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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 ...
Some analysts recognize the existence of another consonant, the /ɰ/ used only in the diphthong /ɰi/, and describe Korean's sound inventory as having as many as ten vowels. Vowels / ø / and / y / continue to be used only by older speakers, and have been replaced with /we/ and /wi/, respectively.
However, the lateral /l/ is acquired by most Arabic-speaking children by age two, a year earlier than English-speaking children. [26] The most difficult phonemes for young Arabic children are emphatic stops, fricatives, and the flap [27] /trill /ɾ/ ~ /r/. /x/ and /ɣ/, which are relatively rare sounds in other languages, are the most difficult ...
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.
Note: The following tables use the letter hamza (ء) as a carrier to illustrate the use of diacritics. It is not part of these signs. To record short vowels after a consonant, optional signs (fatḥah, ḍammah, kasrah) are used above this consonant. To write long vowels, the same signs are used plus the corresponding consonant letter.
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.
When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact ...