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This article deals primarily with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the standard variety shared by educated speakers throughout Arabic-speaking regions. MSA is used in writing in formal print media and orally in newscasts, speeches and formal declarations of numerous types. [2] Modern Standard Arabic has 28 consonant phonemes and 6 vowel ...
Instead of writing the letter twice, Arabic places a W-shaped sign called shaddah, above it. Note that if a vowel occurs between the two consonants the letter will simply be written twice. The diacritic only appears where the consonant at the end of one syllable is identical to the initial consonant of the following syllable.
List of languages Language Language family Phonemes Notes Ref Total Consonants Vowels, tones and stress Arabic (Standard): Afroasiatic: 34: 28 6 Modern spoken dialects might have a different number of phonemes; for exmple the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ are phonemic in most Mashriqi dialects.
Early written Arabic used only rasm (in black). Later, i‘jām (in red) were added so that letters such as ṣād (ص) and ḍād (ض) could be distinguished. Ḥarakāt (in blue)—which is used in the Qur'an but not in most written Arabic—indicate short vowels, long consonants, and some other vocalizations.
In most cases, the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads, with the versions used for some languages, such as Kurdish dialect of Sorani, Uyghur, Mandarin, and Bosniak, being alphabets. It is the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy.
However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Pahlavi, are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels.
Sun letters (red) and moon letters (black) In Arabic and Maltese, the consonants are divided into two groups, called the sun letters or solar letters (Arabic: حروف شمسية ḥurūf shamsiyyah, Maltese: konsonanti xemxin) and moon letters or lunar letters (Arabic: حروف قمرية ḥurūf qamariyyah, Maltese: konsonanti qamrin), based on whether they assimilate the letter lām (ﻝ l ...
Most dialects of Arabic will use for ق in learned words that are borrowed from Standard Arabic into the respective dialect or when Arabs speak Modern Standard Arabic. The main dialectal variations in Arabic consonants revolve around the six consonants ج , ق , ث , ذ , ض and ظ .