Dose # 1 - Introduction
Facts about the language
It’s a Semitic language, which is a branch of languages that includes languages like Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic and Hebrew among other languages.
It has millions speakers worldwide. People usually refer to 22 countries as “the Arab world” but I personally prefer to talk about “Arabic speaking countries” since it gives a better representation of the countries that speak the language and have Arabic as one of the official languages which are 25 countries in the Western part of Asia as well as Northern Africa.
The 25 countries are: Saudi Arabia, Chad, Algeria, Comoros, Eritrea, Djibouti, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Bahrain, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
People might want to learn for a variety of reasons, whether it is to live in an Arabic speaking country or environment, for work purposes, or for religious purposes. Muslims Arabic holds a special place since it is the language of the Holy Quran.
Variations
Since many regions speak the language. There are a lot of variation in the language which I try to summarize.
To put it simply, on one hand we have the Standard Arabic, which is the formal Arabic. The older variation of Standard Arabic is Classical Arabic, among is the Holly Quran which is the most eloquent, inimitable form of Arabic.
Here is a small post I made about MSA and Classical Arabic.
I will focus on the modern variant of Standard Arabic which is “Modern Standard Arabic”, or MSA. Nowadays, this variant is used in official correspondence, books, magazines and writings in general. It is important.
There are also dialects which are the “spoken Arabic”, each region has their own dialects but they are usually grouped per region and similarities:
Gulf dialects; Levantine dialects; Maghreb dialects; Nile Valley and Egyptian
Some dialects are not within these groups per se but they are somewhat close like Yemeni and Iraqi (which I would associate with the Gulf dialects).
I could also place Djibouti, Somalia, Mauritania and Chad in a separate category as well
These groupings over simplify the variety of the dialects but it’s to make the concept closer to understand especially for those who are not familiar with it. I spoke about dialects in a post I made a where I tried to provide an explanation for the difference in dialects, if you’re interested read it [here].
Usually, people learn Arabic to be able to speak a certain dialect, I recommend studying the standard Arabic first or at least having some sort of knowledge before delving into the dialects.
In my lessons, I will focus on Modern Standard Arabic, but I do make dialectal posts on my blog as well which can be found [here].
Arabic alphabets
Arabic is written from right to left, and the letters connect to form words. The letters are read as they are written in 99.9% of the cases, except for only very minor exceptions. It's also very phonetically consisentent, very similar to Spanish for example when comapred to English were different letters can be read differently according to the word.
Arabic has 28 letters, and because the writing connects the words together to form sentences, each letter can be written in 4 ways: the isolated form, the initial form (how it would look like if it came at the beginning of the word), medial form (how it would look like if it was in the middle of the word), and finally, the final form (how it would look like if it were at the end of the word).
However, it is important to note that not all letters connect with other letters, for example, the letters (ا / د / ذ / ر / ز / و) do not connect to each other, and only connects if the other letters in the alphabet comes before it.
The Arabic letters are simple, and many letters resemble one another, I usually refer to letters that are similar as “sisters”. The resemblance in shape doesn’t necessarily mean that the sounds are similar though.
There are two types of vowels, short vowels or harakat, and these are the diacritics or little accents that can be found on top of each letters; and long vowels or mudood which are three letters ا (which makes the sound “aah” ), و (which makes the sound of “oo” like “pool” ) and ي (which makes the sound “ee” like feel). Usually, when talking about “vowels” people are referring to the long vowels.
The vowel is twice as long as the haraka but it has the same sound.
Grammar & vocabulary
Arabic is a very well structured language, and it has a very consistent grammar, exceptions are not very common and it’s very logical.
A notable thing to note about Arabic grammar is that first of all, there are grammatical cases, like Turkish and German for example.
This means that the end of the word changes according to its role in a sentence. In the case of Arabic, the harakat of the end of the word changes depending on the place and role it plays in a sentence.
So don’t be surprised when you see the same word ending with different harakat. Because it is a language that has this grammatical case system, the sentence structure is flexible.
For example تُوتُ (berries) is the same as تُوتَ and تُوتِ . The difference here is the place in the sentence.
Another thing is that Arabic has a root system, most words have a root (most likely made up of three letters), the root has a certain meaning and all the derived words will contain the same three letters of the root as well as a certain meaning that is carried with the derivation.
For example the word كَتَبَ is the root and it means “to write”, we derive words like كَاتِب (writer or author) مَكْتُوب (written) and كِتَاب (book) and مَكْتَبَة (library). If you know the verb (root) it’ll be easy to guess the meaning of the word or have a guess on what the word is about.
Arabic letters : how are they arranged?
There are two ways that the letters in Arabic are arranged, the first one is called التَّرْتِيب الأبجَدِيُّ attartīb alʾbǧadiy. This is the old order of the letters, it was based on the order of the letters in Semetic languages, the order is also used in numbers (similar to roman numerals, how a letter can have a numerical value like (i) which is the number a).
This order is still used when making lists, for example if you’re saying point a) point b) , people are more likely to use this order.
For point c) in Arabic people will say ج) and not ت.
The letters are grouped in these words, in this same order
أبجد هوز حطي كلمن سعفص قرشت ثخذ ضظغ
التَّرْتِيبُ الهِجَائِيَ attartīb alhiǧāʾiy is an order that was later introduced. This order arranges words in the alphabet according to the similarities between the way the letters are drawn. It’s the one used when studying Arabic.
This is the order of these letters
أ ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن هـ و ي
For simplicity’s sake, I suggest focusing on the second order, but it’s good to know that it’s not the only one.
I hope this has been an interesting introduction to read!
Homework
Complete this small quiz to measure how much you understood from this lesson
Next lesson : we will study the different harakat and vowels.
