Language

Arabic (official), Kurdish (official in Kurdish regions), Assyrian, Armenian

Iraqis speak a dialect of Arabic, a Semitic language (along with Hebrew) that is spoken by about 200 million people in a wide geographical area from Morocco in the west to the Persian (Arabian) Gulf in the east. The Arabic language originated in the Arabian Peninsula (now Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states) and was spread throughout the area as a result of conquests by Islamic armies beginning in the seventh century and ultimately culminating in the formation of the Islamic Empire.

There are more than fifteen dialects of spoken Arabic, defined by geographical areas and rural–urban differences, and they have varying degrees of mutual understanding. Speakers of Arabic can understand people in the neighboring countries, and television has ensured that Egyptian Arabic is pretty well understood by all Arabic speakers. Dialects spoken by those in the far west and the far east of the Arab World, however, are no longer mutually understood.

Written Arabic is quite different from the spoken dialects. The written form is called Classical Arabic, or, for today's literature and press, Modern Standard Arabic. It is the same for all literate Arabs, regardless of how different their spoken forms are.

To help you understand the difference between written and spoken Arabic, consider the following: If for some reason the English-speaking world had decided that Middle English—the English spoken in Chaucer's time—would forever constitute the written form of English, we would now speak English as we speak it, but whenever we wrote it we would write in the Middle English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There would be great differences in what we say and what we write, but everyone in the entire English-speaking world would be able to understand what we wrote.

Modern Standard Arabic (often abbreviated MSA) is effectively classical Arabic, the language in which the Koran was revealed. The vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic has been expanded, of course, to include words for modern concepts, but even so, efforts are made to keep the new vocabulary within the "rules" of word formation of classical Arabic.

In general, the dialects of Arabic spoken now are grammatically simpler than MSA, just as modern English is grammatically simpler than Middle English. For example, Arabic dialects have fewer categories of verb types than MSA, and no case endings on words.

Pronunciation

The most notable feature of Arabic pronunciation is the presence of some "back" and "heavy" consonants for which there are no equivalents in English. There are not many of these consonants, but they occur frequently. Here are tables of the "back" and "heavy" consonants. If you want to know exactly how they sound, ask an Iraqi to pronounce the letters for you.

"Back" consonants

"Heavy" consonants

The other consonants are close enough to English to be easily recognized. Note, however, that consonants can be doubled (or lengthened), an important feature because it affects meaning.

Iraqi Arabic has fewer vowels than English, but they can be short or long, i.e., held for a longer time. Here is a list (as will be explained below, the Arabic alphabet does not represent the short vowels at all, and has symbols for only the three vowels, [aa], [ii], and [uu], that occur in Modern Standard Arabic):

Word Structure

Tri-literal Root System

The most interesting and famous aspect of the grammar of Arabic is the three-letter root system, best described using an example. The three letters k-t-b, for example, carry the basic meaning "write." Various combinations of the letters—always, however, in the k-t-b order—with vowels and other consonants produce words that are variants on the basic meaning "write." For example (note that these and the other examples in this section are given in the Iraqi dialect):

Most educated Arabs can readily list many words from one root. If you haven't worn through your Iraqi friend's patience in getting him or her to recite the alphabet, ask for other examples, for example words from d-r-s "study".

The Arabic Article

Another aspect of Arabic grammar that is interesting because it shows up in English as [al] (or [il] in some dialects), which is the definite article, the Arabic word for "the." It is prefixed to the following word, and, depending on what consonant that word starts with, the [l] may be dropped and the first consonant doubled. Here are some examples:

Many English words that have been borrowed from Arabic still have the definite article attached—for example, alkali, alcohol, alchemy, algorithm, algebra, and almanac.

Many Arabic masculine names also include the definite article. A common way to name a boy is to call him "servant of" followed by one of the many hundred names for God. The Arabic word for "servant" is ['abd]; ['abd] plus the [al] plus whatever word for God is chosen constitutes the full name. (Our rendition of an Arab name as Abdul or Abdel is actually the word for servant, plus the definite article, but minus the rest of the phrase!) Here are some examples:

Nouns and Adjectives

All Arabic nouns (including those which denote inanimate objects) are masculine or feminine, with the feminine nouns usually ending in [-a] -. The plural marker for masculine nouns is the suffix [-iin] - ; the plural for feminine nouns is the suffix [-aat]\£- . There are also many irregular plurals in Arabic, which have to be memorized individually, like the irregular plurals in English ('child–children', 'mouse–mice', etc.)

individually, like the irregular plurals in English ('child–children', 'mouse–mice', etc.)

Prepositions and Connecting Words

Verbs

 
Sentence Structure

Word Order

In the written language, the usual word order is verb-subject-object. The basic word order in the spoken language is subject-verb-object, just as it is in English.

The basic grammar of the spoken language differs considerably from English. Most noticeable are the differences in word order. For example, adjectives come after nouns, instead of before: "the teacher good" instead of "the good teacher."

The Arabic Alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is not as difficult as it looks at first. It is not an endless list of characters—just 28, with each letter standing for a single, particular sound. Once you learn these, you can sound out and begin to write words. There are no capital letters, but there is some difference between printing and handwriting, as there is in English. As we mentioned before, short vowels are usually not written (the name Muhammad is spelled,

in Arabic, or m-h-m-d reading from right to left). Otherwise, words are spelled very close to the way they are pronounced.  A final difference between the Arabic alphabet and Roman alphabet is that there is no capital/small letter distinction in Arabic. Here is a list of all the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, with their sounds—also called transcriptions—in square brackets, and their Arabic names in italics.