A Guide To The Arabic Alphabet

For anyone interested in Arabic, there’s one early challenge that can deter even the most intrepid learner: the Arabic alphabet, or Arabic abjad. It looks entirely different from the Latin alphabet used in English, the letter forms look different depending on where they appear in the word and the vowels are either indicated with diacritics or omitted entirely. Tackling the topic is certainly a challenge, but it’s the first step to mastering the Arabic alphabet as a whole.

To get you started, we put together this simple guide to the alphabet. Here we’ll explore what the letters look and sound like, and steps to conquer this tricky topic.

How Many Letters Are In The Arabic Alphabet?

The Arabic alphabet technically has 28 letters, all of which are consonants (though three of them can act as vowels in certain situations, similar to a Y in English). In addition, there are diacritics that can be used to indicate the vowels, but these aren’t part of the alphabet proper.

If you’ve ever heard that there are 30 letters in the Arabic alphabet, that person may be including two letters that aren’t officially included. First is the hamza, which is a glottal stop that has six different possible forms. The second is taa marbuuta, which can make either an “a” or “t” sound, is often used to designate a feminine noun and only ever appears at the end of a word.

The Arabic Alphabet And Its English Equivalents

Let’s start at the very beginning. Here are the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet in their most common order  (the order varies slightly depending on the variety being used). Remember, though, that Arabic is read from right to left, and so the alphabet is presented the same way starting with the letter alif and ending with yaa. Next to each Arabic letter is its name written in the Latin alphabet, and its romanized version appears below.

Note On Romanization: While the romanized versions of each letter given above are the most often used when trying to turn the Arabic alphabet into the Latin one, it should be mentioned there is no perfect one-to-one ration between the two alphabets. That means depending on the text you’re reading, the romanization might use slightly different letters to capture the same Arabic words. Some Arabic letters just don’t have English equivalents, so an approximation is used. This is most apparent with vowels, because short vowels in Arabic are usually not written out. When it’s romanized, then, someone has to decide which vowel to use so that someone reading it can determine how the word is pronounced.

How To Use The Arabic Alphabet

In the alphabet above, we gave the version of each Arabic letter written in its isolated version. To make things more complicated, the appearance of each letter differs depending on whether it’s at the beginning, middle or end of a word. Here is the full look at how these letters would look when used in writing.

It may seem overwhelming to memorize three shapes for each letter, but for the most part they work in predictable ways, preserving a flow that runs through Arabic words. For example, with ف (fa) above, you can see that the letter’s overall look is the same — a loop with a dot over it — but the line underneath changes depending on whether it’s at the beginning, middle or end of a word.

Common Questions About The Arabic Alphabet

How Do You Say The ABCs in Arabic?

For an English speaker raised on the alphabet song, it may be surprising that there’s no musical equivalent in Arabic. To say the ABCs, you just read the letter names out. You can find children’s alphabet songs for Arabic online if you think that will help with memorization, though.

What Are The Unfriendly Letters In Arabic?

As mentioned above, the letters of the Arabic alphabet tend to flow together and preserve a somewhat common line throughout the word. There are six letters, however, that “break” the flow of words by not connecting to the letters that precede them. These six are:

1. alif ( ا )
2. daal ( د )
3. thaal ( ذ )
4. raa ( ر )
5. zayn ( ز )
6. waaw ( و )

Which Arabic Letters Are Vowels?

A tricky topic for learners is Arabic vowels, because they are treated very differently from English vowels. There are two categories: long vowels (which are written in Arabic) and short vowels (which are optional).

There are three long vowels: alif ( ا ),  waaw ( و )  and yaa ( ي ). These make the ah, oo and ee sounds, respectively. All three of these also act as consonants, and become vowels only in specific scenarios.

There are more short vowels, which are indicated by the presence of diacritics, called harakat. These diacritics are optional, however, and are mostly used for beginner Arabic learners and in other special cases. They provide extra help for the reader to figure out what the pronunciation of a word would be.

• ـَ (Fatḥah) — a small dash above a letter, this indicates the “a” sound in “bat.” It can also indicate when an alif is meant to make the long A sound (ah) when it appears before the alif.
• ـِ (Kasrah) — appears below a vowel for the short I sound in “wit.” Or, when appearing before the “yaa,” it means there should be a long E sound (ee).
• ـُ (Ḍammah) — this small loop that appears above consonants can mean either the “u” sound in “foot” or, before a waaw, the “oo” sound in “dude.”
• ـْـ (Sukūn) — this small round shape above a consonant means that it is not followed by a vowel sound.
• آ (Maddah) — this tilde-looking diacritic is shown with an alif because that’s the only letter it can be paired with, because it is a glottal stop followed by the long A sound.
• ـٌ  ـٍ  ـً (Tanwin) — these three diacritics are all part of the same category, indicating (from left to right) -an, -in and -un sounds.
• ـّـ (Shaddah) — this small w is the only harakat that is actually used frequently, because it indicates a vowel sound should be doubled, and without it there can be some confusion as to what the word is.

What Are The Arabic Numbers?

You may already know that the numbers used in English — and many other languages — are based on the Arabic numerals: 1, 2, 3 and so on. While Arabic gave them their name, they are more accurately called Western Arabic numerals, because they differ from the Eastern Arabic numerals used in parts of the Arabic-speaking world including Iran and Afghanistan. Here you can compare their look.

Apart from their appearances, the numbers work in the same way, so 10 is ١٠, 37 is ٣٧ and 284 is ٢٨٤. Persian and Urdu also have their own numerals that are similar to the Eastern Arabic ones, except for a few differences.