language fact file: Arabic

Arabic is an official language in:  Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Number of native speakers: more than 400 million

Learn some: There are so many different varieties of Arabic but there is one greeting that remains constant: ‘السلام عليكم’, pronounced ‘as-salamu alaykum’, which translates as ‘peace be upon you’. The standard response to this is ‘وعليكم السلام’, pronounced ‘wa-alaikum as-salam’, which means ‘and peace be upon you’.

Fast facts:

There are at least 30 Arabic dialects, which are not always mutually intelligible. Speakers from different parts of the Arabic-speaking world may have to switch to Modern Standard Arabic to understand each other.

Arabic meaning is built around a three-letter root system, called jadhr. A single core concept, like ‘writing’, has three letters, in this case K-T-B, and all related words are derived from these letters, eg kitaab (book), maktoob (letter), kateeb (writer). This gives Arabic words deep links that can cause translators some bother!

Just as there are many words in English for types of rain, Arabic has a huge number of words for camels! These can get extremely specific, for example  الغب (al ghib), a camel that drinks water every two days, ربع (riba’a), a camel that drinks water every three days, ظاهرة (dhahira), a camel that drinks water every day and الرفة (al riffah), a camel that drinks at any time.