Arabic abjad
Type	Abjad
Languages	Arabic, Persian, Baloch, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Sindhi, Malay and others.
Time period	400 CE to the present
Parent systems	Proto-Canaanite  → Phoenician   → Aramaic    → Nabataean or Syriac     → Arabic abjad
Unicode range	U+0600 to U+06FF U+0750 to U+077F U+FB50 to U+FDFF U+FE70 to U+FEFF The first five letters of the Phoenician abjad, from right to left An abjad, sometimes also called a consonantary or consonantal alphabet, is a type of writing system in which there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme. ... Arabic redirects here. ... Farsi redirects here. ... Balochi (also Baluchi, Baloci or Baluci) is a Northwestern Iranian language. ... Urdu ( , , trans. ... The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... Pashto (پښتو; also known as Afghan, Pushto, Pashto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, and Pukhto) is the language spoken by the ethnic Afghan otherwise known as the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the Western provinces of Pakistan. ... SindhÄ« (سنڌي, सिन्धी) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. ... Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... ... The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is an abjad of twenty-plus acrophonic glyphs, which is found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age (from ca. ... The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... Bilingual inscription (Greek and Aramaic) by the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great, 3rd century BC. The Aramaic alphabet is an abjad alphabet designed for writing the Aramaic language. ... The Nabatean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was used by the Nabateans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. ... 11th century book in Syriac Serto. ... Unicode’s Universal Character Set potentially supports over 1 million (1,114,112 = 220 + 216 or 17 × 216, hexadecimal 110000) code points. ...
ISO 15924	Arab (#160)
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad, used from around 1300 BC for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Canaanite language discovered in Ugarit, Syria. ... The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is an abjad of twenty-plus acrophonic glyphs, which is found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age (from ca. ... The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is an offshoot of the Phoenician alphabet used to write the Hebrew language from about the 10th century BCE until it began to fall out of use in the 5th century BCE with the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet as a writing system for Hebrew and... The Samaritan alphabet is a direct descendant of the paleo-Hebrew variety of the Phoenician alphabet, the more commonly known Hebrew alphabet having been adapted from the Aramaic alphabet under the Persian Empire. ... Bilingual inscription (Greek and Aramaic) by the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great, 3rd century BC. The Aramaic alphabet is an abjad alphabet designed for writing the Aramaic language. ... Variation of BrāhmÄ« with dates. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, descended from the BrāhmÄ« script of Mauryan India. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... This article or section uses Khmer characters which may be rendered as boxes or other nonsensical symbols. ... Javanese script is the script that Javanese is originally written in (not to be confused with Javascript, which is a programming language). ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... 11th century book in Syriac Serto. ... The Nabatean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was used by the Nabateans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. ... The Pahlavi script was used broadly in the Sasanid Persian Empire to write down Middle Persian for secular, as well as religious purposes. ... The Avestan alphabet was created in the 3rd century AD for writing the hymns of Zarathustra (a. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Rune redirects here. ...   The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius to Wulfila, used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. ... The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by certain Slavic languages — Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union... Photograph of Botorrita 1 (both sides), 1st century BC. The Iberian scripts (or Iberian alphabet) are two scripts (or two styles of the same script) found on the Iberian peninsula, the Northeast and South Iberian script. ... The ancient South Arabian alphabet (also known as musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in ca. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Meroitic script is an alphabet of Egyptian (Hieroglyphic) origin used in Kingdom of Meroë. Some scholars, e. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... Jamo redirects here. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Zhuyin fuhao (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Tongyong Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chu-yin fu-hao), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) after the first four letters of this Chinese phonemic alphabet (bo po mo fo), is the national phonetic system of the... Nearly all the segmental scripts (alphabets, but see below for more precise terminology) used around the globe were apparently derived from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. ... Writing systems of the world today. ... Arabic redirects here. ... Farsi redirects here. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ...

The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic -- most importantly, the Qur'an, 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, Balti, Brahui, Panjabi (in Pakistan), Kashmiri, Sindhi (in Pakistan), Uyghur (in China), Kazakh (in China), Kyrgyz (in China), Azerbaijani (in Iran) and Kurdish in Iraq and Iran. In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new letters and other symbols were added to the original alphabet. (See Arabic alphabets of other languages below.) The Qur’ān [1] (Arabic: , literally the recitation; also sometimes transliterated as Quran, Koran, or Al-Quran) is the central religious text of Islam. ... For people named Islam, see Islam (name). ... The Semitic languages are the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only family of this group spoken in Asia. ... Farsi redirects here. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... Pashto (‎, IPA: also known as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto ‎, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu or Pushtoo) is a language spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. ... Balochi (also Baluchi, Baloci or Baluci) is a Northwestern Iranian language[1]. It is the principal language of the Baloch of Balochistan, a region in western Pakistan, eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. ... Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... Balti (بلتی) is a language spoken in Baltistan, in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. ... The Brahui (بروہی) or Bravi (براوِ) language, spoken by the Brahui, is mainly spoken in Balochistan, Pakistan, although it is also spoken in Afghanistan and Iran. ... Punjabi (sometimes spelled Panjabi) is the language of the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. ... Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) is a northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated mostly in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. ... Sindhī (سنڌي, सिन्धी) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. ... Uyghur (‎/Uyghurche//, or ‎/Uyghur tili//)[1] is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (also called East Turkestan or Uyghurstan), formerly also “Sinkiang” and “Chinese Turkestan,” a Central Asian region administered by China. ... Kazakh (also Qazaq and variants[2], natively , , ‎; pronounced ) is a Turkic language closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak. ... Kyrgyz or Kirghiz (Kyrgyz tili, Кыргыз тили, قىرعىز ٴتىلى) is a Turkic language, and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. ... The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ...

Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, the Arabic alphabet exists in different styles such as Nasta'līq, Thuluth, Kufic and others (see Arabic calligraphy). These styles can vary widely. Calligraphy in a Latin Bible of AD 1407 on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. ... “Font” redirects here. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Nastaliq or Nastaleegh (نستعلیق) is a specific style for writing in the Arabic alphabet. ... Thuluth (Arabic: ثلث one-third) is a script variety of Arabic calligraphy, which made its first appearance in the fourth century of the Hegira (11th century AD). ... Surah Al-Baqarah written in Kufic form. ... The stylized signature of Sultan Abdul Hamid I of the Ottoman Empire was written in an expressive calligraphy. ...

After the Latin alphabet, the Arabic alphabetic writing system is the most widely used around the world. ^[1]

Structure of the Arabic alphabet

Arabic is written from right to left; its alphabet is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages than Arabic have additional letters (for example, see Malay-Arabic script). There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive; i.e., most of the letters connect directly to the letter which immediately follows. Some letters are non-connecting; they do not connect to the following letter, even in the middle of a word. Each individual letter can have up to four distinct forms, based upon where the letter appears in a word or group of letters. These forms are initial, medial, final, and isolated: It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Yawi. ... In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between majuscule (capital or upper-case) and minuscule (lower-case) letters. ...

• Initial: beginning of a word; or in the middle of a word, following a non-connecting letter
• Medial: between two connecting letters (non-connecting letters lack a medial form)
• Final: at the end of a word following a connecting letter
• Isolated: at the end of a word following a non-connecting letter; or used independently

Some letters appear almost the same in all four forms; others display more variety. In addition, some combinations of two or three letters can take special shapes (ligatures) in handwriting, and often in printed Arabic as well. In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more letterforms are written or printed as a unit. ...

In many cases, dots will be placed above or below the central part of a letter to distinguish it from other similar letters. These are not like accent marks--rather, the dots distinguish completely different letters (and sounds). For example, the Arabic letters transliterated as "b" and "t" have the same basic shape, but "b" has one dot below, and "t" has two dots above.

The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad—short vowels are not written, though long ones are—so the reader must know the language in order to restore the vowels. However, in editions of the Qur'an or in didactic works vocalization marks are used – including a sign for vowel omission (sukūn) and one for gemination/doubling/lengthening of consonants (šadda). The first five letters of the Phoenician abjad, from right to left An abjad, sometimes also called a consonantary or consonantal alphabet, is a type of writing system in which there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

The names of Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where the names of the letters signified meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language. Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical proto-language of the Semitic languages. ...

There are two orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original Abjadī أبجدي order derives from the order of Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Latin alphabet. In the the Hejā'ī هجائي order similarly-shaped letters are grouped together. This order is used wherever lists of names and words need to be sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries. However when letters are used for numbering, the the Hejā'ī هجائي order is exclusively used. The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ...

Abjadī order

See also: Abjad numerals

The special Abjadī order (or two slightly variant orders) was devised by matching an Arabic letter of the fully consonant-dotted 28-letter Arabic alphabet to each of the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet (in their old Phoenician alphabetic order, also used by the Hebrew alphabet) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end. The Abjad numerals are a decimal numeral system which was used in the Arabic-speaking world prior to the use of the Hindu-Arabic numerals from the 8th century, and in parallel with the latter until Modern times. ... Bilingual inscription (Greek and Aramaic) by the Indian emperor Ashoka the Great, 3rd century BC. The Aramaic alphabet is an abjad alphabet designed for writing the Aramaic language. ... The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ...

The most common Abjad sequence is (from left to right):

أ‎

ب‎

ج‎

د‎

ﻫ‎

و‎

ز‎

ح‎

ط‎

ي‎

ك‎

ل‎

م‎

ن‎

س‎

ع‎

ف‎

ص‎

ق‎

ر‎

ش‎

ت‎

ث‎

خ‎

ذ‎

ض‎

ظ‎

غ‎

ʼ

b

ǧ

d

h

w

z

ḥ

ṭ

y

k

l

m

n

s

ʻ

f

ṣ

q

r

š

t

ṯ

ḫ

ḏ

ḍ

ẓ

ġ

This is commonly vocalized as follows:

ʼabǧad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman saʻfaṣ qarašat ṯaḫaḏ ḍaẓaġ

Another vocalization is:

ʼabuǧadin hawazin ḥuṭiya kalman saʻfaṣ qurišat ṯaḫuḏ ḍaẓuġ

Another Abjad sequence, mainly confined to the Maghreb, is: This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...

ﺃ‎

ﺏ‎

ﺝ‎

ﺩ‎

ﻫ‎

ﻭ‎

ﺯ‎

ﺡ‎

ﻁ‎

ﻱ‎

ﻙ‎

ﻝ‎

ﻡ‎

ﻥ‎

ﺹ‎

ﻉ‎

ﻑ‎

ﺽ‎

ﻕ‎

ﺭ‎

ﺱ‎

ﺕ‎

ﺙ‎

ﺥ‎

ﺫ‎

ﻅ‎

ﻍ‎

ﺵ‎

ʼ

b

ǧ

d

h

w

z

ḥ

ṭ

y

k

l

m

n

ṣ

ʻ

f

ḍ

q

r

s

t

ṯ

ḫ

ḏ

ẓ

ġ

š

which can be vocalized as:

ʼabuǧadin hawazin ḥuṭiya kalman ṣaʻfaḍ qurisat ṯaḫuḏ ẓaġuš

Despite no longer being used as the standard order of the alphabet, the Abjadi order is still used in things such as lists and outlines where a ordinal system of designating points of information or questions other than numbers is required. In other words, whereas a list in English might call its first point "A" its next point "B", its next point "C", then "D", then "E" and so on down to "Z", even today a list in Arabic would typically call its first point "أ‎", then "ب‎", then "ج‎", "د‎", "ﻫ‎" and so on down to "ﻍ‎", rather than "أ‎", "ب‎", "ت‎", "ث‎", "ج‎", and so on down to "ي‎", as the modern order might suggest. The order is, also, still used in Modern Arabic mathematical notation when allocating variable names. For example when a the letters أ (alif) ب (ba') have been already used for variable names, conventionally, the next letter to be used would be ج (ġim) An outline is a hierarchical way to display related items of text to graphically depict their relationships. ... Ordinal numbers, or ordinals for short, are numbers used to denote the position in an ordered sequence: first, second, third, fourth, etc. ... Modern Arabic mathematical notation is a mathematical notation that is based on the Arabic script. ...

Major software packages, like word processors, lack the capability of sorting according to this order, or generating numbered lists according to this order.

Presentation of the alphabet

The following table provides all of the Unicode characters for Arabic, and none of the supplementary letters used for other languages. 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. Download high resolution version (200x747, 14 KB)Arabic alphabet table, edited from German Wikipedia Arabic. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... DIN 31635 is a DIN standard for the transliteration of the Arabic language. ... Due to the fact that the Arabic language has a number of phonemes that have no equivalent in English or other European languages, a number of different transliteration methods have been invented to represent certain Arabic characters, due to various conflicting goals. ...

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the "standard" pronunciation of the fusha language as taught in universities. Actual pronunciation between the varieties of Arabic may vary widely. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology. Fuṣḥa (فصحى) (pronounced like Fooṣ Ḥa where the ṣ and ḥ are emphatic consonants) is a collective term referring to the standardized, non-spoken varieties of the Arabic language, as opposed to the spoken varieties of Arabic. ... The Arabic language is classified as a Semitic language. ... The Arabic language has a standard pronunciation, which is basically the one used to recite the Quran. ...

Primary letters

The Arabic script is cursive, and 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.

For compatibility with previous standards, Unicode can encode all these forms separately; however, these forms can be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The table below 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 ligation). There are 29 primary letters.

Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word. As to ﺀ‎ hamza, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a waw, ya or alif, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary waw, ya or alif. Alif ( ) is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. ... Beth or Bet is the second letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Syriac and Arabic alphabet . Its value is a voiced bilabial plosive, IPA . ... Taw or Tav is the twenty-second and last letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its original value is an voiceless alveolar plosive, IPA , The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Tau (Τ), Latin T, and the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet. ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiceless dental fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... Gimel is the third letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic alphabet (in abjadi order; 5th in modern order). ... is the reconstructed name of the eighth letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician , Syriac , Hebrew (also , heth) , and Arabic (in abjadi order). ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiceless velar fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of (see also there). ... Dalet (, also spelled Daleth) is the fourth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order; 8th in modern order). ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiced dental fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... Resh is the twentieth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA or , in Hebrew also or . ... Zayin or Zain is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic alphabet . It represents a voiced alveolar fricative, IPA . ... Shin or Sin is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order, 12th in modern order). ... Shin or Sin is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order, 12th in modern order). ... Tsade is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA . ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents a pharyngealized voiced alveolar plosive (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... (also Teth, Tet) is the ninth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order, 16th in modern order). ... ( ) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents a pharyngealized voiced dental fricative or voiced alveolar fricative (IPA: or ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... or Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet (in abjadi order). ... () is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It represents the voiced velar fricative (IPA ). In name and shape, it is a variant of . ... Pe is the seventeenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet (in abjadi order). ... Qoph is the nineteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet (in abjadi order). ... Kaph or Kaf is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA . ... Lamed or Lamedh is the twelfth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA . ... Allah is the Arabic language word for God. ... Mem is the thirteenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet . Its value is IPA . ... Nun is the fourteenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabet (in abjadi order). ... He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic , expressing a voiceless glottal fricative (). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon, Etruscan , Latin E and Cyrillic Ye. ... Waw (, also spelled vav or vau) is the sixth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac , and Arabic (in abjadi order; it is 27th in modern Arabic order). ... Yud or Yodh is the tenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order, 28th in modern order). ...

Modified letters

The following are not individual letters, but rather different contextual variants of some of the Arabic letters.

Notes

The ʼalif maqṣūra ("broken alif") commonly using Unicode 0x0649 (ى‎) in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Persian Yeh". This is appropriate to its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial form, in which the Persian Yeh gains two dots below (ﻳ ﻴ) while the ʼalif maqṣūra has neither an initial nor a medial form. The tāʼ marbÅ«á¹­a (Arabic: ﺓ) is a variant of the letter ta used at the end of words to denote that the word is grammatically feminine. ... Farsi redirects here. ...

Although this is the common situation, the problem is not so simple, and no solution is met yet at the time of September, 2007^[2].

Ligatures

The only compulsory ligature is lām + ʼalif. All other ligatures (yāʼ+mīm, etc.) are optional. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Ligature (palaeography). ...

• (isolated) lām + ʼalif (lā /laː/) :

ﻻ‎

• (final) lām + ʼalif (lā /laː/) :

ﻼ‎

Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature allāh (“God”). U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM: The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

ﷲ‎

The latter is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word Allāh, because it should compose a small ʼalif sign above a gemination šadda sign. Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration): Fatha redirects here. ... The word is the Arabic term for God. In other languages, it is often used to refer specifically to the Islamic concept of God: see Usage below. ...

• lām, (geminated) lām (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) hāʼ :

لله‎

• ʼalif, lām, (geminated) lām (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) hāʼ :

الله‎

Hamza

Main article: Hamza

Initially, the letter ʼalif indicated an occlusive glottal, or glottal stop, transcribed by [ʔ], confirming the alphabet came from the same Phoenician origin. Now it is used in the same manner as in other abjads, with yāʼ and wāw, as a mater lectionis, that is to say, a consonant standing in for a long vowel (see below). In fact, over the course of time its original consonantal value has been obscured, since ʼalif now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic support for certain diacritics (madda or hamza). Hamza () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . ... The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to begin with a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. ... The first five letters of the Phoenician abjad, from right to left An abjad, sometimes also called a consonantary or consonantal alphabet, is a type of writing system in which there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme. ... Matres lectionis (singular form: mater lectionis) are an early manner of indicating vowels in the Hebrew alphabet. ...

The Arabic alphabet now uses the hamza to indicate a glottal stop, which can appear anywhere in a word. This letter, however, does not function like the others: it can be written alone or on a support in which case it becomes a diacritic: Hamza () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

• alone: ء‎ ;
• with a carrier: إ, أ‎ (above and under a ʼalif), ؤ‎ (above a wāw), ئ‎ (above a dotless yāʼ or yāʼ hamza).

Diacritics

Shadda

Main article: Shadda

The šadda ( ّ‎^◌ ) marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant; a kasra ( ِ‎^◌ ) vowel sign (when present) moves to between the geminated (doubled) consonant and the šadda. Ù‘ shadda marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-20, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ...

The w-shaped šadda glyph above the second consonant that it geminates, is in fact the beginning of a small šīn letter.

Ù‘ shadda marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant. ...

Sukūn and ʼalif above

An Arabic syllable can be open (ended by a vowel) or closed (ended by a consonant).

• open: CV[consonant-vowel] (long or short vowel)
• closed: CVC (short vowel only)

When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a sign called sukūn ( ْ‎ ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalised: it's necessary to remember that a standard text is only composed of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. The sukūn is also used for transliterating words to Arabic script. The Persian word ماسک‎ (mâsk, from the English word mask), for example, might be written with a sukūn above the ﺱ‎ to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the ک‎.

Sukūn allows us to know where not to place a vowel: qlb could, in effect, be read qalab (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a sukūn over the l and the b, it can only be interpreted as the form /qVlb/; we write this قلْْب‎. This is one stage from full vocalization, where the a vowel would also be indicated by a fatḥa: قَلْْب‎,

The Qur’an is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qur’an, putting a sukūn above a yāʼ which indicates [i:], or above a wāw which stands for [u:] is extremely rare, to the point that yāʼ with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong [ai], and wāw with sukūn will be read [au]. The Quran (Arabic: al-qurān literally the recitation; also called Al Qurān Al KarÄ«m or The Noble Quran; or transliterated Quran, Koran, and less commonly Alcoran) is the holy book of Islam. ... The Quran (Arabic: al-qurān literally the recitation; also called Al Qurān Al KarÄ«m or The Noble Quran; or transliterated Quran, Koran, and less commonly Alcoran) is the holy book of Islam. ...

The letters m-w-s-y-q-ā (موسيقى‎ with an ʼalif maqṣūra at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word mūsīqā (“music”). If you were to write sukūns above the wāw, yāʼ and ʼalif, you’d get موْسيْقىْ‎, which would be read as *mawsaykāy (note however that the final ʼalif maqṣūra is an ʼalif and never takes sukūn). The word, entirely vocalised, would be written مُوْسِيْقَى‎ in the Qur’an (if it happened to appear there!), or مُوسِيقَى‎ elsewhere. (The Quranic spelling would have no sukūn sign above the final ʼalif maqṣūra, but instead a miniature ʼalif above the preceding qaf consonant, which is a valid Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature ʼalif as of 2006.) The Quran (Arabic: al-qurān literally the recitation; also called Al Qurān Al KarÄ«m or The Noble Quran; or transliterated Quran, Koran, and less commonly Alcoran) is the holy book of Islam. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

A sukūn is not placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalised texts are always written as if the i`rab vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, ʼaḥmad zawǧ šarr, meaning “Ahmed is a bad husband”, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if still pronounced with full i`rab, i.e. ʼaḥmadu zawǧun šarrun with the complete desinences. The are the nominal desinences of Classical Arabic. ... In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages. ...

In the Arabic script, harakat (حركة, literally meaning movements) are the diacritic marks used to represent vowel sounds. ... Alif ( ) is the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. ...

Vowels

Main article: Harakat

Arabic short vowels are generally not written when writing Arabic, except in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan, where they must be written) and sometimes in didactics, which are known as vocalised texts. Fatha redirects here. ...

Before the introduction of printing, occasionally short vowels would be marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and could not be resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they looked nice. This custom has now all but disappeared, to the point that many Arabs believe (wrongly) that the use of vowel marks is forbidden outside of the Quran. Most software (such as most text editors and all mobile phones) does not allow the writer to add short vowels, and displays them illegibly if at all.

Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable. (All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; contrary to appearances, there is a consonant at the start of a name like Ali — in Arabic ʻAliyy — or a word like ʼalif.) Example of a letter with a diacritic A diacritic or diacritical mark, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ...

Long "a" following a consonant other than hamzah is written with a short-"a" mark on the consonant plus an alif after it (ʼalif). Long "i" is a mark for short "i" plus a yaa yāʼ, and long u is mark for short u plus waaw, so aā = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū); long "a" following a hamzah sound may be represented by an alif-madda or by a floating hamzah followed by an alif.

In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or shadda. Please note, that most consonants (except 6 of them) do join to the left with ʼalif, wāw and yāʼ written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the yāʼ letter in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. 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. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.

In an un-vocalised text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question : ʼalif, ʼalif maqṣūra (or yeh), wāw, yāʼ. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of un-vocalized text are treated like consonants taking sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.

In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages. ... A Semitic noun can take one of three states of definiteness: definite, indefinite or construct state. ... The are the nominal desinences of Classical Arabic. ...

Numerals

Main article: Eastern Arabic numerals

There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals and "East Arab" numerals, used in Iran, Pakistan and India. In Arabic, these numbers are referred to as "Indian numbers" (أرقام هندية‎ arqām hindiyyah). In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western "Arabic numerals" derive) was used. Like Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from right to left, though the units are always right-most, and the highest value left-most, just as with Western "Arabic numerals". Telephone numbers are read from left to right. The Eastern Arabic numerals (also called Eastern Arabic numerals, Arabic-Indic numerals, Arabic Eastern Numerals) are the symbols (glyphs) used to represent the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and parts of India, and also in the no longer used Ottoman Turkish...

^*Standard form of numeral 2 in Egypt is slightly different For other uses, see Arabic numerals (disambiguation). ...

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals), a usage rare today. This usage is based on the Abjadi order of the alphabet. ʼalif is 1, ب bāʼ is 2, ج ǧīm is 3, and so on until ي yāʼ = 10, ك kāf = 20, ل lām = 30, …, ر rāʼ = 200, …, غ ġayn = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms. The Abjad numerals are a decimal numeral system which was used in the Arabic-speaking world prior to the use of the Hindu-Arabic numerals from the 8th century, and in parallel with the latter until Modern times. ... A chronogram is a sentence or inscription in which the capital letters, interpreted in Roman numerals, stand for a particular date if rearranged. ...

History

Main article: History of the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabatean alphabet used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic, itself descended from Phoenician. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from Jabal Ramm (50 km east of Aqaba), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them (the Aramaic model had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds!) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qurʼan were frequently memorized; this practice, which is still widespread among many Muslim communities today, probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script. If certain characters in this article display badly (as empty squares, question marks, etc), see Unicode. ... The Nabatean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet (abjad) that was used by the Nabateans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. ... Petra, the Nabataean capital The Nabataeans, a people of ancient Arabia, whose settlements in the time of Josephus gave the name of Nabatene to the border-land between Syria and Arabia from the Euphrates to the Red Sea. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a four-thousand year history. ... Aqaba (Arabic: العقبة al-Ê»Aqabah) is a coastal town with a population of 101,290 (2000) and 2% of Jordans population in the far south of Jordan (). It is the capital of Aqaba Governorate. ... The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. ... A fairly substantial number of Arabian inscriptions survive from the pre-Islamic era; however, very few are in the Arabic alphabet. ... For other uses, see Papyrus (disambiguation). ... PERF 558 is the oldest surviving Arabic papyrus, and the oldest dated Arabic inscription from the Islamic era, dating from 22 AH (AD 642) and found in Heracleopolis in Egypt. ... The Qur’ān [1] (Arabic: , literally the recitation; also sometimes transliterated as Quran, Koran, or Al-Quran) is the central religious text of Islam. ... For computer memory, see computer storage. ...

Yet later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning sometime in the last half of the seventh century, roughly contemporaneous with the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = a, a dot below = i, a dot on the line = u, and doubled dots gave tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi. Hamza () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . ... ( 6th century - 7th century - 8th century - other centuries) Events Islam starts in Arabia, the Quran is written, and Arabs subjugate Syria, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, North Africa and Central Asia to Islam. ... In animals, vocalization is a means of communication generated in many cases by their primitive versions of vocal chords. ... The Courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of the grandest architectural legacies of the Umayyads. ... ... This page may meet Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ...

Arabic alphabets of other languages

Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet
	→  Countries where the Arabic script is the only official orthography
	→  Countries where the Arabic script is used alongside other orthographies.

Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages other than Arabic, including Persian, Kurdish, Malay and Urdu. 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 [p] phoneme, so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas Indonesian languages 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. Image File history File links Arabic_alphabet_world_distribution. ... The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. ... Farsi redirects here. ... The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are traditionally considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Perso-Arabic script. ... The Jawi alphabet. ... The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing the Arabic language, which is the language of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. ...

In the case of Kurdish, vowels are mandatory, making the script an abugida rather than an abjad as it is for most languages. Kashmiri, also, writes all vowels. The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) is a northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated mostly in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. ...

Use of Arabic script in West African languages, especially in the Sahel, developed with the penetration of Islam. To a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb (for instance the position of dots in the fa and qaf letters). Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language. The term "Ajami," which comes from the Arabic root for "stranger" has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages.  Western Africa (UN subregion)  Maghreb[1] West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... The term Ajami, or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign or stranger has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. ...

Current uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are the main non-Arab states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Persian, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Uyghur.

The Arabic alphabet is currently used for:

Middle East and Central Asia

• Kurdish and Turkmen in Northern Iraq. (In Turkey and Syria, the Latin alphabet is now used for Kurdish);
• Official language Persian and regional languages including Azeri, Kurdish and Baluchi in Iran;
• Official languages Dari (which differs only to a minor degree from Persian) and Pashto and all regional languages including Uzbek in Afghanistan;
• Tajik also differs only to a minor degree from Persian, and while in Tajikistan the usual Tajik alphabet is an extended Cyrillic alphabet, there is also some use of Arabic-alphabet Persian books from Iran
• Uyghur changed to Roman script in 1969 and back to a simplified, fully voweled, Arabic script in 1983;
• Kazakh is written in Arabic in Pakistan, Iran, China, and Afghanistan; and
• Kyrgyz is written in Arabic by the 150,000 in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China.

The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... An official language is a language that is given a special legal status in the countries, states, and other territories. ... Farsi redirects here. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... When referring to central asian peoples, Baluchi is an alernative spalling of Balochi (qv). ... Dari (Persian: ) is the official name for the Persian language in Afghanistan, popularly and locally known as Farsi. ... Pashto (‎, IPA: also known as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto ‎, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu or Pushtoo) is a language spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. ... Tajik or Tadjik (тоҷикӣ, تاجیکی, tojikí) is a descendant of the Persian language spoken in Central Asia. ... The coat of arms of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic circa 1929. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by certain Slavic languages — Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union... Uyghur (‎/Uyghurche//, or ‎/Uyghur tili//)[1] is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (also called East Turkestan or Uyghurstan), formerly also “Sinkiang” and “Chinese Turkestan,” a Central Asian region administered by China. ... Kazakh (also Qazaq and variants[2], natively , , ‎; pronounced ) is a Turkic language closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak. ... Kyrgyz or Kirghiz (Kyrgyz tili, Кыргыз тили, قىرعىز ٴتىلى) is a Turkic language, and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. ... For the county in Shanxi province, see Xinjiang County. ...

East Asia

• The Chinese language is written by some Hui in the Arabic-derived Xiao'erjing alphabet.

Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. ... The Hui (回) ethnic group is unrelated to the Hui (å¾½) dialects. ... A Chinese-Arabic-Xiaoerjing dictionary from the early days of the Peoples Republic of China. ...

South Asia

• Official language Urdu and regional languages including Punjabi (where the script is known as Shahmukhi), Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Balochi in Pakistan;
• Urdu and Kashmiri in India. Urdu is one of several official languages in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh; see List of national languages of India. Kashmiri also uses Sharada script;
• The Arwi language known as Arabic-Tamil uses the Arabic script together with the addition of 13 letters. It is mainly used in Sri Lanka and the South Indian states of Tamilnadu and Kerala for religious purposes.
• The Thaana script used to write the Dhivehi language in the Maldives has vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic script. Some of the consonants are borrowed from Arabic numerals.

The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... Punjabi redirects here. ... Shahmukhi (شاہ Ù…Ú©Ú¾ÛŒ) is a script used to record the Punjabi language. ... SindhÄ« (سنڌي, सिन्धी) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. ... Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) is a northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated mostly in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. ... Balochi (also Baluchi, Baloci or Baluci) is a Northwestern Iranian language. ... The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Urdu Urdu () is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). ... Kashmiri (कॉशुर, کٲشُر Koshur) is a northwestern Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the valley of Kashmir, a region situated mostly in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. ... This article is about the area administered by India. ... For other uses, see Delhi (disambiguation). ... , Uttar Pradesh (Hindi: , Urdu: , IPA:  , translation: Northern Province), [often referred to as U.P.], located in central-south Asia and northern India, is the most populous and fifth largest state in the Republic of India. ... For other uses, see Bihar (disambiguation). ... Andhra redirects here. ... Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages as National languages 1. ... For other uses, see Kashmiri (disambiguation) Kashmiri is a Dardic language spoken primarily in Kashmir, an Asian region now split between India, Pakistan and China. ... Kashmiri Shaivaite manuscript (17th or 18th century) The Sharada script is an abugida writing system of the Brahmic family of scripts, developed from ca. ... Letters unique to Arwi. ... Thaana (written ‎ in Thaana) is the writing system for the Dhivehi language spoken in the Maldives. ... Dhivehi or Divehi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 300,000 people in the Republic of Maldives where it is the official language of the country and in the island of Minicoy (Maliku) in neighbouring India where it is known as Mahl. ...

Southeast Asia

• Malay in the Arabic script known as Jawi is co-official in Brunei, and used for religious purposes in Malaysia, Indonesia, Southern Thailand, Singapore, and predominantly Muslim areas of the Philippines.

Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... The Jawi alphabet. ... Southern Thailand is a distinct region of Thailand, connected with the Central region by the narrow Kra Isthmus. ...

Africa

• Bedawi or Beja, mainly in northeastern Sudan
• Comorian (Comorian) in the Comoros, currently side by side with the Latin alphabet (neither is official);
• Hausa for many purposes, especially religious (known as Ajami);
• Mandinka, widely but unofficially (known as Ajami); (another non-Latin alphabet used is N'Ko)
• Fula, especially the Pular of Guinea(known as Ajami);
• Wolof (at zaouias), known as Wolofal.
• Tamazight and other Berber languages were traditionally written in Arabic in the Maghreb. There is now a competing 'revival' of neo-Tifinagh.

Beja (also called Bedawi, Bedauye, To Bedawie) is an Afro-Asiatic language of the southern coast of the Red Sea, spoken by about two million nomads in parts of Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea. ... Comorian (Shikomor) is the most widely used language on the Comoros (independent islands in the Indian Ocean, off Mozambique and Madagascar). ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. ... The term Ajami, or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign or stranger has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. ... The Mandinka language, sometimes referred to as Mandingo, is a Mandé language spoken by some 1. ... The term Ajami, or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign or stranger has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. ... The word NKo written in the NKo alphabet NKo is both a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949 as a writing system for the Mande languages of West Africa, and the name of the literary language itself written in the script. ... The Fula language is a language of West Africa, spoken by the Fula people from Senegal to Cameroon and Sudan. ... The term Ajami, or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign or stranger has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. ... Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and it is the native language of the ethnic group of the Wolof people. ... Zaouia (Arabic زاوية corner), also spelled zawiya or zawiyah, is a Maghrebi and West African term for an Islamic religious school cum monastery, roughly corresponding to the Eastern term madrassa. In precolonial times, these were the primary sources for education in the area, and taught basic... Wolofal is a derivation of the Arabic script for writing the Wolof language. ... Afro-Asiatic - Berber The Berber languages (or Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. ... The Berber languages (or Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Former uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Speakers of languages that were previously unwritten used Arabic script as a basis to design writing systems for their mother languages. This choice could be influenced by Arabic being their second language, the language of scripture of their faith, or the only written language they came in contact with. Additionally, since most education was once religious, choice of script was determined by the writer's religion; which meant that Muslims would use Arabic script to write whatever language they spoke. This led to Arabic script being the most widely used script during the Middle Ages. See also Languages of Muslim countries. Muslims believe that God revealed the Quran to the Muhammad literally, word-for-word, in the Arabic language. ...

In the 20th century, 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 Latinization, [1] use of the Cyrillic alphabet 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 Iran. [2] The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Balkan redirects here. ... A political map showing national divisions in relation to the ecological break (Sub-Saharan Africa in green) A geographical map of Africa, showing the ecological break that defines the sub-Saharan area Sub-Saharan Africa is the term used to describe the area of the African continent which lies south... Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by certain Slavic languages — Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union... Farsi redirects here. ...

Most languages of the Iranian languages family continue to use Arabic script, as well as the Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan and of Muslim populations in India, but the Bengali language of Bangladesh is written in the Bengali alphabet. The Iranian languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family. ... The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. ... Bengali or Bangla (IPA: ) is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit languages. ... The Bengali script is an Abugida system of writing belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts whose use is associated with the Bengali, Assamese, Manipuri and Sylheti languages. ...

Africa

• Afrikaans (as it was first written among the "Cape Malays", see Arabic Afrikaans);
• Berber in North Africa, particularly Tachelhit in Morocco (still being considered, along with Tifinagh and Latin for Tamazight);
• Harari, by the Harari people of the Harari Region in Ethiopia. Now uses the Ge'ez alphabet.
• For the West African languages mentioned above - Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof - the Latin alphabet has officially replaced Arabic transcriptions for use in literacy and education;
• Malagasy in Madagascar (script known as Sorabe);
• Nubian;
• Swahili (has used the Latin alphabet since the 19th century);
• Somali (see Wadaad's writing) has used only the Latin alphabet since 1972;
• Songhay in West Africa, particularly in Timbuktu;
• Yoruba in West Africa (this was probably limited, but still notable)

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. ... The Cape Malays are an ethnic group who can claim descent from slaves brought to South Africa from Indonesia starting from 1667. ... Arabic Afrikaans was a form of Afrikaans that was written in Arabic script. ... The Berber languages (or Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. ... Tashelhit is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Berber subgroup; it is spoken in Morocco and Algeria. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Afro-Asiatic - Berber The Berber languages (or Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. ... aman be dejqho ... Map of Ethiopia highlighting the Harari region (in red). ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. ... The Fula language is a language of West Africa, spoken by the Fula people from Senegal to Cameroon and Sudan. ... The Mandinka language, sometimes referred to as Mandingo, is a Mandé language spoken by some 1. ... Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and it is the native language of the ethnic group of the Wolof people. ... Sorabe, or Sora-be, is an alphabet based on Arabic used to transcribe the Malagasy language and the Antemoro dialect in particular. ... The Nubian language group, according to the most recent research by Bechhaus-Gerst comprises the following varieties: Nobiin (previously known by the geographic terms Mahas or Fadicca/Fiadicca). ... This article is about the language. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Example of Wadaads writing. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The Songhay languages (IPA [soŋay], in the dialects of Gao and Timbuktu [soŋoy]) are a group of closely related languages/dialects centered on the middle stretches of the Niger River in present day Mali and Niger, widely used as a lingua franca there ever since the era of... Timbuktu (Archaic English: Timbuctoo; Koyra Chiini: Tumbutu; French: Tombouctou) is a city in Tombouctou Region, Mali. ... Yoruba (native name èdè Yorùbá, the Yoruba language) is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 22 million speakers. ...

Europe

• Albanian;
• Azeri in Azerbaijan (now written in the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet scripts in Azerbaijan);
• Bosnian (only for literary purposes; presently written in the Latin alphabet);
• Polish (among ethnic Tatars);
• Belarusian (among ethnic Tatars; see Belarusian Arabic alphabet);
• Mozarabic, when the Moors ruled Spain (and later Aragonese, Portuguese, and Spanish proper; see aljamiado);

Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is actually a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by certain Slavic languages — Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian—as well as many other languages of the former Soviet Union... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... This article is about the people. ... This article is about the people. ... The Belarusian Arabic alphabet was based on the Arabic script and was developed in the 16th, possibly 15th, century from the need to write down the Belarusian language in the Arabic script. ... Mozarabic was a continuum of closely related Iberian Romance dialects spoken in Muslim dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula during the early stages of the Romance languages development in Iberia. ... Aragonese redirects here. ... Aljamiado text by mancebo de Arévalo. ...

Central Asia and Russian Federation

• Bashkir (for some years: from October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
• Chaghatai across Central Asia;
• Chechen (from the adoption of Islam in the XVI century until 1928^[3]);
• Kazakh in Kazakhstan (until 1930s, now uses Cyrillic script);
• Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan (until 1930s, now uses Cyrillic script);
• Tatar (iske imlâ) before 1928 (changed to Latin), reformed in 1880s, 1918 (deletion of some letters);
• Chinese and Dungan, among the Hui people (script known as Xiao'erjing);
• Turkmen in Turkmenistan;
• Uzbek in Uzbekistan;
• All the Muslim peoples of the USSR between 1918-1928 (many also earlier), including Bashkir, Chechen, Kazakh, Tajik etc. After 1928 their script became Latin, then later Cyrillic.

The Bashkir language is a Turkic language. ... For other uses, see October Revolution (disambiguation). ... The Chagatai language is an extinct Turkic language which was once widely spoken in Central Asia. ... Map of Central Asia showing three sets of possible boundaries for the region Central Asia located as a region of the world Central Asia is a vast landlocked region of Asia. ... The Chechen language has about 1,200,000 speakers, most of whom live in Russia. ... Kazakh (also Qazaq and variants[2], natively , , ‎; pronounced ) is a Turkic language closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak. ... For the language spoken by this ethnic group, see Kyrgyz language. ... The Tatar language (Tatar tele, Tatarça, Татар теле, Татарча) is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars. ... İske imlâ (Tatar language for Old Orthography) is a variant of Arabic alphabet, used for Tatar language before 1920 and Old Tatar language. ... The Dungan language (Dungan: Хуэйзў йүян Huejzw jyian, Russian: tr. ... The Hui (回) ethnic group is unrelated to the Hui (徽) dialects. ... A Chinese-Arabic-Xiaoerjing dictionary from the early days of the Peoples Republic of China. ... The Bashkir language is a Turkic language. ... The Chechen language has about 1,200,000 speakers, most of whom live in Russia. ... Kazakh (also Qazaq and variants[2], natively , , ‎; pronounced ) is a Turkic language closely related to Nogai and Karakalpak. ... Tajik or Tadjik (тоҷикӣ, تاجیکی, tojikí) is a descendant of the Persian language spoken in Central Asia. ...

Southeast Asia

• Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia; Maguindanaon and Tausug in the Philippines.

Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... Maguindanao is an Austronesian language spoken in the provinces of Cotabato, South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, and Zamboanga del Sur in the Philippines. ... Tausug is spoken in Sulu province in the Philippines. ...

South Asia

• Arwi, a Tamil dialect that was used extensively by the Muslim minority of Tamil Nadu state of India and Sri Lanka.

Letters unique to Arwi. ... Tamil ( ; IPA ) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. ... Tamil Nadu (தமிழ் நாடு, Land of the Tamils) is a state at the southern tip of India. ...

Middle East

• Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic script until Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared the change to Roman script in 1928. This form of Turkish is now known as Ottoman Turkish and is held by many to be a different language, due to its much higher percentage of Persian and Arabic loanwords; (Ottoman Turkish alphabet)
• Kurdish (Kurmanji dialect) in Turkey and Syria was written in Arabic script until 1932, when a modified Kurdish Latin alphabet was introduced by Jaladat Ali Badirkhan in Syria.

Ottoman redirects here. ... “Mustafa Kemal” redirects here. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. ... Ottoman Turkish (Turkish: or , Ottoman Turkish: ‎ ) was the variant of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. ... A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ... The Ottoman Turkish alphabet (الفبا elifbâ) was the version of the Arabic alphabet that was used for the Ottoman Turkish language during the time of the Ottoman Empire. ... The Kurdish language (Kurdish: Kurdî or کوردی) is the language spoken by Kurds. ... Year 1932 (MCMXXXII) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link will display full 1932 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Jaladat Ali Badirkhan (or Celadet Alî Bedirxan in Kurdish) (April 26, 1893 - 1951), was a Kurdish diplomatist, writer, linguist, journalist and political activist. ...

Computers and the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6 and Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character. A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ... ISO 8859-6, also known as Arabic, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... A web browsers layout engine takes content (HTML, XML, images, etc. ... variant glyphs representing the character a (allographs of a) in the Zapfino typeface. ...

Unicode

Main article: Arabic Unicode

As of Unicode 5.0, the following ranges encode Arabic characters: As of Unicode 5. ...

• Arabic (0600–06FF)
• Arabic Supplement (0750–077F)
• Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF)
• Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF)

The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621–U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" ۝ۖ and "start of rub el hizb" ۞. The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms. ISO 8859-6, also known as Arabic, is an 8-bit character encoding, part of the ISO 8859 standard. ... Various symbol sets are used to represent numbers in the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, all of which evolved from the Brahmi numerals. ...

See also the notes of the section on modified letters.

Arabic keyboard

Arabic/QWERTY keyboard in Yemen

Keyboards designed for different nations have different layouts so that proficiency in one style of keyboard such as Iraq's does not transfer to proficiency in another keyboard such as Saudi Arabia's. Differences can include the location of non-alphabetic characters such as '<' as well as the location of vowel marks and possibly other differences. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (2592 × 1944 pixel, file size: 1. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (2592 × 1944 pixel, file size: 1. ...

Arabic/AZERTY keyboard in Morocco

All Arabic keyboards allow typing Roman characters, e.g. for URL in a web browser. Thus, each Arabic keyboard has both Arabic and Roman characters marked on the keys. Usually the Roman characters of an Arabic keyboard conform to the QWERTY layout, but in North Africa, where French is the most common language typed using the Roman characters, the Arabic keyboards are AZERTY. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1024 × 768 pixel, file size: 187 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Arabic/AZERTY computer keyboard Taken in an internet cafe in Rabat, Morocco Source: http://flickr. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1024 × 768 pixel, file size: 187 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Arabic/AZERTY computer keyboard Taken in an internet cafe in Rabat, Morocco Source: http://flickr. ... An example of a Web browser (Mozilla Firefox) A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network. ... For the song by Linkin Park, see QWERTY (song). ...  Northern Africa (UN subregion)  geographic, including above North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, separated by the Sahara from Sub-Saharan Africa. ... The Azerty keyboard layout on a laptop sold in Belgium. ...

When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms.

Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date. For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at http://www.unicode.org/ Some writing systems of the world, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are written in a form known as right-to-left (RTL), in which writing begins at the right-hand side of a page and concludes at the left-hand side. ...

• MULTILINGUAL COMPUTING WITH ARABIC AND ARABIC TRANSLITERATION Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic & Solutions for the Transliteration Quagmire Faced by Arabic-Script Languages

• A PowerPoint Tutorial (with screen shots and an English voice-over) on how to add Arabic to the Windows Operating System

Arabic text computerized

The first software program of its kind in the world that identifies Arabic handwriting in real time has been developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University. The Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (&#1488;&#1493;&#1504;&#1497;&#1489;&#1512;&#1505;&#1497;&#1496;&#1514; &#1489;&#1503;-&#1490;&#1493;&#1512;&#1497;&#1493;&#1503; &#1489;&#1504;&#1490;&#1489;) was founded in 1969, in Beer Sheva, Israel. ...

The prototype enables the user to write Arabic words by hand on an electronic screen, which then analyzes the text and translates it into printed Arabic letters in a thousandth of a second. The error rate is less than three percent, according to Dr. Jihad El-Sana, from BGU's department of computer sciences, who developed the system along with master's degree student Fadi Biadsy.[3]

Arabic printing presses

Although Napoleon Bonaparte generally is given the credit with introducing the printing press to the Arab world upon invading Egypt in 1798, and he did indeed bring printing presses and Arabic script presses, to print the French occupation's official newspaper Al-Tanbiyyah (The Courier), the process was started several centuries earlier. Bonaparte as general Napoleon Bonaparte ( 15 August 1769 &#8211; 5 May 1821) was a general of the French Revolution and was the ruler of France as First Consul (Premier Consul) of the French Republic from November 11, 1799 to May 18, 1804, then as Emperor of the French (Empereur des...

Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1450 was followed up by Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, who in 1514 published an entire prayer book in Arabic script entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i intended for the eastern Christian communities. The script was said to be crude and almost unreadable. This article is about the inventor of printing in Europe; for other uses, see Guttenberg (disambiguation) and Gutenberg. ...

Famed type designer Robert Granjon working for Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici succeeded in designing elegant Arabic typefaces and the Medici press published many Christian prayer and scholarly Arabic texts in the late sixteenth century.

The first Arabic books published using movable type in the Middle East were by the Maronite monks at the Maar Quz?hayy Monastery in Mount Lebanon. They transliterated the Arabic language using Syriac script. It took a fellow goldsmith like Gutenberg to design and implement the first true Arabic script movable type printing press in the Middle East. The Greek Orthodox monk Abd Allah Zakhir set up an Arabic language printing press using movable type at the monastery of Saint John at the town of Dhour El Shuwayr in Mount Lebanon, the first home made press in Lebanon using true Arabic script. He personally cut the type molds and did the founding of the elegant typeface. He created the first true Arabic script type in the Middle East. The first book off the press was in 1734; this press continued to be used until 1899. [4][5] Maronites (Marunoye ܡܪܘܢܝܐܶ; in Syriac, Mâruniyya مارونية in Arabic) are members of an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Pope of Rome. ... For other uses, see Mount Lebanon (disambiguation). ... Syriac is an Eastern Aramaic language that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. ... Greek Orthodox Church can refer to any of several hierarchical churches within the larger group of mutually recognizing Eastern Orthodox churches: the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, headed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is also the first among equals of the Eastern Orthodox Communion. ... Arabic redirects here. ... The printing press is a mechanical device for printing many copies of a text on rectangular sheets of paper. ... For the weblog software, see Movable Type. ... Dhour El Shuwayr is a town in Lebanon. ...

See also

• Arabic calligraphy - considered an art form in its own right
• Arabic numerals
• Romanization of Arabic
• Arabic Chat Alphabet
• ArabTeX - provides Arabic support for TeX and LaTeX
• Harakat
• Jawi - an adapted Arabic alphabet for the Malay language
• South Arabian alphabet
• History of the Arabic alphabet

The stylized signature of Sultan Abdul Hamid I of the Ottoman Empire was written in an expressive calligraphy. ... For other uses, see Arabic numerals (disambiguation). ... Due to the fact that the Arabic language has a number of phonemes that have no equivalent in English or other European languages, a number of different transliteration methods have been invented to represent certain Arabic characters, due to various conflicting goals. ... It has been suggested that Arabesh be merged into this article or section. ... ArabTeX is a free software package providing support for the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets to TeX and LaTeX. Written by Klaus Lagally, it can take romanized ASCII or native script input to produce quality ligatures for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Maghribi, Uyghur, Kashmiri, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino and Yiddish. ... TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ... This article is about the typesetting system. ... Fatha redirects here. ... The Jawi alphabet. ... Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ... The ancient South Arabian alphabet (also known as musnad) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in ca. ... If certain characters in this article display badly (as empty squares, question marks, etc), see Unicode. ...

References

Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 327th day of the year (328th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• The Arabic Alphabet showing the different glyphs for each letter and its code position in Unicode
• Alphabet, with sound, just click on a letter
• Arabic writing and calligraphy
• Article about Arabic alphabet
• Arabic alphabet and calligraphy
• (freeware) to learn the characters
• Guide to the use of Arabic in Windows, major word processors and web browsers
• Learn the Arabic Script Online
• Madinaharabic.com: Free Arabic Reading and Language Course (with sound)
• Arabic Alphabet Quiz Choose the "Arabic" link.
• Babel Arabic Writing Explanation
• Site on Scripts and Writing Systems: A long list of links to sites dealing with issues of scripts.
• Arabic alphabet stroke directions

Online Arabic keyboards

• Arabic Keyboard adapted to QWERTY (ISLAM-91)
• clavier arabe en ligne LEXILOGOS (French)
• Muftah-Alhuruf.com: Write and send Arabic emails without having an Arabic keyboard or operating system.

This article contains major sections of text from the very detailed article Arabic alphabet from the French Wikipedia, which has been partially translated into English. Further translation of that page, and its incorporation into the text here, are welcomed.