Modern Arabic

Discover how the language of the Qur’an became the language of today’s newspapers, sciences and exchanges — and how to learn it, step by step.

What is called Modern Arabic today is the fruit of an evolution that lasted more than a millennium, shaped by the interplay between literary Arabic and its various dialects. It has its roots in the classical, poetic and Qur’anic Arabic that was standardised by the grammarians of the first centuries of Islam. On the lexical level, the transformation of Arabic through gradual semantic shift has in fact never ceased, even though this movement was slow and almost imperceptible.

The contribution of philosophy and the sciences

With the development of philosophical thought and of the sciences, the language acquired a vast abstract terminology and an elaborate scientific vocabulary, drawing on the immense lexical resources at its disposal. This phenomenon marks the Arabic heritage on both a chronological and a geographical level: one and the same word may carry meanings that are more or less distant from one era to another, or from one geographical area to another.

Coining new words

To express new ideas, scholars would first search the old dictionaries and texts for an obsolete word that could be adapted to the intended meaning. When no suitable word existed, a literal translation of the term was proposed — for example, ʿilm al-ḥayât (“the science of life”) for biology. When a literal translation was not possible, a new word could be coined from an existing root: the word sayyâra (“car”), for instance, derives from the root s-y-r, whose meaning is linked to “movement”.

As a last resort, a foreign word could be borrowed and modified to fit the Arabic phonological system. The new demands placed on the language thus fed into the tension between respect for tradition and the desire for modernity. It is this form of Modern Arabic — reformed whether deliberately or not — that is used in most writing and, orally, in official or formal settings (religious and political speeches, television news) throughout the Arab world.

Modern Arabic and the dialects

Modern Standard Arabic is distinct from the dialects spoken in daily life, which can vary quite considerably from one country to another. In the reality of everyday exchange, however, there is no hermetic separation between the two: speakers combine, according to context, elements specific to their spoken language with elements borrowed from the literary language.

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