At least 400 million people speak Arabic, including 200 million native speakers and 200 to 250 million non-native speakers, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is widely used in both international and religious settings as the official language for government, legal proceedings, and education. Additionally, the Middle East and North Africa are the primary languages of more than 25 dialects.
The United Nations observes World Arabic Language Day every December 18 and salutes Arabic as “the pillar of the cultural diversity of humanity.” The UN General Assembly designated Arabic as one of its six official languages on the anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s 1973 adoption of that date.
Al Jazeera provides a list of the most frequently used Arabic words that either originated in Arabic or traveled through Arabic before arriving in English in the following visual explainer.
how words from Arabic got into other languages
Arabic has had a long-lasting impact on cultures and other languages because it is the most widely used Semitic language, a group of languages that were native to Southwest Asia and Africa.
According to linguists, Arabic words are used in other languages because of long-standing cultural exchanges and trade.
Numerous other languages, including English, Spanish, French, Turkish, and many others, have taken hundreds to thousands of words from Arabic that are used in everyday language.
This kind of borrowing, according to Muntasir Al Hamad, a linguist and professor of Arabic at Qatar University, is a “natural phenomenon,” and languages have done so for centuries.
In that regard, Arabic is unaffected. He tells Al Jazeera, “This is reflected in vocabulary, science, technology, and civilisation.”
An alphabet that can be used in many different ways.
Arabic is written from right to left using a 28-letter alphabet. The letters in the script change shape depending on their word position because they are cursive. In everyday writing, short vowels are typically absent.
These characteristics, in addition to Arabic’s extensive vocabulary, have led to the perception that non-native speakers find it challenging to learn the language.
Al Hamad claims that many people’s perceptions are far from accurate.
One of the biggest myths about Arabic is that it is one of the most challenging languages in the world, he claimed. It is merely a language with systems that are different from English or many other European languages, according to the author.
He added that speakers of other languages, such as Urdu and Farsi, may find the Arabic script to be “quite familiar” with it. According to Al Hamad, speakers of those languages frequently find Arabic to be simpler to read while Turkish speakers may find its vocabulary to be simpler to memorize due to the numerous Arabic words that Turkish have absorbed.
For tariffs, from A to T, please.
Mathematics and science have two of the biggest contributions the Arabic language has made to the world.
Some of these words eventually shortened or adapted into other languages, becoming so well-known that their origins are frequently forgotten.
Algebra, the foundation of mathematics, is just one more illustration. The word al-jabr, which means “restoration” or “reunion,” is where the word comes from. The Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who lived in Baghdad and is the author of the book on equation solving, first used the name “algorithm” as its title.
Other Arabic words underwent more dramatic transformations. The Arabic word qirat is where the weight of gemstones is measured, known as the carat.
These adaptations, according to Al Hamad, reveal how unfamiliar sounds are adapted into English and other languages. He explains that “Arabic words like qirat were reshaped using more common sounds like C, G, or K, producing forms like carat” because there are comparatively few words in English that begin with Q.
Beyond science and mathematics, the same process can be found in everyday language. Giraffe, for instance, was derived from the Arabic word zarafa, which underwent a similar transformation as words that began with the Arabic letter Q similarly reshaped the original sounds to fit their own phonetic patterns.
On the other hand, words like tariff, which derive from the Arabic word ta’rif, which means “to notify” or “to announce,” made their way into English through exchanges with other trade languages.
Source: Aljazeera
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