Alif

The first letter of the alphabet — a long vowel, a glottal-stop carrier, and a tall vertical stroke that does not connect to its left.

Sound

Alif on its own is a long vowel: aa, like the a in father held for an extra beat. It is not the short a of cat, and it is not a diphthong. The most common English mistake is to glide it — ay or ah-uh — instead of holding a single steady vowel.

Alif also has two non-vowel jobs. With a hamza on top (أ) or beneath (إ), it carries the glottal stop — the catch in the throat between the two vowels of English uh-oh. At the start of nearly every word that looks vowel-initial, that hamza is what is actually being pronounced; the alif is just its seat. In some grammatical positions alif is silent, most famously the alif al-fariqa written but not pronounced after the waw of plural verbs (كَتَبوا).

Near an emphatic consonant the quality of aa shifts toward the back of the mouth — closer to the a of father; elsewhere it can sit further forward, closer to the a of cat drawn out. Dialects vary in how far they push this distinction.

Forms

Connecting behavior

Alif is a non-connector to the left. It joins to the letter on its right when one is there, but never to the letter on its left. This means alif always breaks a word into two pieces: anything after it begins as if it were the start of a new word. There are six letters with this property in the alphabet (alif, daal, dhaal, raa, zaay, waw), and learning to see the breaks they create is one of the keys to reading connected Arabic.

Easy to confuse with

Visually, alif looks most like laam (ل). Both are tall vertical strokes. The distinguishing feature is the foot: laam has a hook curving leftward at the bottom in its isolated and final shapes; alif is a clean straight stroke. In handwriting that distinction is sometimes the only one available, so it pays to look for it.

Examples in common words

A note on handwriting

Alif by hand is a single quick downstroke, often with a slight rightward lean and sometimes a small flourish at the top. The hamza on alif (أ, إ) is routinely dropped in casual handwriting and even in much published prose; it is mandatory only in carefully vowelled text. Learners should expect to see احمد written for أحمد in everyday notes.