Arabic is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages with at least 400 million speakers, including 200 million native speakers and 200 million to 250 million non-native speakers.Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) serves as the formal language for government, legal matters and education, and it is widely used in international and religious contexts. Additionally, more than 25 dialects are spoken primarily across the Middle East and North Africa.Every year on December 18, the United Nations commemorates World Arabic Language Day, celebrating Arabic as “the pillar of the cultural diversity of humanity”. The date was chosen to mark the day in 1973 on which the UN General Assembly adopted Arabic as one of its six official languages.In the following visual explainer, Al Jazeera lists some of the most common words in today’s English language that originated from Arabic or passed through Arabic before reaching English. (Al Jazeera)How Arabic words entered other languagesAs the most spoken of the Semitic languages, a group of languages that originated across Southwest Asia and Africa, Arabic has influenced societies and other languages for centuries.Linguists say the presence of Arabic words in other languages reflects long histories of contact through trade, scholarship and cultural exchange.English, Spanish, French, Turkish and many other languages across the globe have borrowed hundreds to thousands of words from Arabic that are used in everyday language.Muntasir Al Hamad, a linguist and professor of Arabic at Qatar University, says this type of borrowing is a “natural phenomenon” and languages ha …
