Arabic

Arabic is the Central Semitic language of the Arabian Peninsula. Its older forms, Old Arabic, survive in pre-Islamic inscriptions cut in Ancient North Arabian and Nabataean scripts.

In the seventh century the Quran was collected in a single codex under the Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656; by the 700s grammarians had standardized Classical Arabic, the register of poetry, scholarship and Islamic worship across the caliphate.

The Islamic conquests carried Arabic from Mesopotamia to the Maghrib and Iberia, where it became a vehicle of science and philosophy and supplied European tongues with loanwords. The Arabic of Sicily and al-Andalus gave rise to Maltese, the one Arabic descendant written in the Latin alphabet. The Arabic abjad, derived from Nabataean Aramaic, is written from right to left.