December 18: Arabic Language Day
Did you know that in 2012, the United Nations designated December 18 as “Arabic Language Day”? On that date in 1973, the General Assembly of the U.N.had adopted Arabic as its sixth official language — joining Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
Numbers vary, but perhaps more than 370 million people worldwide claim Arabic as their native language — with the majority living in North Africa and the Middle East. Many more have picked up Arabic as an additional language.
Egypt hosts the most Arabic-speakers, at roughly 82 million. Some estimate that more than 25 dialects exist, although they fall into three categories: Classical, Modern Standard, and Colloquial.
- Classical: as set down in the Qur’an.
- Modern Standard (or fussha): used most officially in media and diplomacy, such as at the Arab League Summit. This differs from the Qur’an only in its expanded, modern vocabulary but is not spoken fluently by most people.
- Colloquial (or ameya): individual dialects that vary nation-to-nation in vocabulary and pronunciation. Egypt’s ameya has gained the most recognition, due to a proliferation of Egyptian movies and the sheer number of people in Egypt who speak it. Thus, according to Slate, “Just as a language free from regionalisms developed on U.S. network news broadcasts, a universally understood ameya—the Arabic equivalent of Midwestern English—is evolving on Arab television.”
Arabic’s history
Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family and is influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia).
Most Muslms believe Arabic to be the language of heaven. According to one Islamic website, “The first speech taught to men was the one taught by God Himself, and that this speech was Arabic — all other languages being the offsprings or offshoots of Arabic.”
Thus, Muslims around the world, regardless of their native tongue, must perform certain Islamic rites and rituals in Classical Arabic or they will not be accepted by Allah (even if they do not speak or understand that language).
Indeed, according to one Christian ministry that reaches out to Muslims, “Muslims believe when they die they will be questioned by angels about their life and devotion to Allah, and they have to answer these questions in Arabic to pass the test.”
But do all world languages really spring from Arabic?
It’s true that many Arabic words appear in languages as varied as Spanish, Indonesian, and Swahili. In English, we can thank Arabic for words such as zero, algebra, alcohol, lime, and cotton, among others. Yet translation experts claim that Arabic is not the world’s first language.
Not all languages spring from Arabic either. Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language group. Other groups include Uralic (Finnish and Hungarian), which developed near the Ural Mountains in Russia; Sino-Tibetan (Chinese and Tibetan); and Niger-Congo (Zulu and Swahili); among others.
This doesn’t even account for the complete anomaly of the Basque language — unrelated to any other known language worldwide.
Details about speaking Arabic
Arabic is known as a nontonal language, meaning that a speaker’s accent, pace, or inflection does not change a word’s meaning. According to one language-learning site, Arabic contains 14 different words to describe the various stages of falling in love — from initial attraction (hawa) to how lovers lose their ability to reason (huyum).
Arabic is also unique in that it contains no capital letters and employs sounds not common in frequently spoken languages — with one sound found only in Arabic. Arab-speakers use no “to be” verbs in the present tense, such as “is,” “are,” or “am.” So the phrase “Her name is Mary” becomes simply “Her name Mary.” And while words are written from right to left, numbers are written from left to right!
Please pray for all who speak this beautiful, ancient, unique language. Pray, too, for the powerful programming that Arabic Media Ministries creates, to convey the life-changing message of the gospel to Arabic-speakers worldwide. To learn more about our ministry, please visit our website.
---
Sources: “World Arabic Language Day,” UNESCO; “Official Languages,” United Nations; “Arabic speaking countries,” worlddata.info; “Arabic Dialects: Different Types of Arabic Language,” tarjama.com; “Arabic” by Lee Smith, April 2, 2002, Slate; “ All In The Language Family: The Afro-Asiatic Languages” by Sam Wood, June 17, 2020, Babbel Magazine; “Arabic, the mother of all languages,” alislam.org; “How Islam Uses Arabic to Hide the Truth” by Call of Love Ministries, Aug. 8, 2022, calloflove.org; “Difference between Urdu and Arabic,” 24x7offshoring.com; “English Words That Come From Arabic,” arabacademy.com; “Arabic Language History,” todaytranslations.com; “Arabic Language Facts,” languagecoursesuk.co; “Fun Facts About the Arabic Language,” arabacademy.com; “17 Facts & Statistics about the Arabic Language,” industryarabic.com.
* For security purposes, names are changed to protect identity. Arabic Media Ministries uses stock images.