ABSTRACT
Arabic belongs to the South Central Semitic branch of the Semito-Hamitic family. M odern standard literary Arabic (al-fusha) is the official language of some 20 countries, ranging from Morocco on the Atlantic seaboard of Africa to the Persian Gulf states. As such, it is used in the press and other media, and is the language of diplomacy and official communication between Arab states. Basi cally, this literary standard is the language of the Qur’an and the Hadith, lexically enriched, of course, largely from Arabic’s own generative resources. Modernisms abound, but they are additions to a core structure which has hardly changed in a thousand years. Colloquial Arabic is spoken as mother tongue, in various dialect forms, by an estimated 150 million people. And again, as the canonical language of Islam, Arabic is understood up to a point by many millions of people, wherever the Qur’an is taught - in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, East and West Africa, etc. Finally, one should mention the thousands of Arabic words that have been borrowed by Iranian, Turkic, Indian, and African languages, with little or no reciprocal borrowing by Arabic.
