Today, in addition to the Arabic language, which is spoken in several varieties by hundreds of millions of people, the Arabic script is also used to write other languages in modified forms. There are only a small number of confirmed pre-Islamic inscriptions, and it was not until the writing of the Qur’an in the 7 th century CE that the full Arabic script was finalized.

The earliest form of the script had only 22 characters and could not fully express all the sounds of Arabic, so early Arabic writing would use the same letter for different sounds. The Arabic writing system is most likely derived from the Nabataean script. Arabic is always written in a cursive style, with letters connected to one another, and there are a large number of ligatures, which combine multiple letters into one symbol. Upper and lower case are not distinguished, but letters may have up to four different forms depending on their placement in a word. The standard Arabic script has 28 letters, and unlike European alphabets like Latin and Greek, it is written from right to left. It is classified as an abjad, as it generally only consists of consonant letters, though vowels can be indicated using diacritics, and are usually written out in full for loanwords. As one of the world’s most spoken languages, it is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.Īrabic is written using the Arabic script. Arabic (العربية) is an official language of over 20 countries, including Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, and the liturgical language of Islam.

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