Where is Arabic spoken? A language

Brief

This lesson asks you to use what you hear to identify communities where Arabic is spoken and to find out about aspects of their cultures, linking them to your own experience. The museum offers a description of the language. The map of communities today, how many speak the language and their local festivals, your class brings. ¹

What do you hear about a community?

Notice what the speaker says about the place and its people, then ask what resembles your own community and what differs from it.

Go deeper

In the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence, as the record on Arabic in jurisprudence gives it, Arabic in the lexicon is eloquence and purity of speech, and the Arabic language is what the Arabs spoke, and the Qur'an came down in it; the jurists' usage stays within this meaning ². The encyclopaedia adds that 'ajamiyya is the opposite of Arabic, and that lugha, language, is wider, since it covers any speech by which a people express their aims ². The record on Arabic adds a short history: the language of the Arabian Peninsula that spread with the Islamic conquests until it became the language of learning, religion and literature from al-Andalus to Persia ³.

How do we know?

The meaning of the word comes from the jurists' encyclopaedia, which says the jurists' usage stays within it ². The short history of the language is cited in the record to Wikidata ³. Neither says where Arabic is spoken today or by how many people, so your class finds that in other sources and says where each fact came from.

Think about it

The lexicon says Arabic is what the Arabs spoke ², and the record on Arabic says it spread from the Arabian Peninsula to lands from al-Andalus to Persia ³. Give a reason for your answer: does a language belong only to the people who first spoke it?

Into the museum

Arabic in jurisprudence: the lexicon's meaning, the opposite word, the wider word for language, and what the jurists say of the merit of Arabic.
Arabic: a short history of the language and its spread.

Try this

Read the record on Arabic. Tell a classmate two sentences about the language, then compare with the language of your own community.