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The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, [a] the Horn of Africa, [b] [c] Malta, [d] and in large immigrant and expatriate ...
Arabic language, a Semitic language spoken in areas including North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Middle East. The language of the Qur’an (the sacred book of Islam) is often considered the ideal archetype of Arabic’s many varieties, and the literary standard closely approaches that archetype.
Before the spread of Islam and, with it, the Arabic language, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. In modern usage, it embraces any of the Arabic-speaking peoples living in the vast region from Mauritania , on the Atlantic coast of Africa, to southwestern Iran , including the entire Maghrib ...
Varieties of Arabic (or dialects or vernacular languages) are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. [2] Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related ...
Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic, the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remains contested.
Ancient Semitic Roots. Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family, which includes other languages like Hebrew and Amharic. The earliest known written records of Arabic date back to the 4th century CE. The Quran. The Quran, the holy book of Islam, is written in Arabic. It played a pivotal role in the preservation and standardization of the ...
Arabic is a Semitic language and is an official language in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Libya and Eritrea. It’s also widely spoken in many other countries. Arabic comes in a number of varieties, but if you learn Modern Standard Arabic, you’ll be able to communicate with most Arabic speakers around the world.
