Classical, Modern Standard and spoken Arabic
Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Our Arabic translators will know precisely which Arabic register to choose for your document and your intended audience
MSA is the official language of 26 states, while Classical Arabic is the language of the Quran and Hadith and the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims.
Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All variants of Arabic combined are spoken by some 422 million speakers (native and non-native) across the Arab world, making it the world’s fifth most spoken language. The language is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script (a type of writing system in which, at variance with true alphabets, each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving it to the reader to infer the appropriate vowel). The script moves from right to left.
Arabic’s influence on other languages
Arabic has had a strong influence on many other languages spanning the region in a line stretching from the Western point of the Mediterranean across North Africa, the Middle East, India and the subcontinent to Indonesia in Southeast Asia. Influenced languages include Albanian, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish, Malaysian, Maldivian, Odia, Pashto, Persian (Farsi), Punjabi, Sicilian, Sindhi, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish and Urdu, as well as some languages in parts of Africa. Arabic has also borrowed from Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew and Persian in the Middle Ages and, more recently, from English and French.