Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
The Arabic alphabet, or 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. 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.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally 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 caron is a diacritic mark commonly placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts.
Zhe, Zha, sometimes transliterated as Že is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced retroflex sibilant (listen) or voiced alveolar fricative /ʒ/. It is also often used with D (Д) to approximate the sound in English of the Latin letter J with a ДЖ combination. Zhe is romanized as ⟨zh⟩, ⟨j⟩ or ⟨ž⟩.
While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, the contemporary spoken Arabic language is more properly described as a continuum of varieties. This article deals primarily with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions. MSA is used in writing in formal print media and orally in newscasts, speeches and formal declarations of numerous types.
The Persian alphabet, also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic alphabet with five additional letters: پ چ ژ گ, in addition the obsolete ڤ.
Shin is the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician šīn 𐤔, Hebrew šīn ש, Aramaic šīn 𐡔, Syriac šīn ܫ, and Arabic sīn س. Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, or.
Qoph is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician qōp 𐤒, Hebrew qūp̄ ק, Aramaic qop 𐡒, Syriac qōp̄ ܩ, and Arabic qāf ق.
Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician gīml 𐤂, Hebrew gīmel ג, Aramaic gāmal 𐡂, Syriac gāmal ܓ, and Arabic ǧīm ج. Its sound value in the original Phoenician and in all derived alphabets, except Arabic, is a voiced velar plosive ; in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents either a or for most Arabic speakers except in Northern Egypt, the southern parts of Yemen and some parts of Oman where it is pronounced as the voiced velar plosive.
The Arabic chat alphabet, Arabizi, Arabeezi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat alphabets were originally used primarily by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings—especially for communicating over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones—though use is not necessarily restricted by age anymore and these chat alphabets have been used in other media such as advertising.
Ḍād (ﺽ) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. In name and shape, it is a variant of ṣād. Its numerical value is 800.
The Arabic letter غ is the nineteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet. It represents the sound or. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn. Its numerical value is 1000. In the Persian language, it represents ~ and is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet.
Gaf, is the name of different Perso-Arabic letters, all representing. They are all derived from the letter kāf, with additional diacritics, such as dots and lines. There are four forms, each used in different alphabets:
Že or Zhe (ژ) used to represent the phoneme, is a letter in the Persian alphabet, based on zayn (ز) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that the Persian alphabet adds to the original Arabic script, others being چ ,پ and گ, in addition the obsolete ڤ.
Veڤ is a letter of the Arabic-based Kurdish, Comoro, Wakhi, and Karakhanid alphabets. It is derived from the Arabic letter fāʾ (ف) with two additional dots. It represents the sound in the aforementioned uses.
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.
![A bilingual road sign at a Turkmen village in Kirkuk Governorate, Iraq. The letter Che is used to represent the sound [tS]. Welcome sign to the village of Cardagli.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Welcome_sign_to_the_village_of_%C3%87arda%C4%9Fl%C4%B1.jpg/200px-Welcome_sign_to_the_village_of_%C3%87arda%C4%9Fl%C4%B1.jpg)
![In this trilingual road sign in Israel, however, the letter Che is used to represent the sound [g] in Nof HaGalil. ToNofHagalil (cropped road sign).jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/ToNofHagalil_%28cropped_road_sign%29.jpg/200px-ToNofHagalil_%28cropped_road_sign%29.jpg)
