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Chapter

Arabic

GENERAL INFORMATION

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 Number of speakers: More than 200 million speakers worldwide; 11 most‐spoken
language in the United States

 Writing system: Abjad; written from right‐to‐left; 28 letters

 Language Family: Afro‐Asiatic, most closely related to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic and

Phoenician; Semitic language

 Official language in: Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel,

Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,

Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

SPECIAL NOTE: “STANDARD” ARABIC

There are more than 30 different varieties of colloquial Arabic, including Egyptian,

12 Algerian, Moroccan/Maghrebi, Sudanese, Saidi, North Levantine, Mesopotamian, and Najdi.
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Not all dialects are mutually intelligible. Vocabulary and syntactic rules vary among Classic

Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and the colloquial dialects. Classic Arabic is used for

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