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| Arabic from the
Quran in the old Hijazi dialect (Hijazi script,
7th century AD). |
Arabic
Arabic (العربية) is a Semitic language, in the same
family as Hebrew and Aramaic. Around 250 million people
use it as their first language. Many more people can
also understand it, but not as a first language. It is
written with the Arabic alphabet, which is written from
right to left, like Hebrew. Since it is so widely spoken
throughout the world, it is one of the six official
languages of the UN, alongside English, Spanish, French,
Russian, and Chinese.
Many countries speak Arabic as an official language, but
not all of them speak it the same way. There are many
dialects, or varieties of a language, like Modern
Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Maghrebi
Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and many others. Some of these
dialects are so different from each other that they have
a hard time understanding the other. |
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Arabic is also becoming a popular language to learn in
the Western world, even though Arabic grammar is
sometimes very hard to learn for native speakers of
Indo-European languages. Many other languages have
borrowed words from Arabic, because of its importance in
history. Some English words that can be traced to Arabic
are: sugar, cotton, magazine, algebra, and alcohol. |
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 Kiddle: Arabic
Wikipedia: Arabic |
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