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The Arabic alphabet is the Script used for writing in the Arabic Language . Because the Qur'an , the holy book of Islam , is written with this alphabet, its influence spread with that of Islam. As a result, the Arabic alphabet is used to write many other languages — even languages belonging to Language Families other than Semitic . Examples of non-Semitic languages written with the Arabic alphabet include Persian , Urdu , and Malay . In order to accommodate the phonetics of other languages, the alphabet has been adapted by the addition of letters and other symbols. (See Arabic Alphabets Of Other Languages below). The alphabet presents itself in different styles such as Nasta'līq , Thuluth , Kufic and others (see Arabic Calligraphy ), just like different Handwriting Styles and Typeface s for the Roman Alphabet . Superficially, these styles appear quite different, but the basic letterforms remain the same. STRUCTURE OF THE ARABIC ALPHABET The Arabic alphabet is written from right to left and is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as Persian and Urdu have additional letters. There is no difference between written and printed letters; the writing is Unicase (i.e. the concept of Upper And Lower Case letters does not exist). On the other hand, most of the letters are attached to one another, even when printed, and their appearance changes as a function of whether they connect to preceding or following letters. Some combinations of letters form special Ligatures . 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 a vocalization notation in the form of Diacritic marks is used. Moreover, in vocalized texts, there is a series of other diacritics of which the most modern are an indication of vowel omission ''(sukūn)'' and the lengthening of consonants ''(šadda)''. 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. There are two orders for Arabic letters in the alphabet, the original Abjadī order matches the ordering of letters in all alphabets derived from the Phoenician Alphabet , including the English ABC. The standard order used today, and shown in the table, is the Hejā'ī order, where letters are grouped according to their shape. Abjadi order See Also: abjadi order 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) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end. The most common Abjad sequence is: This is commonly vocalized as follows:
Another vocalization is: Another Abjad sequence, mainly confined to the Maghreb, is: which can be vocalized as: See also: Abjad Numerals . 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 '' Arabic Transliteration '' for details and various other transliteration schemes. 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 ''. Primary letters The Arabic script is cursive, and all primary letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whever they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit 4 distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). Six letters however only have isolated or final form, and if they are followed by another letter, they do not join with it, and so this next letter can only have their initial or isolated form despite if it is not an initial. For compatibility with previous standards, Unicode encoded all these forms separately, however these forms can be infered 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). Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word. As to ''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. Modified letters The following are not actual letters, but rather different orthographical shapes for letters. ;Notes: The , commonly using Unicode 0x0649 () 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 has neither an initial nor a medial form. Ligatures The only compulsory ligature is ' + '. All other ligatures (''''+'''', etc.) are optional.
Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature ', the post-vocalic form of ' (“God”).
Combined with an initial ', this becomes full ' :
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 ', because it should compose a small ' sign above a gemination '''' sign). Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):
Hamza See Also: hamza 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:
Diacritics Shadda See Also: shadda ' ( ◌ ) marks the Gemination (doubling) of a consonant; an ( ◌ ) vowel sign (when present) moves to between the geminate (doubled) consonant and '. The w-shaped ' glyph above the second consonnant that it geminates, is in fact the beginning of a small ' letter. ''Sukūn'' and ''ʼalif'' above An Arabic syllable can be open (ended by a vowel) or closed (ended by a consonant).
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 ' ( ) 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 ', "heart", is written ''''. The sukūn is also used for transliterating words to Arabic script. The Persian word ماسك (mâsk, from the English word mask), for example, would be written with a sukūn above the ﺱ to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the ك . ' allows us to know where not to place a vowel: ' could, in effect, be read ''/qVlVbV/'', but written with a ''sukūn'' over the '''' and the '''', it can only be interpreted as the form ''/qVlb/''; we write this . This is one stage from full vocalization, where the ''a'' vowel would also be indicated by a : , The ' is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the ', putting a '''' above a '''' which indicates , or above a '''' which stands for is extremely rare, to the point that '''' with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong , and '''' with '''' will be read . The letters ' ( with an ' at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word ' (“music”). If you were to write ' above the '''', '''' and '''', you’d get , which would be read as '''' (note however that the final '''' is an '''' and never takes ''''). The word, entirely vocalised, would be written in the '''' (if it happened to appear there!), or elsewhere. (The Quranic spelling would have no '''' sign above the final '''', but instead a miniature '''' above the preceding '''' consonant, which is a valid Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature '''' as of 2006.) A ' 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, ', meaning “Ahmed is a bad husband”, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if it was still pronounced with full ''i`rab'', i.e. '''' with the complete Desinence s. Vowels See Also: Harakat Arabic short vowels are generally ''not'' written, except sometimes in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan) and didactics, which are known as vocalised texts. Occasionally short vowels are marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and cannot be resolved simply from context. Short vowels may be written with Diacritic s 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 ' or a word like '.) Note that when the acute-shaped which denotes a short a is added on top of a geminated consonnant (i.e. after a ), the fatha accent takes a vertical shape to make the composition more distinctable from the tanwiin vowel sign (which marks a /-an/ ending with indeterminate nunation in fully vocalized texts, see below). For an example, see the encoded ligature for ''ʻAllah'' above. Long "a" following a consonant other than hamzah is written with a short-"a" mark on the consonant plus an alif after it (''''). 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 ', ' and '''' written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the '''' 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 : , (or ), , . 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. NUMERALS See Also: 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" ( ''''). 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. Unlike Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from left to right.
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