moroccan and an Iraqi may struggle to understand each other's everyday speech. Most Arabic speakers therefore live with diglossia: a dialect for home and street, and Modern Standard Arabic, the descendant of the classical language modernised in the 19th-century Nahḍa ('awakening'), for writing and formal speech. Maltese, descended from Sicilian Arabic, is the only Arabic variety written in the Latin alphabet and an official language of the European Union.
In its own words
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
- bismi
- llāhi
- r-raḥmāni
- r-raḥīm
Sources (1)
Where it’s spoken
- Egypt
- Sudan
- Algeria
- Iraq
- Yemen
- Morocco
- Saudi Arabia
- Syria
10 more countries
- Tunisia
- Jordan
- Libya
- Lebanon
- Palestine
- Oman
- Chad
- Israel
- Kuwait
- Malta
Turning points
- Writing
Old Arabic inscriptions
Safaitic and Hismaic graffiti record Old Arabic dialects in scripts related to South Arabian, and the Namara epitaph of 328 CE writes Arabic in Nabataean letters. The Arabic script develops from Nabataean cursive.
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- Writing
The Qur'an and the grammarians
Dots and vowel marks are added to the Arabic script to fix the reading of the Qur'an, and the Basra grammarians, above all Sibawayh, codify Classical Arabic.
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- Split
From Spain to Central Asia
The Arab conquests carry Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa, where it gradually replaces Aramaic, Coptic, Greek and, in part, Berber. Regional dialects diverge from here on.
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- Sound lawContested
Case endings lost in speech
The spoken dialects lose the short final vowels that mark case (kitābu, kitābi, kitāba → kitāb). Some scholars think this was under way in pre-Islamic dialects. Others link it to the rapid spread of Arabic among new speakers after the conquests.
Compare with other loss across families →
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- Revitalization
The Nahḍa
Writers, journalists and translators in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus modernise Classical Arabic for the press, science and the novel, creating Modern Standard Arabic.
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- Writing
Maltese in Latin letters
A standard Latin orthography for Maltese is agreed in 1924, and in 1934 Maltese becomes an official language of Malta. It is the only Semitic language written in Latin script as a national standard.
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