"Arabic" redirects here. For other uses, see Arabic (disambiguation).This article is about the language. For the literary standard, see Modern Standard Arabic. For vernaculars, see varieties of Arabic. For others, see Arabic languages.Arabic???????/???? al-?arabiyyah/?arabi Arabic albayancalligraphy.svgal-?Arabiyyah in written Arabic (Naskh script)Pronunciation /al ?arabijja/, /?arabi/Native to Countries of the Arab League, minorities in neighboring countries: Mali, Niger, Chad, Senegal, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey etc.Native speakers290 million (2010)[1]Language familyAfro-AsiaticSemiticCentral SemiticArabicArabicStandard formsModern Standard ArabicDialectsWestern (Maghrebi)Central (incl. Egyptian, Sudanese)Northern (incl. Levantine, Mesopotamian)Peninsular (Gulf, Hejazi, Najdi, Yemeni)Writing systemArabic alphabetArabic BrailleSyriac alphabet (Garshuni)Hebrew alphabet (Judeo-Arabic languages)Greek alphabet (Cypriot Maronite Arabic)Latin script (Maltese)Signed form(s)Signed Arabic (national forms)Official statusOfficial language inModern Standard Arabic is an official language of 27 states, the third most after English and French[2]List[show]Regulated byList[show]Language codesISO 639-1 arISO 639-2 araISO 639-3 ara{{{mapalt}}}Use of Arabic as the sole official language (green) and an official language (blue)This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.This article contains Arabic text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.Arabic Listeni/'r?b?k/ (??????? al-?arabiyyah [al?ara'bijja] ( listen) or ???? ,???? ?arabi ['?arabi?] ( listen)) is a name for what are traditionally considered the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century. This includes both the literary language and varieties of Arabic spoken in a wide arc of territory, stretching across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family.The literary language is called Modern Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic, which is a pluricentric, fusional language.[3] It is currently the only official form of Arabic, used in most written documents as well as in formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts. However, this varies from one country to the other. Moroccan Arabic was official in Morocco for some time, before the latter nation joined the Arab League.Arabic languages are Central Semitic languages, most closely related to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Phoenician. The standardized written Arabic is distinct from and more conservative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible,[4] both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political and/or religious reasons (see below). If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it perhaps is spoken by as many as 420 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world,[5] making it one of the half dozen most populous languages in the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would most likely be Egyptian Arabic, with 54 million native speakers[6]still greater than any other Afro-Asiatic language. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 billion Muslim speakers.[7][8] It is one of six official languages of the United Nations.[9]The modern written language (Modern Standard Arabic) is derived from the language of the Quran (known as Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic)[citation needed]. It is widely taught in schools, universities and used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical language of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of Quranic Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties[citation needed]. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-Quranic era, especially in modern times.Arabic is the only surviving member of the Ancient North Arabian dialect group attested in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions dating back to the 4th century.[10][contradictory] Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right-to-left although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left-to-right with no standardized forms.