The Arabic alphabet is the script
used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic,
Persian, and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most
widely used alphabet around the world.
The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the
Qurʼan, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be
used to write many other languages, even outside of the Semitic family
to which Arabic belongs. Examples of non-Semitic languages written with
the Arabic alphabet include Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Baloch, Malay, Hausa
(in West Africa), Mandinka, Swahili (in East Africa), Balti, Brahui,
Panjabi (in Pakistan), Kashmiri, Sindhi (in India and Pakistan), Uyghur
(in China), Kazakh (in China), Kyrgyz (in China), Azerbaijani (in Iran),
Kurdish (in Iraq and Iran) and the language of the former Ottoman
Empire. In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new
letters and other symbols were added to the original alphabet.
The Arabic script is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and
includes 28 basic letters. Because some of the vowels are indicated with
optional symbols, it can be classified as an abjad. Just as different
handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, the Arabic
script has a number of different styles of calligraphy, including Naskh,
Nastaʿlīq, Shahmukhi, Ruq'ah, Thuluth, Kufic, Sini and Hijazi.
There are two collating orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original
abjadī order (أبجدي) derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet,
and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived
alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. The abjadī order is used for
numbering. In the hijāʼī order (هجائي), similarly-shaped letters are
grouped together (see below). The hijāʼī order is used wherever lists of
names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and
The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the Arabic
script for other languages, such as the Malay Arabic script, have
additional letters. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter
Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots
above or below their central part, called iʿjam. These dots are an
integral part of a letter, since they distinguish between letters that
represent different sounds. For example, the Arabic letters
transliterated as b and t have the same basic shape, but b has one dot
below, ب, and t has two dots above, ت.
Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters
directly connected to the letter that immediately follows. All primary
letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whether
they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit
four distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). However, six
letters have only isolated or final form, and so force the following
letter (if any) to take an initial or isolated form, as if there were a
word break. These forms are called:
* Initial: at the beginning of a word; or in the middle of a word, after
a non-connecting letter.
* Medial: between two connecting letters (non-connecting letters lack a
* Final: at the end of a word following a connecting letter.
* Isolated: at the end of a word following a non-connecting letter; or
Some letters look almost the same in all four forms, while others show
considerable variation. In addition, some letter combinations are
written as ligatures (special shapes), including lām-ʼalif.
For compatibility with previous standards, all these forms can be
encoded separately in Unicode; however, they can also be inferred from
their joining context, using the same encoding. The following table
shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings
for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded
today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer
the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without
The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with
some common alternatives. See the article Romanization of Arabic for
details and various other transliteration schemes.
Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the
pronunciation of literary Arabic, the standard which is taught in
universities. In practice, pronunciation may vary considerably between
the different varieties of Arabic. For more details concerning the
pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology.
The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an
older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic
Six letters have neither an initial nor a medial form: they are not
connected to the letter following them.
The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad. Long vowels are written, but
short ones are not, so the reader must be familiar with the language to
understand the missing vowels. However, in editions of the Qurʼan and in
didactic works, vocalization marks are used, including the sukūn for
vowel omission and the šadda for consonant gemination (consonant
Further information: Arabic diacritics
In everyday use handwriting, general publications, and street signs
short vowels are generally not written in Arabic. Prints of Qurʼan
cannot be adorned by the religious institutes that reviews them unless
short vowels are properly marked, and it is generally preferred and
customary to mark them whenever Qurʼan is cited in print. Children's
books and school books for little children and Arabic language teaching
in general have diacritics to varying degrees of observation. These are
known as vocalized texts.The Arabic writing system can not be considered
complete without the diacritical marking of short vowels as they are an
essential part of it in its developed state, conveying information not
coded in any other way. Just like dotted letters, diacritical marking
were a later addition to writing system. Short vowels are occasionally
marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and could not be
resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they are aesthetically
pleasing. Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or
below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable, called harakat.
All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; in Arabic, words
like "Ali" or "alif", for example, start with a consonant: ʻAliyy, ʼalif.
A long a following a consonant other than a hamza is written with a
short a sign on the consonant plus an ʾalif after it; long i is written
as a sign for short i plus a yāʾ; and long u as a sign for short u plus
a wāw. Briefly, aʾ = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū. Long a following a hamza may
be represented by an ʾalif madda or by a free hamza followed by an ʾalif.
In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle
replacing a primary consonant letter or a šadda sign. For clarity in the
table below, the primary letter on the left used to mark these long
vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Please note that most
consonants do connect to the left with ʾalif, wāw and yāʾ written then
with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter yāʾ in the
last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a
medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at
their actual glyph and joining types.
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