Arabic script

The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa, such as Persian (Farsi/Dari), Uyghur, Kurdish, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balti, Balochi, Pashto, Lurish, Urdu, Kashmiri, Rohingya, Somali and Mandinka, among others. Until the 16th century, it was also used to write some texts in Spanish. Additionally, prior to the language reform in 1928, it was the writing system of Turkish. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it and the third by the number of users, after the Latin and Chinese scripts.
The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style, in which most of the letters are written in slightly different forms according to whether they stand alone or are joined to a following or preceding letter. The basic letter form remains unchanged. In most cases, the letters transcribe consonants or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads. It does not have capital letters.
The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam. With the religion's spread, it came to be used as the primary script for many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols, with some versions, such as Kurdish, Uyghur and old Bosnian being abugidas or true alphabets. It is also the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy.
History.
The Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean alphabet or (less widely believed) directly from the Syriac alphabet which are both derived from the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet gave rise to among others the Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets).
Origins.
In the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, northern Arab tribes emigrated and founded a kingdom centred around Petra, Jordan. These people (now named Nabataeans from the name of one of the tribes, Nabatu) spoke Nabataean Arabic, a dialect of the Arabic language. In the 2nd or 1st centuries BCE, the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet were written in the Aramaic language (which was the language of communication and trade), but included some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus. This cursive form influenced the monumental form more and more and gradually changed into the Arabic alphabet.
Overview.
The Arabic script has been adapted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Malay and Urdu, which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive (the sound), therefore many languages add their own letter to represent in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: Indian and Turkic languages written in the Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas the languages of Indonesia tend to imitate those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.
In the cases of Bosnian, Kurdish, Kashmiri and Uyghur writing systems, vowels are mandatory. The Arabic script can therefore be used in both abugida and abjad forms, although it is often strongly, if erroneously, connected to the latter due to it being originally used only for Arabic.
Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, developed with the spread of Islam. To a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb (for instance the position of the dots in the letters ' and '). Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate the writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language. The term "", which comes from the Arabic root for "foreign," has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages.
Current use.
Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are the main non-Arabic speaking states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Brahui, Persian, Pashto, Central Kurdish, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Punjabi and Uyghur.
An Arabic alphabet is currently used for the following languages:
Former use.
In the 20th century, the Arabic script was generally replaced by the Latin alphabet in the Balkans, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, while in the Soviet Union, after a brief period of Latinisation, use of Cyrillic was mandated. Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Afghanistan and Iran.
Unicode.
As of Unicode 13.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:
Additional letters used in other languages.
Assignment of phonemes to graphemes.
 
Letter construction.
Most languages that use alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet use the same base shapes. Most additional letters in languages that use alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet are built by adding (or removing) diacritics to existing Arabic letters. Some stylistic variants in Arabic have distinct meanings in other languages. For example, variant forms of "kāf" are used in some languages and sometimes have specific usages. In Urdu and some neighbouring languages the letter Hā has diverged into two forms "dō-čašmī hē" and "gōl hē". while a variant form of "yā" referred to as "baṛī yē" is used at the end of some words.
Table of Letter Components.
Abbreviations used below.
A = The letter is used for most languages and dialects with writing systems based on Arabic.
MSA = Letters used in Modern Standard Arabic.
CA = Letters used in Classical Arabic.
AD = Letters used in some regional Arabic Dialects.
"Arabic" = Letters used in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and most regional dialects.
"Farsi" = Letters used in modern Persian.
FW = Foreign words: the letter is sometimes used to spell foreign words.
SV = Stylistic variant: the letter is used interchangeably with at least one other lletter depending on the calligraphic style.
AW = Arabic words: the letter is used in additional languages to spell Arabic words.