The Script
Twenty-eight letters, written from right to left, that join up like cursive.
The Arabic script is the second most widely used writing system in the world, behind only the Latin alphabet. It is used not just for Arabic but, with modifications, for Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Kurdish, Uyghur, and historically dozens of other languages. Its core is small — only twenty-eight letters — but each letter takes different shapes depending on where it falls in a word, and short vowels are usually not written at all. For an English speaker meeting it for the first time, the difficulty is rarely the letters themselves. It is the discipline of reading without the vowels you are used to, and of letting your eye move right to left.
If you are reading this section cold, take the pages in order. Start with the alphabet at a glance to see all twenty-eight letters in one view. Then work through the individual letter pages as a reference, dipping in when a particular letter trips you up. How letters connect is the page most learners wish they had read first — Arabic is fundamentally a joined script, and the four positional forms (initial, medial, final, isolated) make sense only once you understand the joining rules. Diacritics covers the short-vowel marks you will see in the Quran, in children's books, and in dictionaries — and almost nowhere else. Handwriting shows how educated native speakers actually shape the letters when they write, which differs from print in small but important ways. Numerals sorts out the confusing fact that the digits we call "Arabic numerals" in English are not the digits used in most of the Arabic-speaking world today. Punctuation covers the comma, the question mark, and the other marks that mirror their Latin counterparts.