Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing in the Arabic language.

Because the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, is written with this alphabet, its influence spread with that of Islam. As a result, the Arabic alphabet is used to write many other languages — even languages belonging to language families other than Semitic. Examples of non-Semitic languages written with the Arabic alphabet include Persian, Urdu, and Malay. In order to accommodate the phonetics of other languages, the alphabet has been adapted by the addition of letters and other symbols. (See Arabic alphabets of other languages below).

The alphabet presents itself in different styles such as Nasta'līq, Thuluth, Kufic and others (see Arabic calligraphy), just like different handwriting styles and typefaces for the Roman alphabet. Superficially, these styles appear quite different, but the basic letterforms remain the same.

Structure of the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is written from right to left and is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as Persian and Urdu have additional letters. There is no difference between upper and lower case nor between written and printed letters. Most of the letters are attached to one another, even when printed, and their appearance changes as a function of whether they connect to preceding or following letters. Some combinations of letters form 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 Arabic letters in the alphabet. The original Abjadī order matches the ordering of letters in all alphabets derived from the Phoenician alphabet, including the English ABC. The standard order used today, and shown in the table, is the Hejā'ī order, where letters are grouped according to their shape.

Abjadi order

The special Abjadī order (or two slightly variant orders) was devised by matching an Arabic letter of the fully consonant-dotted 28-letter Arabic alphabet to each of the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet (in their old Phoenician alphabetic order) — leaving six remaining Arabic letters at the end.

The most common Abjad sequence is:

This is commonly vocalized as follows:

Another vocalization is:

Another Abjad sequence, mainly confined to the Maghreb, is:

which can be vocalized as:

Presentation of the alphabet

The following table provides all of the Unicode characters for Arabic, and none of the supplementary letters used for other languages. The transliteration given is the widespread DIN 31635 standard, with some common alternatives. See the article Arabic transliteration for details and various other transliteration schemes.

Regarding pronunciation, the phonetic values given are those of the "standard" pronunciation of the fusha language as taught in universities. Actual pronunciation between the varieties of Arabic may vary widely. For more details concerning the pronunciation of Arabic, consult the article Arabic phonology.

Primary letters

The Arabic script is cursive, and all primary letters have conditional forms for their glyphs, depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle or end of a word, so they may exhibit 4 distinct forms (initial, medial, final or isolated). Six letters, however, only have isolated or final form, and if they are followed by another letter, they do not join with it, and so this next letter can only have their initial or isolated form despite its not being an initial letter.

For compatibility with previous standards, Unicode encoded all these forms separately, however these forms can be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The table below shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation).

General Unicode	Contextual forms				Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
General Unicode	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial	Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
0627	FE8D	FE8E	—			/	various, including
0628	FE8F	FE90	FE92	FE91
062A	FE95	FE96	FE98	FE97
062B	FE99	FE9A	FE9C	FE9B
062C	FE9D	FE9E	FEA0	FE9F		(also j, g)	/ /
062D	FEA1	FEA2	FEA4	FEA3
062E	FEA5	FEA6	FEA8	FEA7		(also kh, x)
062F	FEA9	FEAA	—
0630	FEAB	FEAC	—			(also dh, ð)
0631	FEAD	FEAE	—
0632	FEAF	FEB0	—
0633	FEB1	FEB2	FEB4	FEB3
0634	FEB5	FEB6	FEB8	FEB7		(also sh)
0635	FEB9	FEBA	FEBC	FEBB
0636	FEBD	FEBE	FEC0	FEBF
0637	FEC1	FEC2	FEC4	FEC3
0638	FEC5	FEC6	FEC8	FEC7			/
0639	FEC9	FECA	FECC	FECB			/
063A	FECD	FECE	FED0	FECF		(also gh)	/
0641	FED1	FED2	FED4	FED3
0642	FED5	FED6	FED8	FED7
0643	FED9	FEDA	FEDC	FEDB
0644	FEDD	FEDE	FEE0	FEDF			, (in Allah only)
0645	FEE1	FEE2	FEE4	FEE3
0646	FEE5	FEE6	FEE8	FEE7
0647	FEE9	FEEA	FEEC	FEEB
0648	FEED	FEEE	—			/	/
064A	FEF1	FEF2	FEF4	FEF3		/	/

Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word. As to hamza, it has only a single graphic, since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a waw, ya or alif, and in that case the seat behaves like an ordinary waw, ya or alif.

Modified letters

The following are not actual letters, but rather different orthographical shapes for letters.

General Unicode	Conditional forms				Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
General Unicode	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial	Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
0622	FE81	FE82	—
0629	FE93	FE94	—			or / ^h /	,
0649	FEEF	FEF0	—		(Arabic) (see note below)	/
06CC	FBFC	FBFD	FBFF	FBFE	(Persian, Urdu) (see note below)	/

Notes:

The , commonly using Unicode 0x0649 () in Arabic, is sometimes replaced in Persian or Urdu, with Unicode 0x06CC (ی), called "Persian Yeh". This is appropriate to its pronunciation in those languages. The glyphs are identical in isolated and final form (ﻯ ﻰ), but not in initial and medial form, in which the Persian Yeh gains two dots below (ﻳ ﻴ) while the has neither an initial nor a medial form.

Ligatures

The only compulsory ligature is ' + '. All other ligatures ('+', etc.) are optional.

(isolated) ' + ' ( ) :
(final) ' + ' ( ) :

Unicode has a special glyph for the ligature ', the post-vocalic form of ' (“God”).

U+FDF2 ARABIC LIGATURE ALLAH ISOLATED FORM:

Combined with an initial ', this becomes full ' :

The latter is a work-around for the shortcomings of most text processors, which are incapable of displaying the correct vowel marks for the word ', because it should compose a small ' sign above a gemination sign. Compare the display of the composed equivalents below (the exact outcome will depend on your browser and font configuration):

', (geminated) ' (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) :
', ', (geminated) ' (with implied short-a vowel), (vowel reversed) ' :

Hamza

Initially, the letter ' indicated an occlusive glottal, or glottal stop, transcribed by , confirming the alphabet came from the same Phoenician origin. Now it is used in the same manner as in other abjads, with ' and ', as a mater lectionis, that is to say, a consonant standing in for a long vowel (see below). In fact, over the course of time its original consonantal value has been obscured, since ' now serves either as a long vowel or as graphic support for certain diacritics (madda or hamza).*****

The Arabic alphabet now uses the hamza to indicate a glottal stop, which can appear anywhere in a word. This letter, however, does not function like the others: it can be written alone or on a support in which case it becomes a diacritic:

alone: ;
with a support: (above and under a '), (above a '), (above a dotless ' or ').

Diacritics

Shadda

' ( ^◌ ) marks the gemination (doubling) of a consonant; an ( ^◌ ) vowel sign (when present) moves to between the geminate (doubled) consonant and '.

The w-shaped ' glyph above the second consonant that it geminates, is in fact the beginning of a small ' letter.

General Unicode	Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
0651 ^◌		(consonant doubled)

Sukūn and ʼalif above

An Arabic syllable can be open (ended by a vowel) or closed (ended by a consonant).

open: CV^* (long or short vowel)
closed: CVC (short vowel only)

When the syllable is closed, we can indicate that the consonant that closes it does not carry a vowel by marking it with a sign called ' ( ) to remove any ambiguity, especially when the text is not vocalised: it's necessary to remember that a standard text is only composed of series of consonants; thus, the word ', "heart", is written . The sukūn is also used for transliterating words to Arabic script. The Persian word ماسك (mâsk, from the English word mask), for example, might be written with a sukūn above the ﺱ to signify that there is no vowel sound between that letter and the ك .

' allows us to know where not to place a vowel: ' could, in effect, be read qalab (meaning "he turned around"), but written with a sukūn over the ' and the ', it can only be interpreted as the form /qVlb/; we write this . This is one stage from full vocalization, where the a vowel would also be indicated by a : ,

The ' is traditionally written in full vocalization. Outside of the ', putting a ' above a ' which indicates , or above a ' which stands for is extremely rare, to the point that ' with sukūn will be unambiguously read as the diphthong , and ' with ' will be read .

The letters ' ( with an ' at the end of the word) will be read most naturally as the word ' (“music”). If you were to write ' above the ', ' and ', you’d get , which would be read as ' (note however that the final ' is an ' and never takes '). The word, entirely vocalised, would be written in the ' (if it happened to appear there!), or elsewhere. (The Quranic spelling would have no ' sign above the final ', but instead a miniature ' above the preceding ' consonant, which is a valid Unicode character but most Arabic computer fonts cannot in fact display this miniature as of 2006.)

A ' is not placed on word-final consonants, even if no vowel is pronounced, because fully vocalised texts are always written as if the i`rab vowels were in fact pronounced. For example, ', meaning “Ahmed is a bad husband”, for the purposes of Arabic grammar and orthography, is treated as if it was still pronounced with full i`rab, i.e. with the complete desinences.

General Unicode	Name	Translit.	Phonetic Value (IPA)
0652 ^◌		(no vowel with this consonant letter or diphthong with this long vowel letter)	/
0670 ^◌		(no vowel with next final consonant letter or diphthong with next final long vowel letter)	/

Vowels

Arabic short vowels are generally not written, except in sacred texts (such as the Qurʼan, where they must be written) and sometimes in didactics, which are known as vocalised texts.

Before the introduction of printing, occasionally short vowels would be marked where the word would otherwise be ambiguous and couldn't be resolved simply from context, or simply wherever they looked nice. This custom has now all but disappeared, to the point that many Arabs believe (wrongly) that the use of vowel marks is forbidden outside of the Quran. Most software (such as most text editors and all mobile phones) doesn't allow the writer to add short vowels, and displays them illegibly if at all.

Short vowels may be written with diacritics placed above or below the consonant that precedes them in the syllable. (All Arabic vowels, long and short, follow a consonant; contrary to appearances: there is a consonant at the start of a name like Ali — in Arabic ' — or a word like '.)

Note that when the acute-shaped which denotes a short a is added on top of a geminated consonant (i.e. after a ), the fatha accent takes a vertical shape to make the composition more distinguishable from the tanwiin vowel sign (which marks a /-an/ ending with indeterminate nunation in fully vocalized texts, see below). For an example, see the encoded ligature for ʻAllah above.

Short vowels (fully vocalized text)	Name	Trans.	Value
064E ^◌
064F ^◌
0650 ^◌

Long "a" following a consonant other than hamzah is written with a short-"a" mark on the consonant plus an alif after it (). Long "i" is a mark for short "i" plus a yaa yāʼ, and long u is mark for short u plus waaw, so aā = ā, iy = ī and uw = ū); long "a" following a hamzah sound may be represented by an alif-madda or by a floating hamzah followed by an alif.

In the table below, vowels will be placed above or below a dotted circle replacing a primary consonant letter or shadda. Please note, that most consonants (except 6 of them) do join to the left with ', ' and ' written then with their medial or final form. Additionally, the ' letter in the last row may connect to the letter on its left, and then will use a medial or initial form. For clarity in the table below, the primary letter on the left used to mark these long vowels are shown only in their isolated form. Use the table of primary letters to look at their actual glyph and joining types.

Long vowels (fully vocalized text)	Trans.	Value
064E 0627 ^◌
064E 0649 ^◌	/
064E 06CC ^◌	/
064F 0648 ^◌	/	^*
0650 064A ^◌	/	^*

In an un-vocalised text (one in which the short vowels are not marked), the long vowels are represented by the consonant in question : , (or ), , . Long vowels written in the middle of a word of un-vocalized text are treated like consonants taking sukūn (see below) in a text that has full diacritics. Here also, the table shows long vowel letters only in isolated form for clarity.

Long vowels (un-vocalized text)	Trans.	Value
0627
0649	/
06CC	/
0648	/	^*
064A	/	^*

tanwiin letters:
	used to write the grammatical endings and respectively for desinences with nunation in indefinite state (see I`rab) in Arabic. is most commonly written in combination with alif ‎ () or taa' marbūta.

Numerals

There are two kinds of numerals used in Arabic writing; standard numerals and "East Arab" numerals, used in Iran, Pakistan and India. In Arabic, these numbers are referred to as "Indian numbers" ( ). In most of present-day North Africa, the usual Western numerals are used; in medieval times, a slightly different set (from which, via Italy, Western "Arabic numerals" derive) was used. Unlike Arabic alphabetic characters, Arabic numerals are written from left to right.

Standard numerals
	0
	1
	2
	3
	4
	5
	6
	7
	8
	9

East Arab numerals
	0
	1
	2
	3
	4
	5
	6
	7
	8
	9

*Standard form of number 2 in Egypt is slightly different

In addition, the Arabic alphabet can be used to represent numbers (Abjad numerals), a usage rare today. This usage is based on the Abjadi order of the alphabet. ' is 1, ' is 2, ' is 3, and so on until ' = 10, ' = 20, ' = 30, ... ' = 200, ..., ' = 1000. This is sometimes used to produce chronograms.

History

The Arabic alphabet can be traced back to the Nabatean alphabet used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic, itself descended from Phoenician. The first known text in the Arabic alphabet is a late fourth-century inscription from Jabal Ram (50 km east of Aqaba), but the first dated one is a trilingual inscription at Zebed in Syria from 512. However, the epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic. Later, dots were added above and below the letters to differentiate them (the Aramaic model had fewer phonemes than the Arabic, and some originally distinct Aramaic letters had become indistinguishable in shape, so in the early writings 15 distinct letter-shapes had to do duty for 28 sounds!) The first surviving document that definitely uses these dots is also the first surviving Arabic papyrus (PERF 558), dated April 643, although they did not become obligatory until much later. Important texts like the Qurʼan were frequently memorized; this practice, which survives even today, probably arose partially from a desire to avoid the great ambiguity of the script.

Yet later, vowel signs and hamzas were added, beginning sometime in the last half of the seventh century, roughly contemporaneous with the first invention of Syriac and Hebrew vocalization. Initially, this was done by a system of red dots, said to have been commissioned by an Umayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf: a dot above = ', a dot below = ', a dot on the line = , and doubled dots gave tanwin. However, this was cumbersome and easily confusable with the letter-distinguishing dots, so about 100 years later, the modern system was adopted. The system was finalized around 786 by al-Farahidi.

Arabic alphabets of other languages

Worldwide use of the Arabic alphabet
	→ Countries where the Arabic script is the only official orthography
	→ Countries where the Arabic script is used alongside other orthographies.

Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages other than Arabic, including Persian, Kurdish, Malay and Urdu. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a phoneme, so many languages add their own letter to represent in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas West African languages tend to imitate those of Ajami, and Indonesian ones those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.

Current uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Today Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the only non-Arab states using the Arabic alphabet to write their official national language.

The Arabic alphabet is currently used for:

Middle East and Central Asia

Kurdish and Turkmen in Northern Iraq. (In Turkey, the Latin alphabet is now used for Kurdish);
Official language Persian and regional languages including Azeri, Sorani-Kurdish and Baluchi in Iran;
Official languages Dari (which differs only to a minor degree from Persian) and Pashto and all regional languages including Uzbek in Afghanistan;
Tajik also differs only to a minor degree from Persian, and while in Tajikistan the usual Tajik alphabet is an extended Cyrillic alphabet, there is also some use of Arabic-alphabet Persian books from Iran
Uyghur (changed to Roman script in 1969 and back to a simplified, fully voweled, Arabic script in 1983), Kazakh and Kyrgyz by a minority of Kyrgyz in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China;

South Asia

Official language Urdu and regional languages including Punjabi (where the script is known as Shahmukhi), Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Baluchi in Pakistan;
Urdu and Kashmiri in India. Urdu is one of several official languages in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh; see List of national languages of India. Kashmiri also uses Sharada script;

Southeast Asia

Malay in the Arabic script known as Jawi is co-official in Brunei, and used for religious purposes in Malaysia, Indonesia, Southern Thailand and Singapore;

Africa

Comorian (Comorian) in the Comoros, currently side by side with the Latin alphabet (neither is official);
Hausa for many purposes, especially religious (known as Ajami);
Mandinka, widely but unofficially (known as Ajami); (another non-Latin alphabet used is N'Ko)
Fula, especially the Pular of Guinea(known as Ajami);
Wolof (at zaouias), known as Wolofal.
Tamazight and other Berber languages were traditionally written in Arabic in the Maghreb. There is now a competing 'revival' of neo-Tifinagh.

Former uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Most education was once religious instead of governmental, so choice of script was determined by the user's religion; this meant Muslims would use Arabic script to write any language they used. See also Languages of Muslim countries.

In the 20th century, Arabic script was generally replaced by the Latin alphabet in the Balkans,Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, while in the Soviet Union, after a brief period of Latinization, use of the Cyrillic alphabet was mandated. Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has only occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Iran. [http://www.cimera.org/files/camel/en/27e/MICA27E-Siddikzoda.pdf

Most languages of the Iranian languages family continue to use Arabic script, as well as the Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan and of Muslim populations in India, but the Bengali language of Bangladesh is written in the Bengali alphabet.

Africa

Afrikaans (as it was first written among the "Cape Malays");
Berber in North Africa, particularly Tachelhit in Morocco (still being considered, along with Tifinagh and Latin for Tamazight);
For the West African languages mentioned above - Hausa, Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof - the Latin alphabet has officially replaced Arabic transcriptions for use in literacy and education;
Nubian;
Swahili;
Somali (has used the Latin alphabet since 1972);
Songhay in West Africa, particularly in Timbuktu;

Europe

Albanian;
Bosnian (only for literary purposes); (presently written in the Latin alphabet)
Polish (among ethnic Tatars);
Belarusian (among ethnic Tatars; see Belarusian_Arabic_alphabet);
Mozarabic, when the Moors ruled Spain (and later Aragonese, Portuguese, and Spanish proper; see aljamiado);

Central Asia and Russia

Azeri in Azerbaijan (now written in the Latin alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet scripts in Azerbaijan);
Bashkir (for some years: from October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
Chaghatai across Central Asia;
Chechen (for some years: from October Revolution (1917) until 1928);
Kazakh in Kazakhstan;
Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan;
Tatar (iske imlâ) before 1928 (changed to Latin), reformed in 1880's, 1918 (deletion of some letters);
Chinese and Dungan, among the Chinese Hui Muslims^*;
Turkmen in Turkmenistan;
Uzbek in Uzbekistan;
All the Muslim peoples of the USSR between 1918-1928 (many also earlier), including Bashkir, Chechen, Kazakh, Tajik etc. After 1928 their script became Latin, then later Cyrillic.

Southeast Asia

Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia;

South Asia

Sanskrit has also been written in Arabic script, though it is more well known as using Devanagari - the script also currently used for writing the Hindi language.

Middle East

Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic script until Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared the change to Roman script in 1928. This form of Turkish is now known as Ottoman Turkish and is held by many to be a different language, due to its much higher percentage of Persian and Arabic loanwords;

Computers and the Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet can be encoded using several character sets, including ISO-8859-6 and Unicode, in the latter thanks to the "Arabic segment", entries U+0600 to U+06FF. However, neither of these sets indicate the form each character should take in context. It is left to the rendering engine to select the proper glyph to display for each character.

Unicode

As of Unicode 4.1, the following ranges encode Arabic characters:

Arabic (0600–06FF)
Arabic Supplement (0750–077F)
Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50–FDFF)
Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70–FEFF)

The basic Arabic range encodes the standard letters and diacritics, but does not encode contextual forms (U+0621–U+0652 being directly based on ISO 8859-6); and also includes the most common diacritics and Arabic-Indic digits. U+06D6 to U+06ED encode qur'anic annotation signs such as "end of ayah" and "start of rub el hizb" . The Arabic Supplement range encodes letter variants mostly used for writing African (non-Arabic) languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-A range encodes contextual forms and ligatures of letter variants needed for Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Central Asian languages. The Arabic Presentation Forms-B range encodes spacing forms of Arabic diacritics, and more contextual letter forms.

Arabic keyboard

When one wants to encode a particular written form of a character, there are extra code points provided in Unicode which can be used to express the exact written form desired. The range Arabic presentation forms A (U+FB50 to U+FDFF) contain ligatures while the range Arabic presentation forms B (U+FE70 to U+FEFF) contains the positional variants. These effects are better achieved in Unicode by using the zero width joiner and non-joiner, as these presentation forms are deprecated in Unicode, and should generally only be used within the internals of text-rendering software, when using Unicode as an intermediate form for conversion between character encodings, or for backwards compatibility with implementations that rely on the hard-coding of glyph forms.

Finally, the Unicode encoding of Arabic is in logical order, that is, the characters are entered, and stored in computer memory, in the order that they are written and pronounced without worrying about the direction in which they will be displayed on paper or on the screen. Again, it is left to the rendering engine to present the characters in the correct direction, using Unicode's bi-directional text features. In this regard, if the Arabic words on this page are written left to right, it is an indication that the Unicode rendering engine used to display them is out-of-date. For more information about encoding Arabic, consult the Unicode manual available at http://www.unicode.org/

MULTILINGUAL COMPUTING WITH ARABIC AND ARABIC TRANSLITERATION Arabicizing Windows Applications to Read and Write Arabic & Solutions for the Transliteration Quagmire Faced by Arabic-Script Languages

A PowerPoint Tutorial (with screen shots and an English voice-over) on how to add Arabic to the Windows Operating System

External links

This article contains major sections of text from the very detailed article Arabic alphabet/from the French Wikipedia, which has been partially translated into English. Further translation of that page, and its incorporation into the text here, are welcomed.

Abjad writing systems | Arabic alphabet

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Arabic alphabet

Structure of the Arabic alphabet

Abjadi order

Presentation of the alphabet

Primary letters

Modified letters

Ligatures

Hamza

Diacritics

Shadda

Sukūn and ʼalif above

Vowels

Numerals

History

Arabic alphabets of other languages

Current uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Middle East and Central Asia

South Asia

Southeast Asia

Africa

Former uses of the alphabet for languages other than Arabic

Africa

Europe

Central Asia and Russia

Southeast Asia

South Asia

Middle East

Computers and the Arabic alphabet

Unicode

Arabic keyboard

See also

External links