Arabic (MSA)

Also known as: Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, MSA, Fusha

Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabiyya) is a Central Semitic language with ~310M L1 speakers across all dialects and ~400M total, official in 25+ countries (the 22-state Arab League plus diasporic minorities), and one of six UN working languages. It is the liturgical language of Islam, the language of the Qurʾān (610-632 CE) — granting it religious prestige across the ~1.8 billion-Muslim world. The language exists in a state of diglossia: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA, فصحى fuṣḥā) serves as the pan-Arab formal register for media, education, and government and descends from Classical Quranic Arabic, while regional spoken dialects (Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine, Mesopotamian, Gulf, Yemeni-Hadrami) often differ enough to challenge mutual intelligibility. Written right-to-left in the Arabic abjad (28 letters) which evolved from Nabataean Aramaic in the 4th-6th c.; vowels are usually unmarked except in the Qurʾān, children's books, and pedagogy. MSA grammar retains 3 cases (nominative-genitive-accusative) and full root-and-pattern morphology — most words derive from triconsonantal roots through templatic vowel/affix patterns (k-t-b → kataba "wrote", kitāb "book", kātib "writer", maktab "office").