Arabic

Arabic belongs to the South Semitic group of the Semitic subdivision of the Hamite-Semitic family of languages. Arabic was confined largely to the Arabian Peninsula until the 7th century A.D. The spread of Islam took the Arabic language into the Fertile Crescent and across North Africa.

Today Arabic is spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula and also in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, and Chad. It is the primary language of over 180 million people in Africa and Asia. The Arabic alphabet evolved from the Nabataean script, a descendant of the Aramaic script, and is written from right to left.