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Arabic
Arabic is one of the most ancient languages in the world. It belongs to the Semitic language family, a group of languages which has more than three thousand years of history. It is spoken across the Arab world, with a total of about 225 million speakers.Dialects
Arabic can be considered three languages in one. Virtually every Arab speaks Modern standard Arabic, the universal form of the language which is used by the media. This formal language is very different from colloquial Arabic, which is used for daily conversation and is formed by dialects which are very different one from another. To have an idea, just think that people from the Midle East can't understand those who speak the Maghreb dialect, as these two varieties are so different that they can be considered two separate languages. The third form of Arabic is the Classical one, which is used for religious purposes and in literature.In lingusitics, the situation of Arabic is defined as an example of disglossia (a term that means two toungues), a phenomenom which occurs when in addition to a highly codified form of one language (in this case, Modern Standard Arabic) there are the primary dialects of it (that is, the different dialects which form Spoken Arabic). To make things clearer, another example od disglossia is found in the co-existence of written Latin with the spoken Romance languages of French, Italian, and Spanish.
History
Modern Standard Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family, a group of languages which have a three-hundred years history. While the origins of the Semitic language family are currently in dispute among scholars, there is agreement that they flourished in the Mediterranean Basin area, especially in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of the Levant.In the 4th century AD it was recorded the first document of written Arabic. Nevertheless, it was from the 7th century onwards, when Arabic became the language of the Qur’an, that it began to spread as a major language. The rise of Islam went along with the rise of Arabic, which was the official language of the strongest Empire of the time. Due to his strong connection to religion, Arabic has always been recognised as the language of God and for this reason it has been reluctant to changes in its structure. As a result, normative language academies have been established in several areas throughout the Arab world including Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Amman. However, one on-going trend in Modern standard Arabic is modernization, which involves the creation of new terms for concepts which didn't exist in earlier times. In addition to this, Modern Arabic, both standard and colloquial, no more is the static language it was before, as it has started to incorporate colloquialism, which have been started to be studied only in recent times. Let's hope that in the next years we can have a more detailed documentation of the changes to which Modern Arabic is going through.
Arabic Literature
The origin of Arabic literature goes back to 500 AD, when poems were read aloud and handed down orally. The standards of poetry were established only in the 8th century and since then have remained more or less the same.As for prose, it should be mentioned the Nahada or Renaissance period, a long process of cultural revival which brought to the birth of the Modern Arabic Novel. In this context we can distinguish between two different trends, the neo-Classical and the Modernist. The first was based on the literary works of the past, such as the Maquama or the Thousand and One Nights, while the second initially produced translations of West popular novels. Individual works were created only later and were based on classical novel, even though the first authors didn't write any relevant piece. The golden age of the Modern novel came only later. Among the most important Arabic writers we should mention Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 won the Nobel Price for Literature.