Arabic voice-over agency

Which countries have Arabic as a national language?

Arabic is an official language in 25 sovereign states: Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

How many people speak Arabic as their first language?

As there are so many different varieties of Arabic, it’s hard to pin down just how many people speak it as their first language, but estimates range from 200 to 400 million. This makes it around the fifth or sixth most spoken language in the world.

Here are some recent figures for the top five most widely spoken dialects:

Egyptian Arabic – 55 million
Levantine Arabic – 21 million
Sudanese Arabic – 17 million
Mesopotamian Arabic – 15 million
Yemeni Arabic – 15 million

Did you know…

• Maltese is the only variety of modern Arabic that is officially recognised as a separate language, rather than an Arabic dialect. It is written with the Latin script.
• Arabic is written using the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script written from right to left. It uses Western rules of punctuation, but some of the symbols are inverted (eg commas) or reversed (eg question marks).
• The use of different types of Arabic for different social situations within communities is an example of diglossia. Diglossia is an interesting linguistic concept that usually applies to languages with ‘high’ (ie MSA) and ‘low’ (ie colloquial) varieties.
• Arabic has had a major influence on many European languages, particularly Spanish and Portuguese. Many Arabic words have been incorporated into the English language – mainly through the medium of other European languages – including alcohol, coffee, lemon, magazine and sofa.

The Middle Eastern economy

This diverse – and largely Arabic-speaking – part of the world is most famous for the production and export of oil. The oil industry has a major impact on the economies of all Middle Eastern countries, both through the revenue it generates and the movement of labour through these countries.

Due to the fluctuating price of oil, most Middle Eastern countries are also investing heavily in new industries, so that they are not overly reliant on the oil industry. These include banking, tourism, manufacturing and agriculture.

However, the instability caused by the 2010/2011 Arab Spring uprisings has put a major brake on development. A report from HSBC in October 2013 predicted that at the end of 2014, the GDP in the seven worst-hit countries – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Bahrain – would be 35% lower than if the uprisings had not happened.