The Arabic alphabet is thought to be traced back to a Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, known as Nabataean Aramaic. This script itself descends from the Phoenician alphabet, an ancestral alphabet that additionally gave rise to the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. Nabataean Aramaic evolved into Nabataean Arabic, so-called because it represents a transitional phase between the known recognizably Aramaic and Arabic scripts. Nabataean Arabic was succeeded by Paleo-Arabic, termed as such because it dates to the pre-Islamic period in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, but is also recognizable in light of the Arabic script as expressed during the Islamic era. Finally, the standardization of the Arabic alphabet during the Islamic era led to the emergence of classical Arabic. The phase of the Arabic alphabet today is known as Modern Standard Arabic, although classical Arabic survives as a "high" variety as part of a diglossia.
The Arabic alphabet evolved either from the Nabataean,[1][2] or (less widely believed) directly from the Syriac alphabet.[3] The phases of the Arabic script, prior to the Islamic period, can be categorized as follows:
Nabataean Aramaic: In the 2nd or 1st centuries BCE,[4][5] the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet were written in the Aramaic language (which was the language of communication and trade), but included some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus.[6] This cursive form influenced the monumental form more and more and gradually changed into the Arabic alphabet.
Nabataean Arabic: Starting in the third century, and until the mid-fifth century, the Nabataean Aramaic alphabet evolved into what is known as Nabataean-Arabic. This alphabet has received this name because it contains a mixture of features from the prior Aramaic script, in addition to a number of notable features from the later fully developed Arabic script.[7]
Paleo-Arabic: A pre-Islamic phase of the Arabic alphabet, roughly having reached the standardized form of Arabic from the Islamic era, but having already been expressed from the late fifth to the sixth century.[7]
The first known recorded text in the Arabic alphabet is known as the Zabad inscription, composed in 512. It is a trilingual dedication in Greek, Syriac and Arabic found at the village of Zabad in northwestern Syria. The version of the Arabic alphabet used includes only 21 letters, of which only 15 are different, being used to note 28 phonemes:
Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet are few. They mostly use no dots, making them sometimes difficult to interpret, as many letters are the same shape as other letters (they are written with rasm only)
Below are descriptions of inscriptions found in the Arabic alphabet, and the inscriptions found in the Nabataean alphabet that show the beginnings of Arabic-like features.
A large funerary stone is inscribed in the Hasaean dialect using a variety of South Arabian monumental script, with three inscribed lines for the man Matmat, that records both patrilineal and matriarchal descent:[9]
A tomb dedicatory and a prayer to Lāh, Kāhil and ʻAṯṯār to protect the tomb:
"ʿIgl son of Hafʿam constructed for his brother Rabibil son of Hafʿam the tomb: both for him and for his child and his wife, and his children and their children's children and womenfolk, free members of the folk Ghalwan. And he has placed it under the protection of (the gods) Kahl and Lah and ʿAthtar al-Shariq from anyone strong or weak, and anyone who would attempt to sell or pledge it, for all time without any derogation, so long as the sky produces rain or the earth herbage."(Beeston)
A prayer of thanks to the god Obodas for saving someone's life:
"For (Obodas -the god-) works without reward or favour, and he, when death tried to claim us, did not let it claim (us), for when a wound (of ours) festered, he did not let us perish." (Bellamy)
"([Th]is is the tomb which SHYMW … built … (2) … [for P]N, hisson, through (the help of) the god of their father … (3) … king Rabel, king of the Nabataeans …" (Butts and Hardy)
"This is the memorial of Julianos, weighed down by long sleep, for whom his father Agathos built it while shedding a tear beside the boundary of the communal cemetery of the people of Christ, in order that a better people might always sing of him openly, being formerly the beloved faithful [son?] of Agathos the presbyter, aged twelve. In the year 239 [of the era of the Provincia Arabia = 344 AD]." (Trombley)
In the 5th century barracks were built. In their southeast tower, which stands to a height of six stories, the names of the archangels—"Michael, Uriel, Gabriel and Raphael"—are inscribed. (Micah Key)
Mixture of Arabic and Aramaic, 1 vertical line in Thamudic
Nabataean, some letter-joining. Has a few diacritic dots.
Last inscription in Nabataean language. Epitaph to one Raqush, including curse against grave-violaters:
"This is a grave K b. H has taken care of for his mother, Raqush bint ʿA. She died in al-Hijr in the year 162 in the month of Tammuz. May the Lord of the world curse anyone who desecrates this grave and opens it up, except his offspring! May he [also] curse anyone who buries [someone in the grave] and [then] removes [him] from it! May who buries.... be cursed!"(Healey and Smith)
A long epitaph for the famous Arab poet and war-leader Imru'ul-Qays, describing his war deeds:
"This is the funerary monument of Imru' al-Qays, son of 'Amr, king of the Arabs, and (?) his title of honour was Master of Asad and Madhhij. And he subdued the Asadis and they were overwhelmed together with their kings, and he put to flight Madhhij thereafter, and came driving them to the gates of Najran, the city of Shammar, and he subdued Ma'add, and he dealt gently with the nobles of the tribes, and appointed them viceroys, and they became phylarchs for the Romans. And no king has equalled his achievements. Thereafter he died in the year 223 on the 7th day of Kaslul. Oh the good fortune of those who were his friends!" (Bellamy)
In a temple of Allat. Boast or thanks of an energetic man who made his fortune:
"I rose and made all sorts of money, which no world-weary man has [ever] collected. I have collected gold and silver; I announce it to those who are fed up and unwilling." (Bellamy)
"This [inscription] was set up by colleagues of ʿUlayh son of ʿUbaydah, secretary of the cohort Augusta Secunda Philadelphiana; may he go mad who effaces it." (Bellamy)
Record of a military expedition by Ibrahim ibn Mughirah on behalf of the king al-Harith, presumably Al-Harith ibn Jabalah (Arethas in Greek), king of the Ghassanid vassals of the Byzantines:
"This is Ruqaym, son of Mughayr the Awsite. Al-Ḥārith the king, sent me to 'Usays, upon his military posts in the year 423 [528 CE]"
In the 7th century, probably in the early years of Islam while writing down the Qur'an, scribes realized that working out which of the ambiguous letters a particular letter was from context was laborious and not always possible, so a proper remedy was required. Writings in the Nabataean and Syriac alphabets already had sporadic examples of dots being used to distinguish letters which had become identical, for example as in the table on the right. By analogy with this, a system of dots was added [by whom?]to the Arabic alphabet to make enough different letters for Classical Arabic's 28 phonemes. Sometimes the resulting new letters were put in alphabetical order after their un-dotted originals, and sometimes at the end.
The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April, 643. The dots did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qur'an were frequently memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partly to avoid the great ambiguity of the script, and partly due to the scarcity of books in times when printing was unheard-of in the area and every copy of every book had to be written by hand.
The alphabet then had 28 letters, and so could be used to write the numbers 1 to 10, then 20 to 100, then 200 to 900, then 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In this numerical order, the new letters were put at the end of the alphabet. This produced this order: alif (1), b (2), j (3), d (4), h (5), w (6), z (7), H (8), T (9), y (10), k (20), l (30), m (40), n (50), s (60), ayn (70), f (80), S (90), q (100), r (200), sh (300), t (400), th (500), dh (600), kh (700), D (800), Z (900), gh (1000).
The lack of vowel signs in Arabic writing created more ambiguities: for example, in Classical Arabicktb could be kataba = "he wrote", kutiba = "it was written" or kutub="books". Later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning some time in the last half of the 6th century, at about the same time as the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done using a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the Umayyad governor of Iraq, according to traditional accounts[citation needed]: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots giving tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.
All administrative texts were previously recorded by Persian scribes in Middle Persian using Pahlavi script, but many of the initial orthographic alterations to the Arabic alphabet might have been proposed and implemented by the same scribes.[12]
When new signs were added to the Arabic alphabet, they took the alphabetical order value of the letter which they were an alternative for: tā' marbūta (see also below) took the value of ordinary t, and not of h. In the same way, the many diacritics do not have any value: for example, a doubled consonant indicated by shadda does not count as a letter separate from the single one.
Letters Standardization
The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 consonant phonemes; thus, when used to write the Arabic language, 6 of its letters must each represent two phonemes:
As cursive Nabataean writing evolved into Arabic writing, the writing became largely joined-up. Some of the letters became the same shape as other letters, producing more ambiguities, as in the table:
Here the Arabic letters are listed in the traditional Levantine order but are written in their current forms, for simplicity. The letters which are the same shape have coloured backgrounds. The second value of the letters that represent more than one phoneme is after a comma. In these tables, ǧ is j as in English "June". In the Arabic language, the g sound seems to have changed into j in fairly late pre-Islamic times, but this seems not to have happened in those tribes who invaded Egypt and settled there.
When a letter was at the end of a word, it often developed an end loop, and as a result most Arabic letters have two or more shapes, so for example n⟨ن⟩ and y⟨ي⟩ have different shapes at the end of the words (⟨ـي⟩, ⟨ـن⟩) but they have the same linked initial and medial shapes (⟨يـ⟩, ⟨نـ⟩) as b,t, and ṯ (⟨بـ⟩, ⟨تـ⟩ and ⟨ثـ⟩), the same goes for f⟨ف⟩ and q⟨ق⟩ which have the same linked initial and medial shapes (⟨قـ⟩, ⟨فـ⟩) and are only differentiated by the dots.
And even though the eight letters (b, t, ħ, j, r, z, s, and š) had different shapes in the Nabatean alphabet, they have similar shapes in Arabic:
After all this, there were only 18 letters that were different in shapes (without dots). One letter-shape represented 3 phonemes (b t ṯ), another one represented 3 phonemes (j ħ kh), and 6 shapes each represented 2 phonemes, below are the shapes of letters dotless and with dots:
Note that the dotless shapes ⟨ٮ⟩, ⟨ڡ⟩, ⟨ٯ⟩ and ⟨ں⟩ are never used in Arabic. While a dotless ⟨ى⟩ ("ألف مقصورةalif maqṣūrah") is used for /aː/ in some words (instead of ⟨ا⟩), and a dotted ⟨ه⟩; ⟨ة⟩ ("تاء مربوطةtāʾ marbūṭah") indicates /h/ at the end of feminine nouns and adjectives as in رِسَالَة/ri.saː.lah/ "message" when standing alone but in the construct state it indicates /t/ as in رسالة الملكة/ri.saː.latal.ma.li.kah/ "the queen's message" and some masculine nouns.
Some features of the Arabic alphabet arose because of differences between Qur'anic spelling and the form of Classical Arabic that was phonemically and orthographically standardized later. These include:
tā' marbūta: This arose because, in many dialects, the -at ending of feminine nouns (tā' marbūta) was lenited over time and was often pronounced as -ah and written as h. This pronunciation eventually became standard, and so to avoid altering Quranic spelling, the dots of t were written over the h.[citation needed]
y (alif maksura ى) used to spell ā at the ends of some words: This arose because ā arising from contraction where single y dropped out between vowels was in some dialects pronounced at the ends of words with the tongue further forward than for other ā vowels, and as a result in the Qu'ran it was written as y.[clarification needed][citation needed]
ā not written as alif in some words: The Arabic spelling of Allāh was decided before the Arabs started using alif to spell ā. In other cases (for example the first ā in hāðā = "this"), it may be that some dialects pronounced those vowels short.
hamza: Originally alif was used to spell the glottal stop. But Meccans did not pronounce the glottal stop[citation needed], replacing it with w, y or nothing, lengthening an adjacent vowel, or, intervocalically, dropping the glottal stop and contracting the vowels. Thus, Arabic grammarians invented the hamzadiacritic sign and used it to mark the glottal stop.
Reorganization of the alphabet
Less than a century later, Arab grammarians reorganized the alphabet, for reasons of teaching, putting letters next to other letters which were nearly the same shape. This produced a new order which was not the same as the numeric order, which became less important over time because it was being competed with by the Indian numerals and sometimes by the Greek numerals.
The Arabic grammarians of North Africa changed the new letters, which explains the differences between the alphabets of the East and the Maghreb.
The old alphabetical order, as in the other alphabets shown here, is known as the Levantine or Abjadi order. If the letters are arranged by their numeric order, the Levantine order is restored:
Arabic
Hebrew
Syriac
Greek
Value
ʾalif
ا
ʾālep̄
א
ʾālap̄
ܐ
alpha
Α
1
bāʾ
ب
bēṯ
ב
bēṯ
ܒ
bēta
Β
2
ǧīm
ج
gimel
ג
gāmal
ܓ
gamma
Γ
3
dāl
د
dāleṯ
ד
dālaṯ
ܕ
delta
Δ
4
hāʾ
ه
hē
ה
hē
ܗ
epsilon
Ε
5
wāw
و
wāw
ו
wāw
ܘ
wau
Ϝ
6
zāy
ز
zayin
ז
zayn
ܙ
zēta
Ζ
7
ḥāʾ
ح
ḥēṯ
ח
ḥēṯ
ܚ
ēta
Η
8
(Note: here "numeric order" means the traditional values when these letters were used as numbers. See Arabic numerals, Greek numerals and Hebrew numerals for more details) This order is much the oldest. The first written records of the Arabic alphabet show why the order was changed.
Abbasid standardizations
An image of the Taj Mahal featuring marble lettering in the thuluth script, a style attributed to Ibn Muqla (886-940).
Arabic script reached a climax in aesthetics and geographic spread under the Abbasid Caliphate.[11] In this period, Ibn al-Bawwab and Ibn Muqla had the most influence on the standardization of Arabic script.[11] They were associated with al-khatt al-mansūb (الخط المنسوب), or "proportioned script."[15][16]
When the Arabic alphabet spread to countries which used other languages, extra letters had to be invented to spell non-Arabic sounds. Usually the alteration was three dots above like ژ, ڠ, ڭ and څ or below like چ, ؼ and پ.
Urdu: retroflex sounds: as the corresponding dentals but with a small letter ط above. (This problem in adapting a Semitic alphabet to write Indian languages also arose long before this: see Brahmi)
There are broadly two standards for Pashto orthography, the Afghan orthography in Afghanistan and the Peshawar orthography in Pakistan where /g/ is represented by ګ instead of the Afghani گ.
Decline in use by non-Arabic states
Since the early 20th century, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and European influence increased, many non-Arab Islamic areas began using the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet, and local adaptations of the Arabic alphabet were abandoned. In many cases, the writing of a language in Arabic script has become restricted to classical texts and traditional purposes (as in the Turkic States of Central Asia, or Hausa and others in West Africa), while in others, the Arabic alphabet is used alongside the Latin one (as with Jawi in Brunei).
Area used
Arabic spelling system
New spelling system
Date
Ordered by
Some constituent republics in the Soviet Union, especially Muslim States
An abjad, also abgad, is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Assyrians and Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Square Script", even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew.
The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. Unlike the modern Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
A mater lectionis is any consonant that is used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are aleph א, he ה, waw ו and yod י, with the latter two in particular being more often vowels than they are consonants. In Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalif ا, wāw و and yāʾ ي.
The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, which include consonant pointing known as iʻjām (إِعْجَام), and supplementary diacritics known as tashkīl (تَشْكِيل). The latter include the vowel marks termed ḥarakāt.
Jawi is a writing system used for writing several languages of Southeast Asia, such as Acehnese, Banjarese, Magindanawn, Malay, Mëranaw, Minangkabau, Tausūg, and Ternate. Jawi is based on the Arabic script, consisting of all 31 original Arabic letters, six letters constructed to fit phonemes native to Malay, and one additional phoneme used in foreign loanwords, but not found in Classical Arabic, which are ca, nga, pa, ga, va, and nya.
Aljamiado or Aljamía texts are manuscripts that use the Arabic script for transcribing European languages, especially Romance languages such as Old Spanish or Aragonese. This alphabet is also called the Morisco alphabet.
Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician yōd 𐤉, Hebrew yudי, Aramaic yod 𐡉, Syriac yōḏ ܝ, and Arabic yāʾي. Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many languages, it also serves as a long vowel, representing.
The Nabataean script is an abjad that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards. Important inscriptions are found in Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, and other archaeological sites including Abdah and Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia.
Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālefא, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalifا, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters are used in academic settings for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a version of the Perso-Arabic script used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.
The Arabic script, also called as the Perso-Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users.
The Urdu alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has co-official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Africa. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.
Wadaad's writing, also known as Wadaad'sArabic, is the traditional Somali adaptation of written Arabic as well as the Arabic script as historically used to transcribe the Somali language. This script is a part of the global adaptation of the Arabic script to regional languages, and can be viewed as a specific instance of the African usage of Arabic, known as Ajami scripts. In many early uses, it referred to scholarly writing that used a mixture of Arabic and Somali, with the proportion of Somali vocabulary varying depending on the context. The Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have a deeply intertwined history, one such example is that Somalis are among the first people in Africa to embrace Islam. This is a continuation of the long history of interchange between the peninsulas—Sabaic inscriptions exist in abundance in Northern Somalia alongside Christian graves. Sabaic is the precursor that developed in Ethiopia to the Ge'ez script family. In much the same way that Islam and Arabic entered the Horn of Africa, Christianity and Sabaic had shared similar roles previously. This is due to the shared Rea Sea milleu of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Alongside standard Arabic, Wadaad's writing was used by Somali religious men (Wadaado) to record xeer petitions and to write qasidas. It was also used by merchants for business purposes and letter writing.
The hamza is an Arabic script character that, in the Arabic alphabet, denotes a glottal stop and, in non-Arabic languages, indicates a diphthong, vowel, or other features, depending on the language. Derived from the letter ʿAyn, the hamza is written in initial, medial and final positions as an unlinked letter or placed above or under a carrier character. Despite its common usage as a letter in Modern Standard Arabic, it is generally not considered to be one of its letters, although some argue that it should be considered a letter.
The Pashto alphabet is the right-to-left abjad-based alphabet developed from the Arabic script, used for the Pashto language in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It originated in the 16th century through the works of Pir Roshan.
Pegon is a modified Arabic script used to write the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese languages, as an alternative to the Latin script or the Javanese script and the Old Sundanese script. It was used in a variety of applications, from religion, to diplomacy, to poetry. But today particularly, it is used for religious (Islamic) writing and poetry, particularly in writing commentaries of the Qur'an. Pegon includes letters that are not present in Modern Standard Arabic. Pegon has been studied far less than its Jawi counterpart which is used for Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau.
Hausa Ajami script refers to the practice of using the alphabet derived from Arabic script for writing of Hausa language.
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