Arabic alphabet: Encyclopedia - Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

History · Adaptations
Phonology · Transliteration
Diacritics · Writing of the hamza
Numerals · Numeration

Middle Bronze Age 19-15th c. BC

• Proto-Canaanite 14th c. BC
  • Ugaritic 13th c. BC
  • Phoenician 11th c. BC
    • Samaritan 6th c. BC
    • Aramaic 9th c. BC
      • Brāhmī 4th c. BC
      • Hebrew 3rd c. BC
      • Syriac 2nd c. BC
      • Avestan 3th c.
      • Arabic 4th c.
    • Greek 8th c. BC
      • Old Italic 8th c. BC
        • Latin 7th c. BC
        • Runes 2nd c.
      • Gothic 4th c.
      • Armenian 405
      • Glagolitic 862
      • Cyrillic 10th c.
    • Iberian
      • Celtiberian
  • South Arabian 9th c. BC
    • Ge'ez 3rd-4th c.

The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing in the Arabic language.

Because the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, is written with this alphabet, its influence spread with that of Islam. As a result, the Arabic alphabet is used to write many other languages—many other languages belonging to language families other than Semitic, the family Arabic belongs to. For example, Persian and Urdu languages. In order to accommodate the phonetics of other languages, the alphabet has been adapted by the addition of letters and other symbols. (See #Arabic alphabets of other languages below).

The alphabet presents itself in different styles such as Nasta'līq, Thuluth, Kufic and others (see Arabic calligraphy), just like different handwriting styles and typefaces for the Roman alphabet. Superficially, these styles appear quite different, but the basic letterforms remain the same.

Arabic alphabet - Structure of the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is written from right to left and is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as Persian and Urdu have additional letters. There is no difference between written and printed letters; the writing is unicase (i.e. the concept of upper and lower case letters does not exist). On the other hand, most of the letters are attached to one another, even when printed, and their appearance changes as a function of whether they connect to preceding or following letters. Some combinations of letters form special ligatures.

The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad—short vowels are not written, though long ones are—so the reader must know the language in order to restore the vowels. However, in editions of the Qur'an or in didactic works a vocalization notation in the form of diacritic marks is used. Moreover, in vocalized texts, there is a series of other diacritics of which the most modern are an indication of vowel omission (sukūn) and the lengthening of consonants (šadda).

The names of Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where the names of the letters signified meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.

There are two orders for Arabic letters in the alphabet, the original Abjadī أبجدي order matches the ordering of letters in all alphabets derived from the Phoenician alphabet, including the English ABC. The standard order used today, and shown in the table is the Hejā'ī هجائي order, where letters are grouped according to their shape.

Arabic alphabet - Abjadi order

The special Abjadī order (or two slightly variant orders) was devised by matching an Arabic letter of the fully consonant-dotted 28-letter Arabic alphabet to each of the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet (in their old Phoenician alphabetic order) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end. The Abjadī order is not a simple historically-continuous preservation of the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, since it contains a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter semkat/samekh ס, yet no letter of the Arabic alphabet historically comes from ס. Similarly, the Abjad orders include in their first 22 positions some letters (ش and ض) which did not exist until the Arabic alphabet was expanded by consonant dotting.

The most common Abjad sequence is:

This is commonly vocalized as follows:

• ʼabǧad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman saʻfaṣ qarašat ṯaḫaḏ ḍaẓaġ.

Another vocalization is:

• ʼabuǧadin hawazin ḥuṭiya kalman saʻfaṣ qurišat ṯaḫuḏ ḍaẓuġ

Another Abjad sequence, mainly confined to the Maghreb, is:

which can be vocalized as:

• ʼabuǧadin hawazin ḥuṭiya kalman ṣaʻfaḍ qurisat ṯaḫuḏ ẓaġuš

See also: Abjad numerals.

Arabic alphabet - Presentation of the alphabet

The following table provides all of the Unicode characters for Arabic, and none of the supplementary letters used for other languages. The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Arabic transliteration for details and various other transliteration schemes.

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the "standard" pronunciation of the fusha language as taught in universities. Actual pronunciation between the varieties of Arabic may vary widely. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology.

Arabic alphabet - Primary letters

Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word. As to ﺀ hamza, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a waw, ya or alif, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary waw, ya or alif.

The only compulsory ligature is lām+'alif. All other ligatures (yaa - mīm, etc.) are optional.

• lām ʼalif (lā [læː]): ﻻ (medial ﻼ)

Unicode has a special glyph for the word llāh, the post-vocalic form of Allah "God."

• U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM:
  ﷲ

Combined with an initial alif, this becomes full allāh:

• ﺍﷲ

The latter is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word "Allah". Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):

• lam-lam-hā':
  لله
• alif-lam-lam-hā':
  الله

The following are not actual letters, but rather different orthographical shapes for letters.

The ʼalif maqṣūra, commonly using Unicode 0x0649 (ى) in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Farsi Yeh". This is appropriate to its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial form, in which the Farsi Yeh gains two dots below (ﯾ ﯿ) while the ʼalif maqṣūra has neither an initial nor a medial form.

Arabic alphabet - Hamza

Initially, the letter ʼalif indicated an occlusive glottal, or glottal stop, transcribed by [ʔ], confirming the alphabet came from the same Phoenician origin. Now it is used in the same manner as in other abjads, with yāʼ and wāw, as a mater lectionis, that is to say, a consonant standing in for a long vowel (see below). In fact, over the course of time its original consonantal value has been obscured, since ʼalif now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic support for certain diacritics (madda or hamza).

The Arabic alphabet now uses the hamza to indicate a glottal stop, which can appear anywhere in a word. This letter, however, does not function like the others: it can be written alone or on a support in which case it becomes a diacritic:

• alone: ء ;
• with a support: إ, أ (above and under a ʼalif), ؤ (above a wāw), ئ (above a dotless yāʼ or yāʼ hamza).

Arabic alphabet - Diacritics

Arabic short vowels are generally not written, except sometimes in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan) and didactics, which are known as vocalised texts. Occasionally short vowels are marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and cannot be resolved simply from context.

Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable. (All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; contrary to appearances: there is a consonant at the start of a name like Ali — in Arabic ʻAliyy — or a word like ʼalif.)

Long "a" following a consonant other than hamzah is written with a short-"a" mark on the consonant plus an alif after it (ʼalif). Long "i" is a mark for short "i" plus a yaa yāʼ, and long u is mark for short u plus waaw, so aā = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū);

Long "a" following a hamzah sound may be represented by an alif-madda or by a floating hamzah followed by an alif.

In an un-vocalised text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question (alif, yaa, waaw). Long vowels written in the middle of a word are treated like consonants taking sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics.

For clarity, vowels will be placed above or below the letter د dāl so it is necessary to read the results [da], [di], [du], etc. Please note, د dāl is one of the six letters that do not connect to the left, and is used in this demonstration for clarity. Most other letters connect to ʼalif, wāw and yāʼ.

šadda (ّ) marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant; kasra (when present) moves to between the shadda and the geminate (doubled) consonant.

An Arabic syllable can be open (ended by a vowel) or closed (ended by a consonant).

• open: CV[consonant-vowel] (long or short vowel)
• closed: CVC (short vowel only)

When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a sign called sukūn (ْ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalised: it's necessary to remember that a standard text is only composed of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. Sukūn allows us to know where not to place a vowel: qlb could, in effect, be read /qVlVbV/, but written with a sukūn over the l and the b, it can only be interpreted as the form /qVlb/; we write this قلْبْ. This is one stage from full vocalization, where the a vowel would also be indicated by a fatḥa: قَلْبْ,

The Qur'an is traditionaly written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qur'an, putting a sukun above a ya' which indicates [i:], or above a waw which stands for [u:] is extremely rare, to the point that yaa with sukuun will be unambiguously read as the diphthong [ai] and waw with sukun will be read[au].

The letters m-w-s-y-q-ā (موسيقى with an ʼalif maqṣūra at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word mūsīqā ("music"). If you were to write sukuns above the waw, ya and alif, you'd get وْسيْقىْ, which would be read as *mawsaykay (note that an ʼalif maqṣūra is an alif and never takes sukūn). The word, entirely vocalised, is written مُوْسِيْقَىْ.

A Sukun is not placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalised texts are always written as if the i`rab vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, ʼaḥmad zawǧ šarr, meaning "Ahmed is a bad husband", for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if it was still pronounced with full i`rab, ʼaḥmadu zawǧun šarrun.

Arabic alphabet - Numerals

There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals and "East Arab" numerals, used in Iran, Pakistan and India. In Arabic, these numbers are referred to as "Indian numbers" (أرقام هندية arqām hindiyyah). In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western "Arabic numerals" derive) was used. Unlike Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from left to right.

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals), a usage rare today. This usage is based on the Abjadi order of the alphabet. ʼalif is 1, ب bāʼ is 2, ج ǧīm is 3, and so on until ي yāʼ = 10, ك kāf = 20, ل lām = 30, ... ر rāʼ = 200, ..., غ ġayn = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms.

Arabic alphabet - History

The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabatean alphabet used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic, itself descended from Phoenician. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from Jabal Ram (50 km east of Aqaba), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them (the Aramaic model had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds!) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qurʼan were frequently memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script.

Yet later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning sometime in the last half of the seventh century, roughly contemporaneous with the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots gave tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.

Arabic alphabet - Arabic alphabets of other languages

Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages other than Arabic, including Persian, Kurdish, Malay and Urdu. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a [p] phoneme, so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters]); whereas West African languages tend to imitate those of Ajami, and Indonesian ones those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.

Arabic alphabet - Current uses of the alphabet for other languages

The Arabic alphabet is currently used for:

• Kurdish and Turkmen in Northern Iraq. (In Turkey, the Latin alphabet is now used for Kurdish);
• Official language Persian and regional languages including Azeri, Sorani-Kurdish and Baluchi in Iran;
• Official languages Dari and Pashto and regional languages including Uzbek in Afghanistan;
• Official language Urdu and regional languages including Punjabi (where the script is known as Shahmukhi), Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Baluchi in Pakistan;
• Urdu and Kashmiri in India (see List of national languages of India);
• Uyghur (changed to Roman script in 1969 and back to a simplified, fully voweled, Arabic script in 1983), Kazakh and Kyrgyz by a minority of Kyrgyz in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China;
• Malay in the Arabic script known as Jawi is co-official in Brunei, and used for religious purposes in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore;
• Comorian (Comorian) in the Comoros, currently side by side with the Latin alphabet (neither is official);
• Hausa for many purposes, especially religious (known as Ajami);
• Mandinka, widely but unofficially; (another alphabet used is N'Ko)
• Wolof (at zaouias), known as Wolofal.
• Tamazight and other Berber languages were traditionally written in Arabic in the Maghreb. There is now a competing 'revival' of neo-Tifinagh.

Arabic alphabet - Former uses of the alphabet for other languages

In the past, Arabic script has also been used to represent some languages now written with a different script, such as the Latin alphabet. Most education was once religious instead of governmental and uniform within a state, so choice of script was determined by the user's religion and Muslims would use Arabic script to write any language they used. See also Languages of Muslim countries.

• Afrikaans (as it was first written among the "Cape Malays");
• Albanian;
• Azeri in Azerbaijan (now written in the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet scripts in Azerbaijan);
• Belarusian (among ethnic Tatars);
• Berber in North Africa, particularly Tachelhit in Morocco (still being considered, along with Tifinagh and Latin for Tamazight);
• Bashkir (for some years: from October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
• Bosnian (only for literary purposes); (presently written in the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet scripts)
• Chaghatai across Central Asia;
• Chechen (for some years: from October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
• Chinese and Dungan, among the Chinese Hui Muslims[1];
• Fulani, where the script is known as Ajami script;
• Kazakh in Kazakhstan;
• Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan;
• Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia;
• Mozarabic, when the Moors ruled Spain (and later Aragonese, Portuguese, and Spanish proper; see aljamiado);
• Nubian;
• Polish (among ethnic Tatars);
• Sanskrit has also been written in Arabic script, though it is more well known as using Devanagari - the script also known for being currently used for writing the Hindi language.
• Swahili;
• Somali (has used the Latin alphabet since 1972);
• Songhay in West Africa, particularly in Timbuktu;
• Tatar (iske imlâ) before 1928 (changed to Latin), reformed in 1880's, 1918 (deletion of some letters);
• Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic script until Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared the change to Roman script in 1928. This form of Turkish is now known as Ottoman Turkish and is held by many to be a different language, due to its much higher percentage of Persian and Arabic loanwords;
• Turkmen in Turkmenistan;
• Uzbek in Uzbekistan;
• All the Muslim peoples of the USSR between 1918-1928 (many also earlier), including Bashkir, Chechen, Kazakh, Tajik etc. After 1928 their script became Latin, then later Cyrillic.

Arabic alphabet - Computers and the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6 and Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character.

When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) and Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contain most of the characters with contextual variation as well as the extended characters appropriate for other languages. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms.

Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date. For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at http://www.unicode.org/

• Multilingual Computing in Arabic with Windows, major word processors, web browsers, Arabic keyboards, and Arabic transliteration fonts

Arabic alphabet - Arabic keyboard layout

History · Adaptations
Phonology · Transliteration
Diacritics · Writing of the hamza
Numerals · Numeration

See also

• Arabic calligraphy - considered an art form in its own right
• Hindu-Arabic numerals
• Arabic transliteration
• Arabic Chat Alphabet
• ArabTeX - provides Arabic support for TeX and LaTeX
• Jawi - an adapted Arabic alphabet for the Malay language

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Arabic alphabet", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki