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The primary living languages of the Middle East today are Arabic, Hebrew, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish. Pashto is another language spoken by a significant number in Afghanistan, while other Turkic languages closely related to Turkish, such as Turkmen, Uzbek, and others are important.
Mar 9, 2017 · The most common language spoken in the region is Arabic, a Semitic language that is very closely related to Hebrew. Arabic was developed beginning in the 8th century B.C., and it currently boasts approximately 280 million speakers in the Arab world.
Currently, 22 countries are member states of the Arab League (as well as 5 countries were granted an observer status) which was founded in Cairo in 1945. Arabic is a language cluster comprising 30 or so modern varieties.
- There's no agreement on how old the language is. Depending on who you ask, the earliest records of Arabic appear as far back as the second millenium BCE, around the eighth-century BCE or as late as the fourth-century BCE.
- The oldest Arabic inscription dates to 470 CE. A 2014 discovery by a French-Saudi-led team unearthed the world’s oldest known inscription written in the Arabic script – "Thawban Ibn Malik" were the three words etched into stone, alongside what is thought to be a Christian cross.
- Arabic is related to Hebrew and Amharic. Arabic is a member of the Semitic language family, which itself is a member of the Afro-Asiatic family. The Semitic family includes languages still spoken today, such as Hebrew in Israel and Amharic in Ethiopia, as well as extinct languages that were once widely spoken, such as Akkadian and Phoenician.
- There are dozens of Arabic dialects. Modern Standard Arabic remains a unifying dialect across the Arab world and is used in formal broadcasts, religious sermons and literature, but in day-to-day life Arabs speak a diverse array of dialects.
- Egyptian. The Egyptian dialect is the Arab world's most spoken Arabic dialect with close to 100 million people using it in everyday life and tens of millions more outside of the country familiar with it, as a result of the popularity of Egyptian media.
- Mesopotamian. Mesopotamian Arabic is spoken in Iraq and Arabic-speaking areas of Iran, as well as parts of Syria, Kuwait, and southeastern Turkey. The dialect contains influences from languages spoken in Mesopotamia in ancient times and today, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian, Kurdish, and Greek.
- Levantine. The Levantine dialect, known in Arabic as Shami is spoken by 38 million people worldwide. Varieties of the dialect are spoken in the Levant region, which includes; Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, as well as among small Arabic-speaking communities in Cyprus and Turkey.
- Maghrebi. The Maghrebi (western) dialect spoken in North African states west of Egypt has a reputation for being difficult to understand among eastern Arabic speakers but that is a claim many North Africans would take issue with.
Beginning with the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate and the early Muslim conquests in the late seventh century, Arabic gradually replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Near East. However, Aramaic remains a spoken, literary, and liturgical language for local Christians and also some Jews.
The four most commonly spoken languages of the region are Arabic, the most widely spoken language in many of the MENA countries; Persian or Farsi, spoken in Iran and by significant Persian speaking populations in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates; Hebrew, primarily spoken in Israel and the neighboring countries; and Turkish, spoken in Tur...
