February 13, 2019

Last week, in celebration of African American History Month, the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C., hosted an event called “Conversation on the Omar ibn Said Collection.” Omar ibn Said was a western African scholar who was captured and sold into slavery in the United States in the early 1800′s. Noted for his education and intelligence, Said—a Muslim who spoke Arabic—gained notoriety during his lifetime and wrote an autobiography in 1831.

Omar ibn Said in North Carolina in 1850. Credit: Yale University Beinecke Library (licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina is the only known memoir written in Arabic by a slave in the United States. The LOC’s Omar Ibn Said Collection includes the original manuscript of his autobiography, as well as texts written in Arabic by western African slaves held in countries other than the United States. The conversation on Said’s autobiography included an examination of Muslim communities in Africa and the people who continued to practice Islam after being forced into slavery.

Credit: © African American History Month

Omar ibn Said was born around 1770 in what is now Senegal. After years of schooling in Africa, he was enslaved and taken by ship to Charleston, South Carolina. Shortly after Said’s arrival in the United States, he escaped but was captured in North Carolina and briefly imprisoned. During his 16-day detainment, Said wrote in Arabic on the prison walls. His writing caught the attention of wealthy farmer James Owen, who purchased Said and apparently encouraged his literary efforts. Said then wrote his autobiography and many works related to the Qur’ān, the sacred book of the Muslims. Although highly critical of Christians who supported and participated in slavery, Said converted to Christianity during his captivity. He died in North Carolina in 1864. An English-language version of Said’s memoir was first published in 1925.

July 16, 2018

Persian, the official language of Iran, is called Farsi by its native Iranian speakers. The word Persian is often used by people outside of Iran to refer to this language. Accordingly, the word Persia itself comes from an outsider’s name (the Greek word Persis) for the historical Iranian region. The Persian language is written in a slightly modified Arabic script. The word Farsi looks like this: فارسی.

The Iranian flag flies over more than 80 million Farsi speakers. The inscription God Is Greatest appears in stylized Arabic 11 times on both the green stripe and the red stripe of the flag. The white stripe bears the coat of arms, which is the word Allah. Credit: © Grebeshkov Maxim, Shutterstock

Ancient Persia was centered in part of what is now the countries of Iran and Afghanistan. Thousands of years ago, the Persian Empire came to rule most of southwestern Asia and parts of Europe and Africa. The ancient Persians spoke a language they called Aryan (now usually called Old Persian). Aryan is also the name of Iran’s dominant ethnic group. Indeed, the name Iran means Land of the Aryans. About 2,500 years ago, Old Persian was first written in the Cuneiform script. By about A.D. 250, Persian scribes were using an Aramaic script. By A.D. 400, the people spoke Middle Persian, or Pahlavi. Scholars developed an advanced alphabet of 48 letters, each representing a different sound. In the mid-600’s, however, Muslim Arabs conquered what is now Iran and imposed their religion and form of writing.

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Iran. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

Modern Persian belongs to the extensive Indo-European family of languages, to which belong nearly all the languages of Europe and many of the languages of southern and southwestern Asia. The commonalities of such languages become apparent in the origins of a number of words. For example, the English word mother is madre in Spanish and madder in Persian. Many similarities also exist between Old Persian and Sanskrit, the mother tongue of many modern languages of India. Persian shares much vocabulary with Arabic. Many modern and technical Persian terms are taken from English, French, and German.

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Persian, or Farsi, is one of many Indo-European languages. Credit: WORLD BOOK diagram

The modern Persian alphabet has 32 letters, including 4 symbols that represent sounds not heard in Arabic. Like Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu, Persian is written from right to left. Sentences are formed with a subject-object-verb structure. Verbs frequently appear as the last word in a sentence.

Though the Persian language uses Arabic script, there is no p sound in Arabic. The influence of Arabic rendered Persian p’s as f’s. Accordingly, the southwestern Iranian province of Pars—historically a center of Persian culture and learning—became rendered as Fars. The Iranian language was named for its origins in Pars, and the name Parsi was Arabicized as Farsi.

Today, Persian has a number of dialects—that is, distinct forms of the language spoken by certain population groups. Farsi—the official language of Iran—is the most widely spoken dialect. Persian dialects are also spoken in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and parts of other southwestern Asian countries. Persian is also spoken in the United States, where Los Angeles in particular is a hub for Persian speakers. The Dari language in Afghanistan is quite similar to Persian and is understood in Iran. In Tajikistan, the people speak a variety of Persian called Tajik or Tajiki.

Linguists consider Persian not terribly difficult to learn. For instance, it has no articles (such as a, an, or the in English), and its nouns have no gender. However, it can take lots of practice to master the language’s frequent use of guttural (throat-formed) sounds, such as gh and kh. Speakers of Persian consider their language to be a sweet-sounding one that lends itself to song and recitations of poetry.

A number of Persian or Persian-influenced words are part of an English speaker’s everyday vocabulary, particularly when it comes to food. These words include candy, lemon, pistachio, saffron, soup, and spinach. New students of the Persian language may chuckle upon learning that barf falls from the sky in the mountains above Tehran! But the word simply means snow.

June 18, 2018

Malay is the language of a large group of people in Southeast Asia. The language is spoken by about 13.5 million in Malaysia, plus millions of other people who live in nearby Brunei, Indonesia, and Singapore. Malay belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian, a language family that includes Javanese, Sundanese, and Tagalog.

The flag of Malaysia flies over some 13.5 million Malay speakers. Credit: © PhotoRoman/Shutterstock

The Malay language has numerous dialects. The official language of Malaysia, Bahasa Malaysia, is based largely on the Malay dialect of Johor, a southern state in Peninsular Malaysia. The official language of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, is based on the dialect used in the Riau Islands of Indonesia. Because of the similarities between the language used in Johor and in the nearby Riau Islands, the two forms are sometimes classified together as Johor-Riau Malay. Other dialects include Ambon Malay, Ternate Malay, and Banjar Malay. In most cases, speakers of different dialects can communicate with each other without great difficulty.

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Malaysia. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

The Malay language includes elements of Sanskrit and Arabic. These elements entered the language through contact with the culture and religions of India and the Arab world. Contact with traders from many countries led to the development of Bazaar Malay, which became widely spoken in trading communities.

The oldest known Malay text is a stone inscription from the early years of the Srivijaya Empire, a Malay kingdom that emerged in the late 600′s and lasted until the late 1300′s. The text is written in the Indian Pallava script, and it tells of military expeditions. Later Malay texts were written in Devanagari, an alphabet and script used to write Hindi. Beginning in the late 1300′s, many Malay literary and religious works were written in an Arabic-based script called Jawi or Classical Malay. Beginning in the 1500′s, Dutch and British influence in Malaysia led to the adoption of a Malay writing system using the Roman alphabet.

In the 1970’s, Indonesia and Malaysia adopted a common spelling system for their official languages. Since then, efforts have continued to further standardize the Malay language.

January 8, 2018

Arabic is one of the world’s most widely used languages. It is the official language of many Arab nations in the Middle East and northern Africa. Nearly 300 million people use Arabic on a daily basis, and it is a major language in international business and politics. Arabic, a unique language that is read right to left, is also the language of the Qur`ān, the sacred book of Islam. Last month, in December 2017, UNESCO—the United Nations (UN) Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—celebrated World Arabic Language Day. The annual celebration marks the UN’s adoption of Arabic as an official language on Dec. 18, 1973.

The official flag of the Arab League, an organization of Middle Eastern and African countries where Arabic is the main spoken language, is green with the emblem of the league in the center. The emblem features Arabic letters surrounded by a crescent, a yellow chain, and a white wreath. Credit: Flag Research Center

Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asian language family—that is, a group of languages descended from a common proto- or parent language. Other Afro-Asian languages include Amharic, used in Ethiopia; the Berber tongues of northern Africa; and the Hebrew language used by Jewish people throughout their history. Most of the people who speak Afro-Asian languages live in the Near East and in northern and northeastern Africa. Within the Afro-Asian family, Arabic is further categorized as a Semitic language. Semitic languages are some of the oldest in the world. Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Tigre, spoken in Eritrea, are the principal spoken Semitic languages today. No one knows when Arabic originally developed, but people of the Arabian Peninsula were the first to use it. During the 600’s, Islam spread throughout southwestern Asia and northern Africa, and Arabic also spread to those areas.

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The Arab world has both a political and a linguistic (language-related) definition. Politically, it includes many countries in the Middle East and across northern Africa. In a linguistic sense, the Arab world refers to those areas where most people speak Arabic as their native language. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, only three of which are vowels. In writing, vowels may be included, left out, or indicated by symbols called diacritics. Arabic is written from right to left across a page, or—to people accustomed to languages written from left to right—from the back of a book to the front. There is no distinction between upper- and lower-case letters. The Arabic script features prominently in Islamic art as calligraphy. Simple words, such as Monday (الإثْنَين, or al-ithnayn), can be beautiful simply written on a page. Some modern artists, such as the French-Tunisian eL Seed, have combined Arabic calligraphy with graffiti to create artworks called calligrafitti.

Students learn Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in a school in the United Kingdom. MSA is a modernized and simplified version of Arabic used to communicate across different dialects. Credit: © Getty Images

Many other languages, including some outside the Afro-Asian family, have borrowed from Arabic. For example, English has many words that developed from Arabic. Such words include alcohol, algebra, checkmate, coffee, cotton, ghoul, lemon, magazine, racquet, and tariff. Some words were adopted and modified for use in another language, such as Spanish, then adopted and further modified in English.

People use different forms of Arabic in different contexts (circumstances or environments) and for different purposes. Native Arab speakers grow up speaking one of many local dialects (varieties). Across the Arab world, some of these dialects are so different that their speakers cannot understand one another. Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur`ān, written down in the 600’s. Today, classical Arabic is more of a written language than a spoken one. It can be found, for example, in literature. Many Muslims learn classical Arabic in school and through study of the Qur`ān. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a modernized, simplified form of classical Arabic. Overall, it is similar to the classical form. MSA is used widely in broadcast and print media, motion pictures and television, modern literature, politics, mosques, and universities. People who speak different Arabic dialects may use MSA to communicate with one another.