Arabic abjad
Type	Abjad
Spoken languages	Arabic, Persian, Baloch, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Sindhi, Malay (limited usage) 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
ISO 15924	Arab (#160)
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Arabic alphabet
ﺍ    ﺏ    ﺕ    ﺙ    ﺝ    ﺡ
ﺥ    ﺩ    ﺫ    ﺭ    ﺯ     س
ﺵ    ﺹ    ﺽ    ﻁ    ﻅ    ﻉ
ﻍ    ﻑ    ﻕ    ﻙ    ﻝ
ﻡ    ﻥ    ه‍    ﻭ    ﻱ
History · Transliteration Diacritics · Hamza ء Numerals · Numeration v • d • e

History of the alphabet
Middle Bronze Age 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Phoenician 14–11 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Aramaic 8 c. BCE Brāhmī & Indic 6 c. BCE Tibetan 7 c. CE Khmer/Javanese 9 c. CE Hebrew 3 c. BCE Syriac 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. CE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Greek 9 c. BCE Etruscan 8 c. BCE Latin 7 c. BCE Runic 2 c. CE Gothic 3 c. CE Armenian 405 CE Glagolitic 862 CE Cyrillic 10 c. CE Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE Ge'ez 5–6 c. BCE
Meroitic 3 c. BCE
Ogham 4 c. CE
Hangul 1443 CE
Canadian syllabics 1840 CE
Zhuyin 1913 CE
complete genealogy

The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. Arabic is written from right to left, and is written in a cursive style of script. There are 28 basic letters in the Arabic alphabet. Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, there are Arabic scripts in a number of different Arabic calligraphy styles, including Naskh, Nastaʼlīq, Shahmukhi, Ruqʼah, Thuluth, Kufic, and Hejazi. After the Latin alphabet, the Arabic writing system is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world.^[1]

The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic — most importantly, the Qurʼan, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write many other languages, even outside of the Semitic family to which Arabic belongs. Examples of non-Semitic languages written with the Arabic alphabet include Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Baloch, Malay, 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 Use of the Arabic script for languages other than Arabic below.)

Structure

The Arabic alphabet has 28 basic letters. Adaptations of Arabic script for other languages, such the Malay Arabic script, have additional letters. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms.

Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters directly connected to the letter that immediately follows. Each individual letter can have up to four distinct forms, based on its position within in the word. These forms are:

• Initial: at the beginning of a word; or in the middle of a word, after a non-connecting letter.
• Medial: between two connecting letters (non-connecting letters lack a 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 look almost the same in all four forms, while others show considerable variety. In addition, some letter combinations are written as ligatures (special shapes), including lām-ʼalif.^[2] Many letters look similar but are distinguished from one another by dots above or below their central part. The dots are an integral part of the letter, not diacritics, because they 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, ب‎, and t has two dots above, ت‎.

The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad. Long vowels are written, but short ones are not, so the reader must be familiar with the language to understand the missing vowels. However, in editions of the Qurʼan and in didactic works, vocalization marks are used, including the sukūn for vowel omission and the šadda for consonant gemination (consonant doubling).

Sorting

Main article: Abjad numerals

There are two collating orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original abjadī order (أبجدي) derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. The abjadī order is used for numbering. In the hijāʼī order (هجائي), similarly-shaped letters are grouped together (see the next section). The hijāʼī order is used wherever lists of names and words are sorted, as in phonebooks, classroom lists, and dictionaries.

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

Letters and letter variants

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.

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the standard pronunciation of literary Arabic, the Dachsprache which is 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 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.

The names of the Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where they were meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.

Notes

• Initially, the letter ʼalif indicated the glottal stop [ʔ], as in Phoenician. Today it is used, together 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, so ʼalif now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic support for certain diacritics (madda and hamza).

• The Arabic alphabet now uses ﺀ‎, the hamza, to denote the glottal stop, which can appear anywhere in a word. This letter, however, does not function like the others: it can be written alone or with a carrier, in which case it becomes a diacritic:
  • alone: ء‎ ;
  • with a carrier: إ, أ‎ (above and under a ʼalif), ؤ‎ (above a wāw), ئ‎ (above a dotless yāʼ or yāʼ hamza).

• Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never connected to the following letter, even within a word. As to the hamza, it has only a single form, since it is never connected to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes combined with a wāw, yāʼ, or ʼalif, and in that case the carrier behaves like an ordinary wāw, yāʼ, or ʼalif.

Modified letters

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

The broken alif (ʼalif maqṣūra), commonly encoded as Unicode 0x0649 (ى‎) in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Persian yeh", in accordance with its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial position, where the Persian yeh gains two dots below (ﻳ ﻴ). The ʼalif maqṣūra has neither an initial nor a medial form. Although this is the common situation, the problem is not so simple, and no solution has been met yet as of September, 2007.^[3]

Ligatures

The only compulsory ligature is lām + ʼalif. All other ligatures (yāʼ + mīm, etc.) are optional.

• (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:

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):

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

لله‎

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

الله‎

Writing vowels

Short vowels

Short vowels are generally not written in Arabic, except in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan, where they must be written) and sometimes in teaching material. These are known as vocalized texts.

Short vowels are occasionally marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and could not be resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they are aesthetically pleasing.

Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable. 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 of a word like ʼalif.

Long vowels

A long a following a consonant other than a hamza is written with a short a sign on the consonant plus an ʼalif after it; long i is written as a sign for short i plus a yāʼ; and long u as a sign for short u plus a wāw. Briefly, ^aa = ā, ⁱy = ī and ^uw = ū. Long a following a hamza may be represented by an ʼalif madda or by a free hamza followed by an ʼalif.

In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or a šadda sign. For clarity in the table below, the primary letter on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Please note that most consonants do connect to the left with ʼalif, wāw and yāʼ written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the letter yāʼ in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.

In unvocalized 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, or yāʼ. Long vowels written in the middle of a word of unvocalised text are treated like consonants with a sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.

Diphthongs

The diphthongs [ai] and [au] are represented in vocalised text as follows:

Sukūn and alif above

An Arabic syllable can be open (ending with a vowel) or closed (ending with 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 diacritic called sukūn ( ْ‎ ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalized. A normal text is composed only of series of consonants; thus, the word qalb, "heart", is written qlb. The sukūn indicates 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 (قلْبْ‎), it can only have the form qVlb. This is one step down from full vocalization, where the vowel a would also be indicated by a fatḥa: قَلْبْ‎.

The Qur’an is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the Qur’an, putting a sukūn above a yāʼ — which represents [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].

For example, 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 one were to write a sukūn above the wāw, the yāʼ and the ʼalif, one would get موْسيْقىْ‎, which would be read as *mawsaykāy (note however that the final ʼalif maqṣūra, because it is is an ʼalif, never takes a sukūn). The word, entirely vocalized, would be written مُوْسِيْقَى‎ in the Qur’an, 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.)

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 ʼiʻrāb 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 ʼiʻrāb, i.e. ʼAḥmadu zawǧun šarrun with the complete desinences.

The sukūn is also used for transliterating words into the 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.

Other diacritics

See also: Harakat

Gemination

The šadda, or shadda ( ّ‎ ^ّ ), marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant. A kasra ( ِ‎ ^ّ ) may be written between the consonant and the šadda rather than under the consonant.

The w-shaped šadda sign is derived from beginning of a small letter šīn.

Nunation

Numerals

Main article: Arabic numerals

There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals (predominant in the Arab World), and Eastern Arabic numerals (used in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India). In Arabic, the former are referred to as "Indian numbers" (أرقام هندية‎ arqām hindiyyah). Arabic (or Hindu-Arabic) numerals are also used in Europe and the rest of the Western World in a third variant, the Western Arabic numerals, even though the Arabic alphabet is not. In most of present-day North Africa, the usual western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set was used, from which Western Arabic numerals derive, via Italy. 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 standard form of the numeral 2 is slightly different in Egypt.

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals). This usage is based on the abjadī of the alphabet. أ‎ 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.

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. 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 Qur’an 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.

Later still, vowel marks and the hamza were introduced, beginning some time in the latter half of the seventh century, preceedign 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 indicated nunation. 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.

Use of the Arabic script for languages other than Arabic

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.

The 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 voiceless bilabial plosive (the [p] sound), 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