Name: The Arabic Language: Its Amazing History and Features
Uploaded: 2018-08-22T07:16:05.000Z
Duration: 18 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Back in 2013 I produced one of the strangest videos on YouTube: a video about Arabic in Japanese with English subtitles

Basic passive voice

and me teaching an arabic lesson to Japanese viewers at the end. Lots of people were bewildered. Today, I'm going to try again.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Lang Focus channel

and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the

Arabic language or "al Arabiya" as it's called in arabic. Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world

with 293 million native speakers, and 422 million speakers in total.

It's an official language in 26 countries. That doesn't mean it's the majority language in all of those countries,

It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations,

and as the language of the Quran - the holy book of Islam - it is also the liturgical language of

1.7 billion muslims around the world. Most of those people don't speak Arabic

but many have some knowledge of arabic for reading, and for reciting prayers and religious study.

Speaking about Arabic can be confusing, because there are many different varieties of the language.

One of the main varieties is the classical arabic of the Quran.

This is considered by many to be the most perfect form of Arabic, and some say it's the only true Arabic,

because it was the language in which God revealed the quran to Muhammad. Then there's Modern Standard Arabic,

which is the form of Arabic used as an official language today. It's the modern form of literary arabic

which was based on the classical Arabic of the Quran,

but with some adaptations and a greatly expanded vocabulary to make it more suitable for modern times.

It's not exactly the same as classical Arabic,

but both of  them are referred to by Arabs as "Al-Fusha", meaning "eloquent speech". Modern Standard Arabic is the language of books, media,

but not as the language of everyday speech. For everyday speech, Arabic speakers use their local dialects - or "Amiya" -

Which can differ quite significantly from country to country, and even from one place to another within a single country.

Arabic is a semitic language. Arabic and other Semitic languages like Hebrew,

Aramaic, and Phoenician all developed from the same proto-semitic language. Arabic forms one branch of Central Semitic, while another branch of Central

Semitic includes Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. Old Arabic.

Numerous Semitic languages related to Arabic were spoken in Arabia between the 13th and 10th century CE,

but they don't have features that would classify them as Arabic. The earliest evidence of people referred to as "Arab", is in an Assyrian

inscription from the Eighth Century Bce. But, it just mentions the Arabs.

It doesn't give any examples of their language. From the 6th century BCE to the 4th century CE

showing evidence of an early form of Arabic. Some of those inscriptions are written in that early form of Arabic, and others are written in

Aramaic, but show some influence from Arabic. Those inscriptions consist mostly of proper names, so they don't give us an awful lot of

information about what the language was like. The earliest inscription that is

Century BCE, and was found at Ein Avdat. It's an Aramaic inscription,

Another inscription was discovered at An-Namaara,

120 kilometers southeast of Damascus, dating back to 329 CE.

The language of this inscription is nearly identical to classical Arabic as we know it, even though these inscriptions are

They are not written in the Arabic script, but rather the Nabataean script, which derived from the Aramaic script.

But there are also inscriptions from the 4th and 5th century CE that are written in a script that's more like Arabic.

It's generally thought that the Arabic script developed from the Nabataean Script, and these inscriptions might be written in a script

Before the beginning of Islam, there were numerous dialects of Arabic spoken around the peninsula,

but there was also a common literary language

used among the different tribes for poetry, a koine, which was a compromise between the various dialects.

The pieces of Poetry written in this literary koine are the earliest examples of classical Arabic.

when muslims believe that the Quran was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, and then it was written down over a

23-year period. At the time the quran was written, there were seven dialects of classical Arabic, the Quran was written in all of them.

But the Quraishi version became the standard upon which the text of today's quran is based. The differences are in pronunciation,

The Arabic of the Quran is similar to that of the pre-Islamic

classical Arabic poetry, but not exactly. Beginning during the life of Muhammad, and

continuing into the eighth century, the Islamic conquests spread the Arabic language into new faraway lands.

there was an important need to standardize the language, because vast numbers of people were beginning to speak it.

practical, new vocabulary was created, and the grammar and style of prose was standardized.

While classical Arabic was being standardized as a written language,

local dialects of Arabic also emerged in the cities of the Arab Empire.

These dialects did not descend directly from classical Arabic,

but rather from pre-islamic Arabic dialects or from a single Arabic "koine",

which was the common language of conquering Arab armies.

influenced by the original languages of areas that were conquered.

Mesopotamia were influenced by Aramaic. The

dialects of the Maghreb were influenced by Berber. The dialects of Egypt were influenced by

Coptic, and so on. The early centuries of these newly-emerging dialects are referred to as neo-Arabic. Even though classical Arabic was

standardised, not everybody could write it perfectly. Writing that contains features of both classical Arabic and neo-Arabic or

dialects, is referred to as middle Arabic. "Middle" doesn't refer to a time period But rather these texts were somewhere in the middle between

Over the centuries the neo arabic dialect continued to evolve into [the] modern

but literary arabic remained relatively constant because the arabic of the quran was always seen as the ideal

Arabic to imitate and this probably had a conservative effect on the dialects limiting them from changing too much after

Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798 the Arab World entered a period of greater contact with the West the influx of new

Western concepts required the arabic language to be updated in the early 20th century

regional academies of the Arabic-language began a process of language reform focused Mainly on

Expanding and updating the languages vocabulary these updates culminated in what is now known as modern Standard arabic?

Diglossia Arabic is well known for its state of diglossia

Arabic speakers used two distinctly different

Forms of the language in parallel for different purposes modern Standard Arabic is not learned by anyone as a native language

But it's used in reading and writing in Media on children's TV shows and in formal speeches while the colloquial dialects are used almost universally

For daily conversation as I mentioned [before] there's quite a lot of variation amongst arabic dialects

Understand each other depends on the geographic distance of their dialects as well as exposure many arabic speakers have told me that

Speakers of the Middle Eastern dialects really have no trouble understanding each other and that the main trouble comes in understanding the Maghrebi dialect

Especially Moroccan but these days with the spread of cable TV and the internet people are being exposed to a wider range of dialects on

a more regular basis which helps people understand different dialects more and of course there's also alpha Ska Modern Standard Arabic when speakers of

significantly different dialects communicate with each other they can switch [to] Modern Standard arabic

Or they can adjust their speech to make it more formal and literary and similar to Modern Standard arabic

But not exactly another common way [for] native speakers to bridge the dialect gap is to use something called the white

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The Arabic Language: Its Amazing History and Features

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reveal

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