The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others.
The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic -- most importantly, the Qur'an, 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, Malay, 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.
Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, the Arabic alphabet exists in different styles such as Nasta'līq, Thuluth, Kufic and others. These styles can vary widely.
Structure of the Arabic alphabet:
The Arabic alphabet, written from right to left, is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as Malay, Persian and Urdu have additional letters (see Malay-Arabic script). There is no difference between upper and lower case nor between written and printed letters. Most of the letters connect directly to the letter which immediately follows, which gives written text an overall cursive appearance. Each individual letter can have up to four distinct forms, based upon where the letter appears in a word:
Initial, or medial following a non-connecting letter Medial following a connecting letter Word-final, following a connecting letter Isolated, or word-final following a non-connecting letter In typographical fonts, some combinations of two or three letters are given special ligatures.
The Arabic alphabet is an "impure" abjad—short vowels are not written, though long ones are—so the reader must know the language in order to restore the vowels. However, in editions of the Qur'an or in didactic works vocalization marks are used – including a sign for vowel omission (sukūn) and one for gemination/doubling/lengthening of consonants (šadda).
The names of Arabic letters can be thought of as abstractions of an older version where the names of the letters signified meaningful words in the Proto-Semitic language.
There are two orders for the Arabic alphabet. The original Abjadī أبجدي order derives from the order of Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Latin alphabet. The standard order used today, and shown in the table, is the Hejā'ī هجائي order, where similarly-shaped letters are grouped together.
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