Arabic language
Arabic is spoken in: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait,
Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian territories, Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Western Sahara,
Yemen by a majority; it is also the liturgical language of Islam.
Total speakers: Estimates of native speakers between 186 and 422 million.
According to Ethnologue, 246 million including second language speakers,
(1999 est).
Arabic is the largest living member of the Semitic language family in
terms of speakers. Classified as Central Semitic, it is closely related to
Hebrew and Aramaic, and has its roots in a Proto-Semitic common ancestor.
Modern Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage with 27 sub-languages in ISO
639-3. These varieties are spoken throughout the Arab world, and Standard
Arabic is widely studied and known 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, which 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. And in turn, 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.
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