Arabic

Arabic is a Central Semitic language. It is written in the Arabic alphabet, and it is a cursive language (i.e.) written from right to left. The Arabic language has about 30 modern varieties. It is the official language of twenty-six states, the Arab World states plus Chad and Eritrea. According to a study made in 2018, the number of Arabic native speakers is 313 million, while the number of the speakers of it as a second language is 132 million. Most of those speakers live in the Arab World, parts of Africa and parts of Asia such as Ahwaz, Turkey, Chad, Mali, Senegal and Eritrea. It was inserted as an official language in the United Nations in 1973. In addition, it is considered the official tongue of Islam and Muslims all over the world, because it is the language of their sacred book, the Quran, That’s why it attracts all the Muslims around the world. Furthermore, it is also used in practicing prayers in some churches of the Arab World. As in other Semitic languages, Arabic has a complex and unusual morphology (i.e. method of constructing words from a basic root). Arabic has a nonconcatenative "root-and-pattern" morphology: A root consists of a set of bare consonants (usually three), which are fitted into a discontinuous pattern to form words. For example, the word for 'I wrote' is constructed by combining the root k-t-b 'write' with the pattern -a-a-tu 'I Xed' to form katabtu 'I wrote'. Other verbs meaning 'I Xed' will typically have the same pattern but with different consonants, e.g. qaraʼtu 'I read', akaltu 'I ate', dhahabtu 'I went', although other patterns are possible

(e.g. sharibtu 'I drank', qultu 'I said', takallamtu 'I spoke', where the subpattern used to signal the past tense may change but the suffix -tu is always used).