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Arabic

Quoting passages from Monotype on the Arabic scripts. Derived from Nabatean, an ancient Semitic script, Arabic script is an alphabet of 28 basic letters of which 25 are consonants, while three letters double as semi-vowels and long vowels. The overwhelmingly consonantal nature of the Arabic alphabet is well suited to the Semitic roots of the Arabic language. In fact, the writing systems of most Semitic languages (see also Hebrew&Syriac) follow the same basic model which can be traced back to Phoenician script. Written from right to left, Arabic is a cursive script in which most letters connect with their neighbors. Arabic script has no block letters, nor does it distinguish letters as upper or lower case. Instead, each letter can have up to four contextual forms: initial, medial, final and separate. When necessary, short vowels and consonant lengthening (gemination) can be indicated by means of small, unattached diacritic marks above and below the basic letters. However, it should be noted that the use of diacritics is usually restricted to Koranic, educational, poetic and unusually complex texts. For instance, diacritics almost never appear in newspapers. Although Arabic text flows in general from right to left, numbers, which are referred to as 'Indian numbers', are written from left to right. For this reason, Arabic script is sometimes described as bidirectional. Since the Nabatean language had fewer sounds than Arabic, the first forms of Arabic script suffered some deficiencies. The Arabic alphabet in its earliest stages consisted of only 15 consonant letters, many of which stood for more than one sound. With time, the sound represented by each letter was made unambiguous through the addition of dots, a distinctive feature borrowed from Syriac script. Also of great importance was the use of some letters to represent both consonants and long vowels. For instance, alef, originally used only for the glottal stop, began to be used also for the long vowel [a:]. Similarly, waw was used as both [w] and [u:]. At a later stage, small diacritics were added to represent short vowels as needed. As the repertoire of Arabic literary texts grew, these developments gained momentum. Even though Arabic script is best suited to Semitic languages, it is, or has been at one time, used to write the following languages which belong to other language families: Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Malay, Uighur, Hausa, Swahili, etc. In order to accommodate the non-Arabic sounds of these languages, new letters were formed through new combinations of dot diacritics and small appendages with basic Arabic symbols. While it is commonly known that the Latin script has been used for writing more languages than any other script, few recognize that Arabic script follows in second place. The global spread of Islam has been instrumental in the simultaneous spread of Arabic script. Because of the dominant role of calligraphy in Islamic arts, many diverse styles of Arabic script have flourished over the centuries. Among the best known of these calligraphic styles are Naskh, Kufi, Ruqaa, Nastaliq, Maghribi, Diwani and Thuluth.

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Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿