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82-621: The Alawite State ( Arabic : دولة جبل العلويين , Dawlat Jabal al-‘Alawiyyīn ; French : État des Alaouites ), initially named the Territory of the Alawites ( French : territoire des Alaouites ), after the locally-dominant Alawites from its inception until its integration to the Syrian Federation in 1922, was a French mandate territory on the coast of present-day Syria after World War I . The French Mandate from

164-567: A "Territory of the Alawis" was created in the coastal and mountain country, comprising Alawi villages; the French justified this separation by citing the "backwardness" of the mountain-dwellers, religiously distinct from the surrounding Sunni population. The division intended to protect the Alawi people from more-powerful majorities. After the relative independence of Faisal I's rule, French colonialism

246-563: A 1949 military coup). The Syrian army was dominated by recruits from Alawite, Druze and rural Kurdish Sunni communities, a holdover from the French Mandate Levant Army (which became the Syrian army after independence). Beginning after the 1949 coup, Alawites dominated the officer and governmental corps during the 1960s. Former president Hafez Asad and his son, Bashar (the current president), are of Alawite descent. As

328-575: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

410-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

492-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

574-568: A group of Syrian nationalists led by Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar and spread to the states of Aleppo and Damascus. Lasting from July 1925 to June 1927, it was an anti-French, anti-imperialist response to five years of French rule; to the Druze it was not a movement toward Syrian unity, but simply a protest against French rule. The rural Alawite territory was largely uninvolved in the Great Revolt. The French had favoured religious minorities such as

656-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

738-690: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

820-816: A result of the Syrian civil war , in 2012 there was speculation of the possibility of reprisals against the Alawites leading to the re-creation of the Alawite State as a haven for Bashar al-Assad and government leaders if Damascus fell. King Abdullah II of Jordan called it the "worst-case" scenario in the conflict, fearing a domino effect: fragmentation of the country along sectarian lines, with region-wide consequences. Arabic language Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] )

902-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

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984-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

1066-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

1148-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

1230-609: A unified voice. This was attributed to the peasant status of most Alawites, "exploited by a predominantly Sunni landowning class resident in Latakia and Hama ". There was also a great deal of factionalism amongst the Alawite tribes, and the Alawite State was incorporated into Syria with little organised resistance. By 1939 the Nationalist Bloc party fell out of favour with the Syrian people because of its failure to increase

1312-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

1394-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

1476-409: A wife of his father. This act gained him a local reputation as a rebel. After his father's death, he built a shrine for him and reportedly performed miracles at the site, according to local legend. In 1918 the French occupied the Syrian coast and began to move into the interior. On 15 December 1918, Saleh al-Ali called for a meeting of prominent Alawi notables in the town of Sheikh Badr. Al-Ali alerted

1558-737: Is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

1640-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

1722-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

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1804-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

1886-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

1968-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

2050-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

2132-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

2214-781: Is preserved in the Turkish ATASE military archives in Ankara. In November 1920, General Henri Gouraud mounted a full-fledged campaign against Saleh al-Ali's forces in the An-Nusayriyah Mountains . They entered al-Ali's village of Ash-Shaykh Badr and arrested many Alawi notables. Al-Ali fled to the north, but a large French force overran his positions and al-Ali went into hiding. A French court-martial convened in Latakia and sentenced him to death in absentia . Al-Ali remained in hiding until General Gouraud issued

2296-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

2378-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

2460-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

2542-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

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2624-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

2706-719: The Arab Kingdom of Syria under King Faisal I on 7 March 1920. The Arab Kingdom of Syria was initially supported by the British , despite French protests. The British withdrew support, and on 5 May 1920 the Allied Supreme Council published a Mandate for "Syria and the Lebanon " to the French Republic , with French and Arabic as the official languages. General Gouraud was appointed high commissioner of

2788-708: The League of Nations lasted from 1920 to 1946. The use of "Alawite", instead of "Nusayri", was advocated by the French early in the Mandate period and referred to a member of the Alawite faith . In 1920, the French-named "Alawite Territory" was home to a large population of Alawites. The region is coastal and mountainous, home to a predominantly-rural, heterogeneous population. During the French Mandate period,

2870-721: The Third Republic in June 1940 and the French surrender to the Axis powers , Vichy France controlled Syria until Britain and Free France seized the country (and Lebanon) in July 1941. In 1942, the Latakia and Druze regions were returned to Syrian control. By the end of the war, Arab nationalists in Syria were ready to make another play for power. The French left Syria in 1946 and the new, independent government lasted for three years (until

2952-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

3034-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

3116-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

3198-800: The "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn ( c.  8th century ), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi , is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots ; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations —later called taqālīb ( تقاليب ) — calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal ( مستعمَل ) and those that are not used muhmal ( مُهمَل ). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots. Salih al-Ali Saleh al-Ali or Shaykh Saleh Ahmad al-Ali ( Arabic : صالح العلي ; 1883 – 13 April 1950)

3280-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

3362-505: The 26 October elections). The Alawite State, insulated from nationalist tendencies, elected 10 pro-French representatives to its 12-person council after a 77-percent voter turnout in the primary elections. Such numbers were not seen in the nationalist Damascus and Aleppo . The Alawi preferred to be grouped with the territories of Lebanon, in contrast to Sunnis and Christians populations demanding Syrian unity. The majority of French support in these first elections came from rural populations, whom

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3444-519: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

3526-834: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

3608-547: The Alawi people were uninterested in the Great Revolt: The Alawite State was run by a succession of French governors from 1920 to 1936: The Sunni landowners, primarily living in the province's cities, were supporters of Syrian unity; however, the French were supported by the rural Alawite communities to whom they catered. In 1930 the Alawite State was renamed as the Government of Latakia,

3690-431: The Druze and the Alawi, attempting to isolate them from mainstream nationalist culture. Many young men from rural Alawi communities joined the French troops, enlisting in the troupes speciales (part of the French forces in Syria at the time) for social advancement. These troops, regional forces recruited from minority populations, were often used to suppress civil disorders. Itamar Rabinovich proposed three reasons why

3772-447: The French administration instituted an elected government made up of councils of representative of the states of Aleppo , Damascus and the Alawite territory. In June 1923 the French administration, headed by General Maxime Weygand , allowed individual states to elect their own representative councils. The primary election, a contest between French officials and the nationalists, was considered fraudulent by Syrians (many of whom boycotted

3854-516: The French after they conquered Damascus , defeating a makeshift army at the Battle of Maysalun on 24 July 1920. Around this time al-Ali began collaborating, through Ibrahim Hananu 's meditation, with Turkish Kemalist forces fighting the French occupation in southern Anatolia. A letter addressed directly to Mustafa Kemal in January 1921 asking for weapons for their common "jihad" against the French

3936-706: The French had primarily benefited. On 1 January 1925, the State of Syria was born from a French merger of the States of Damascus and Aleppo. Lebanon and the Alawi State were not included. Perhaps inspired by the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1921), the Great Syrian Revolt began in the countryside of Jabal al-Druze . Led by Sultan al-Atrash as a Druze uprising, the movement was adopted by

4018-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

4100-690: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

4182-576: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

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4264-441: The Syrian territories and commander-in-chief of French forces. The population of Lebanon was pro-French; that of Syria was anti-French, with a pan-Arab nationalistic bent . The French insisted that the Mandate was not "inconsistent" with Syrian self-government; Syrians were forced to accept the mandate when King Faisal left the country (under pressure from France) in July 1920, after Great Britain withdrew support for his rule in

4346-502: The attendees that the French had occupied the Syrian coast with the intention of separating the region from the rest of the country, and urged them to revolt and expel the French from Syria. When the French authorities heard of the meeting, they sent a force from Al-Qadmus to the town of Sheikh Badr in order to arrest Saleh al-Ali. Al-Ali and his men ambushed the force at the village of Niha, west of Wadi al-Oyoun . The French forces were defeated and suffered more than 35 casualties. After

4428-486: The autonomy of the Syrian government from French influence. Prime Minister Jamil Mardam resigned at the end of 1938; the French filled the power vacuum, dissolving Parliament, suppressing Syrian nationalism and increasing the autonomy of the French-supporting Alawite and Druze territories (thwarting Syrian unification). World War II established a strong British presence in Syria. After the fall of

4510-574: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

4592-587: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

4674-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

4756-431: The face of French claims. At the time, the French rejected native outcry for the unification of Syria. In early September 1920, the French divided the territories of their mandate based on heterogeneous population to grant local autonomy to demographic regions. Some argue that the French acted to intentionally divide the population, limiting the spread of "the urban contagion of nationalist agitation". On 2 September 1920

4838-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

4920-510: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

5002-420: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

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5084-513: The initial victory, al-Ali started to organize his rebels into a disciplined force, with its own general command and military ranks. The army was supported by the local population, and some women supplied water and food and replaced the men at work in the fields. Al-Ali also allied himself with the rebellion of Ibrahim Hananu in Aleppo, the uprising in Talkalakh by the Dandashi tribe and the revolt in Antioch by Subhi Barakat . He also received funds and arms from Kemal Atatürk of Turkey which

5166-558: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

5248-550: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

5330-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

5412-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

5494-624: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

5576-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

5658-418: The only concession by the French to Arab nationalists until 1936. On 3 December 1936 (becoming effective in 1937), the Alawite state was incorporated into Syrian Republic as a concession by the French to the Nationalist Bloc (the ruling party of the semi-autonomous Syrian government). There was a great deal of Alawite separatist sentiment in the region, but their political views could not be coordinated into

5740-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

5822-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

5904-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

5986-450: The society was divided by religion and geography; the landowning families and 80 percent of the population of the port city of Latakia were Sunni Muslim . About 12 percent were Shia Kurds from the Feyli tribe who had migrated from Ottoman Iraq . More than 90 percent of the province's population was rural, and 82 percent were Alawites . The Alawite State bordered Greater Lebanon on

6068-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

6150-715: The south; the northern border was with the Sanjak of Alexandretta , where Alawites made up a large portion of the population. To the west was the Eastern Mediterranean . The eastern border with Syria ran roughly along the An-Nusayriyah Mountains and the Orontes River from north to south. The modern Latakia and Tartus Governorates roughly encompass the Alawite State. Both have majority Alawite populations; parts of modern-day Al-Suqaylabiyah , Masyaf , Talkalakh and Jisr ash-Shugur Districts also belonged to

6232-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

6314-593: The state. The defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I , with the Armistice of Mudros signed on 30 October 1918, brought on a scramble for control of the disintegrating empire's provinces. As of 1918, France occupied Lebanon and Syria , which was under the leadership of the Emir Faisal I . By 1920, a growing anti-French sentiment in the region led to the establishment of

6396-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

6478-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

6560-690: Was a Syrian leader who commanded the Syrian Revolt of 1919 , one of the first rebellions against the French mandate of Syria before the Great Syrian Revolt . Saleh al-Ali was born in 1883 to a family of Alawi notables from Al-Shaykh Badr , in the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range in northwest. He reportedly clashed with the Ottomans in 1918 before their withdrawal from Syria, killing two Ottoman soldiers who were harassing

6642-500: Was also at war with France at the time. In July 1919, in retaliation to French attacks against rebel positions, al-Ali attacked and occupied several Ismaili villages that were allied to the French. A truce was concluded between the two, but the French violated it by occupying and burning the village of Kaf al-Jaz. Al-Ali retaliated by attacking and occupying al-Qadmus from which the French conducted their military operations against him. The balance of power began to shift in favor of

6724-639: Was unwelcome. The divisions were thought to serve the interests of a Christian minority over a Muslim majority, favouring colonial rule and stifling dissent. Salih al-Ali led the Syrian Revolt of 1919 in the Alawi region east of the coastal city of Latakia . Al-Ali was primarily interested in protecting Alawite regions from external meddling. His rebellions were not motivated by nationalist movement; however, they identified with it to further Alawite autonomy. The rebels surrendered to French forces after two years of raiding French outposts in October 1921. In 1922,

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