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Arabic,
in terms of the number of speakers, is the largest living member of the Semitic
language family. Classified as Central Semitic, it is closely related to Hebrew
and Aramaic, and has its roots in a Proto-Semitic common ancestor. In ISO 639-3,
modern Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage with 27 sub-languages. These
varieties are spoken throughout the Arab world, and Standard Arabic is widely
studied and used throughout the Islamic world.
Modern Standard Arabic derives from Classical
Arabic, the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group,
attested epigraphically since the 6th century. It has been a literary language
and the liturgical language of Islam since the 7th century.
Arabic has lent many words to other languages
of the Islamic world, as Latin has contributed to most European languages. It
has also borrowed from those languages, as well as Persian and Sanskrit from
early contacts with their affiliated regions. During the Middle Ages, Arabic was
a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy,
with the result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words
from it. Arabic influence is especially strong in Spanish and Portuguese due to
both the proximity of European and Arab civilization and 700 years of caliphate
government in the Iberian peninsula (see Al-Andalus).
Arabic and Islam
Arabic is the language of the Qur'an.
Traditionally, Muslims deem it impossible to translate the Qur'an in a way that
would reflect its exact meaning. Some schools of thought maintain that it should
not be translated at all. Arabic is often associated with Islam, but it is also
spoken by Arab Christians, Arab Druze, Mizrahi Jews and Iraqi Mandaeans.
Most of the world's Muslims do not speak Arabic
as their native language but can read the script and recite the words of
religious texts.
History
Modern Arabic is considered to be part of the
Arabo-Canaanite sub-branch of the central group of West Semitic languages. While
Arabic is not the oldest of the Semitic languages, it shares many features with
the common ancestor for all Semitic languages in the Afro-Asiatic group of
languages, Proto-Semitic whose phonological, morphological, and syntactic
features have been determined by linguists. Many linguists consider Arabic to be
the most conservative of the modern Semitic languages because of how completely
it preserves the features of Proto-Semitic.
The earliest texts in Proto-Arabic, or Ancient
North Arabian, are the Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, from the
8th century BC, written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean
ancestor, but in variants of the epigraphic South Arabian musnad. These
are followed by 6th-century BC Lihyanite texts from southeastern Saudi Arabia
and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai, and not actually
connected with Thamud. Later come the Safaitic inscriptions beginning in the 1st
century BC, and the many Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean
inscriptions (which are, however, written in Aramaic). From about the 2nd
century BC, a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (near Sulayyil) reveal a
dialect which is no longer considered "Proto-Arabic", but
Pre-Classical Arabic.
By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms of
the Lakhmids in southern Iraq, the Ghassanids in southern Syria the Kindite
Kingdom emerged in Central Arabia. Their courts were responsible for some
notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and for some of the few surviving
pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet.
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