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about a decade, the town was one of the western outposts of one of Palmyrean empress Zenobia in the Syrian Desert, who took advantage of a period of weakness and disorder in the Roman Empire to set up a shortlived state of her own.
The town was reincorporated into the Roman Empire under Emperor Aurelian in 272. The tetrarchy, a system of multiple up to four emperors introduced by Diocletian 284305, seems to have engaged in a substantial program of rebuilding and of road construction from Ancyra westwards to Germe and Dorylaeum now Eskiehir.
In its heyday, Roman Ancyra was a large market and trading center but it also functioned as a major administrative capital, where a high official ruled from the city's Praetorium, a large administrative palace or office. During the 3rd century, life in Ancyra, as in other Anatolian towns, seems to have become somewhat militarized in response to the invasions and instability of the town.
Byzantine history
The city is well known during the 4th century as a center of Chris |
tian activity see also below, due to frequent imperial visits, and through the letters of the pagan scholar Libanius. Bishop Marcellus of Ancyra and Basil of Ancyra were active in the theological controversies of their day, and the city was the site of no less than three church synods in 314, 358 and 375, the latter two in favor of Arianism.
The city was visited by Emperor Constans I r. 337350 in 347 and 350, Julian r. 361363 during his Persian campaign in 362, and Julian's successor Jovian r. 363364 in winter 363364 he entered his consulship while in the city. After Jovian's death soon after, Valentinian I r. 364375 was acclaimed emperor at Ancyra, and in the next year his brother Valens r. 364378 used Ancyra as his base against the usurper Procopius. When the province of Galatia was divided sometime in 39699, Ancyra remained the civil capital of Galatia I, as well as its ecclesiastical center metropolitan see. Emperor Arcadius r. 383408 frequently used the city as his summer residence, and some information |
about the ecclesiastical affairs of the city during the early 5th century is found in the works of Palladius of Galatia and Nilus of Galatia.
In 479, the rebel Marcian attacked the city, without being able to capture it. In 61011, Comentiolus, brother of Emperor Phocas r. 602610, launched his own unsuccessful rebellion in the city against Heraclius r. 610641. Ten years later, in 620 or more likely 622, it was captured by the Sassanid Persians during the ByzantineSassanid War of 602628. Although the city returned to Byzantine hands after the end of the war, the Persian presence left traces in the city's archeology, and likely began the process of its transformation from a late antique city to a medieval fortified settlement.
In 654, the city was captured for the first time by the Arabs of the Rashidun Caliphate, under Muawiyah, the future founder of the Umayyad Caliphate. At about the same time, the themes were established in Anatolia, and Ancyra became capital of the Opsician Theme, which was the largest a |
nd most important theme until it was split up under Emperor Constantine V r. 741775; Ancyra then became the capital of the new Bucellarian Theme. The city was captured at least temporarily by the Umayyad prince Maslama ibn Hisham in 73940, the last of the Umayyads' territorial gains from the Byzantine Empire. Ancyra was attacked without success by Abbasid forces in 776 and in 79899. In 805, Emperor Nikephoros I r. 802811 strengthened its fortifications, a fact which probably saved it from sack during the largescale invasion of Anatolia by Caliph Harun alRashid in the next year. Arab sources report that Harun and his successor alMa'mun r. 813833 took the city, but this information is later invention. In 838, however, during the Amorium campaign, the armies of Caliph alMu'tasim r. 833842 converged and met at the city; abandoned by its inhabitants, Ancara was razed to the ground, before the Arab armies went on to besiege and destroy Amorium. In 859, Emperor Michael III r. 842867 came to the city during a campaig |
n against the Arabs, and ordered its fortifications restored. In 872, the city was menaced, but not taken, by the Paulicians under Chrysocheir. The last Arab raid to reach the city was undertaken in 931, by the Abbasid governor of Tarsus, Thamal alDulafi, but the city again was not captured.
Ecclesiastical history
Early Christian martyrs of Ancyra, about whom little is known, included Proklos and Hilarios who were natives of the otherwise unknown nearby village of Kallippi, and suffered repression under the emperor Trajan 98117. In the 280s we hear of Philumenos, a Christian corn merchant from southern Anatolia, being captured and martyred in Ankara, and Eustathius.
As in other Roman towns, the reign of Diocletian marked the culmination of the persecution of the Christians. In 303, Ancyra was one of the towns where the coemperors Diocletian and his deputy Galerius launched their antiChristian persecution. In Ancyra, their first target was the 38yearold Bishop of the town, whose name was Clement. Clement's |
life describes how he was taken to Rome, then sent back, and forced to undergo many interrogations and hardship before he, and his brother, and various companions were put to death. The remains of the church of St. Clement can be found today in a building just off Iklar Caddesi in the Ulus district. Quite possibly this marks the site where Clement was originally buried. Four years later, a doctor of the town named Plato and his brother Antiochus also became celebrated martyrs under Galerius. Theodotus of Ancyra is also venerated as a saint.
However, the persecution proved unsuccessful and in 314 Ancyra was the center of an important council of the early church; its 25 disciplinary canons constitute one of the most important documents in the early history of the administration of the Sacrament of Penance. The synod also considered ecclesiastical policy for the reconstruction of the Christian Church after the persecutions, and in particular the treatment of lapsiChristians who had given in to forced paganism |
sacrifices to avoid martyrdom during these persecutions.
Though paganism was probably tottering in Ancyra in Clement's day, it may still have been the majority religion. Twenty years later, Christianity and monotheism had taken its place. Ancyra quickly turned into a Christian city, with a life dominated by monks and priests and theological disputes. The town council or senate gave way to the bishop as the main local figurehead. During the middle of the 4th century, Ancyra was involved in the complex theological disputes over the nature of Christ, and a form of Arianism seems to have originated there.
In 362363, Emperor Julian passed through Ancyra on his way to an illfated campaign against the Persians, and according to Christian sources, engaged in a persecution of various holy men. The stone base for a statue, with an inscription describing Julian as "Lord of the whole world from the British Ocean to the barbarian nations", can still be seen, built into the eastern side of the inner circuit of the walls |
of Ankara Castle. The Column of Julian which was erected in honor of the emperor's visit to the city in 362 still stands today. In 375, Arian bishops met at Ancyra and deposed several bishops, among them St. Gregory of Nyssa.
In the late 4th century, Ancyra became something of an imperial holiday resort. After Constantinople became the East Roman capital, emperors in the 4th and 5th centuries would retire from the humid summer weather on the Bosporus to the drier mountain atmosphere of Ancyra. Theodosius II 408450 kept his court in Ancyra in the summers. Laws issued in Ancyra testify to the time they spent there.
The Metropolis of Ancyra continued to be a residential see of the Eastern Orthodox Church until the 20th century, with about 40,000 faithful, mostly Turkishspeaking, but that situation ended as a result of the 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations. The earlier Armenian genocide put an end to the residential eparchy of Ancyra of the Armenian Catholic Church, which |
had been established in 1850. It is also a titular metropolis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Both the Ancient Byzantine Metropolitan archbishopric and the 'modern' Armenian eparchy are now listed by the Catholic Church as titular sees, with separate apostolic successions.
Seljuk and Ottoman history
After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Seljuk Turks overran much of Anatolia. By 1073, the Turkish settlers had reached the vicinity of Ancyra, and the city was captured shortly after, at the latest by the time of the rebellion of Nikephoros Melissenos in 1081. In 1101, when the Crusade under Raymond IV of Toulouse arrived, the city had been under Danishmend control for some time. The Crusaders captured the city, and handed it over to the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos r. 10811118. Byzantine rule did not last long, and the city was captured by the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum at some unknown point; in 1127, it returned to Danishmend control until 1143, when the Seljuks of Rum retook it. |
After the Battle of Kse Da in 1243, in which the Mongols defeated the Seljuks, most of Anatolia became part of the dominion of the Mongols. Taking advantage of Seljuk decline, a semireligious cast of craftsmen and trade people named Ahiler chose Angora as their independent citystate in 1290. Orhan I, the second Bey of the Ottoman Empire, captured the city in 1356. Timur defeated Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 and took the city, but in 1403 Angora was again under Ottoman control.
The Levant Company maintained a factory in the town from 1639 to 1768. In the 19th century, its population was estimated at 20,000 to 60,000. It was sacked by Egyptians under Ibrahim Pasha in 1832.
From 1867 to 1922, the city served as the capital of the Angora Vilayet, which included most of ancient Galatia.
Prior to World War I, the town had a British consulate and a population of around 28,000, roughly of whom were Christian.
Turkish republican capital
Following the Ottoman defeat in World War I, the Ottoman cap |
ital Constantinople modern Istanbul and much of Anatolia was occupied by the Allies, who planned to share these lands between Armenia, France, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, leaving for the Turks the core piece of land in central Anatolia. In response, the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement, Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, established the headquarters of his resistance movement in Angora in 1920. After the Turkish War of Independence was won and the Treaty of Svres was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne 1923, the Turkish nationalists replaced the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. A few days earlier, Angora had officially replaced Constantinople as the new Turkish capital city, on 13 October 1923, and Republican officials declared that the city's name is Ankara.
After Ankara became the capital of the newly founded Republic of Turkey, new development divided the city into an old section, called Ulus, and a new section, called Yeniehir. Ancient buildings reflecting Roman, Byz |
antine, and Ottoman history and narrow winding streets mark the old section. The new section, now centered on Kzlay Square, has the trappings of a more modern city wide streets, hotels, theaters, shopping malls, and highrises.
Government offices and foreign embassies are also located in the new section. Ankara has experienced a phenomenal growth since it was made Turkey's capital in 1923, when it was "a small town of no importance". In 1924, the year after the government had moved there, Ankara had about 35,000 residents. By 1927 there were 44,553 residents and by 1950 the population had grown to 286,781. Ankara continued to grow rapidly during the latter half of the 20th century and eventually outranked Izmir as Turkey's secondlargest city, after Istanbul. Ankara's urban population reached 4,587,558 in 2014, while the population of Ankara Province reached 5,150,072 in 2015.
After 1930, it became known officially in Western languages as Ankara. After the late 1930s the public stopped using the name "Angora" |
.
Presidential Palace of Turkey is situated in Ankara. This building serves as the main residence of the president.
Economy and infrastructure
The city has exported mohair from the Angora goat and Angora wool from the Angora rabbit internationally for centuries. In the 19th century, the city also exported substantial amounts of goat and cat skins, gum, wax, honey, berries, and madder root. It was connected to Istanbul by railway before the First World War, continuing to export mohair, wool, berries, and grain.
The Central Anatolia Region is one of the primary locations of grape and wine production in Turkey, and Ankara is particularly famous for its Kalecik Karas and Muscat grapes; and its Kavakldere wine, which is produced in the Kavakldere neighborhood within the ankaya district of the city. Ankara is also famous for its pears. Another renowned natural product of Ankara is its indigenous type of honey Ankara Bal which is known for its light color and is mostly produced by the Atatrk Forest Farm and Zoo |
in the Gazi district, and by other facilities in the Elmada, ubuk and Beypazar districts. ubuk1 and ubuk2 dams on the ubuk Brook in Ankara were among the first dams constructed in the Turkish Republic.
Ankara is the center of the stateowned and private Turkish defence and aerospace companies, where the industrial plants and headquarters of the Turkish Aerospace Industries, MKE, ASELSAN, HAVELSAN, ROKETSAN, FNSS, Nurol Makina, and numerous other firms are located. Exports to foreign countries from these defense and aerospace firms have steadily increased in the past decades. The IDEF in Ankara is one of the largest international expositions of the global arms industry. A number of the global automotive companies also have production facilities in Ankara, such as the German bus and truck manufacturer MAN SE. Ankara hosts the OSTIM Industrial Zone, Turkey's largest industrial park.
A large percentage of the complicated employment in Ankara is provided by the state institutions; such as the ministries, submini |
stries, and other administrative bodies of the Turkish government. There are also many foreign citizens working as diplomats or clerks in the embassies of their respective countries.
Geography
Ankara and its province are located in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. The ubuk Brook flows through the city center of Ankara. It is connected in the western suburbs of the city to the Ankara River, which is a tributary of the Sakarya River.
Climate
Ankara has a cold semiarid climate Kppen climate classification BSk. Under the Trewartha climate classification, Ankara has a temperate continental climate Dc. Due to its elevation and inland location, Ankara has cold and snowy winters, and hot and dry summers. Rainfall occurs mostly during the spring and autumn. The city lies in USDA Hardiness zone 7b, and its annual average precipitation is fairly low at , nevertheless precipitation can be observed throughout the year. Monthly mean temperatures range from in January to in July, with an annual mean of .
Demog |
raphics
Ankara had a population of 75,000 in 1927. As of 2019, Ankara Province has a population of 5,639,076.
When Ankara became the capital of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, it was designated as a planned city for 500,000 future inhabitants. During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the city grew in a planned and orderly pace. However, from the 1950s onward, the city grew much faster than envisioned, because unemployment and poverty forced people to migrate from the countryside into the city in order to seek a better standard of living. As a result, many illegal houses called gecekondu were built around the city, causing the unplanned and uncontrolled urban landscape of Ankara, as not enough planned housing could be built fast enough. Although precariously built, the vast majority of them have electricity, running water and modern household amenities.
Nevertheless, many of these gecekondus have been replaced by huge public housing projects in the form of tower blocks such as Elvankent, Eryaman and Gzelkent; and |
also as mass housing compounds for military and civil service accommodation. Although many gecekondus still remain, they too are gradually being replaced by mass housing compounds, as empty land plots in the city of Ankara for new construction projects are becoming impossible to find.
orum and Yozgat, which are located in Central Anatolia and whose population is decreasing, are the provinces with the highest net migration to Ankara. About one third of the Central Anatolia population of 15,608,868 people resides in Ankara.
The population of Ankara has a higher education level than the country average. According to 2008 data, 15yearshigher literacy rate creates 88 of the total provincial population 91 in men and 86 in women. This ratio was 83 for Turkey 88 males, 79 females. This difference is particularly evident in the university educated segment of the population. The ratio of university and high school graduates to total population is 10.6 in Ankara, while 5.4 in Turkey.
Transportation
The Electricity, |
Gas, Bus General Directorate EGO operates the Ankara Metro and other forms of public transportation. Ankara is served by a suburban rail named Ankaray A1 and three subway lines M1, M2, M3 of the Ankara Metro with about 300,000 total daily commuters, while an additional subway line M4 is under construction. A long gondola lift with four stations connects the district of entepe to the Yenimahalle metro station.
The Ankara Central Station is a major rail hub in Turkey. The Turkish State Railways operates passenger train service from Ankara to other major cities, such as Istanbul, Eskiehir, Balkesir, Ktahya, zmir, Kayseri, Adana, Kars, Elz, Malatya, Diyarbakr, Karabk, Zonguldak and Sivas. Commuter rail also runs between the stations of Sincan and Kaya. On 13 March 2009, the new Yksek Hzl Tren YHT highspeed rail service began operation between Ankara and Eskiehir. On 23 August 2011, another YHT highspeed line commercially started its service between Ankara and Konya. On 25 July 2014, the AnkaraIstanbul highspeed |
line of YHT entered service.
Esenboa International Airport, located in the northeast of the city, is Ankara's main airport.
Ankara public transportation statistics
The average amount of time people spend commuting on public transit in Ankara on a weekday is 71 minutes. 17 of public transit passengers, ride for more than two hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is sixteen minutes, while 28 of users wait for over twenty minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is , while 27 travel for over in a single direction.
Politics
Since 8 April 2019, the Mayor of Ankara is Mansur Yava from the Republican People's Party CHP, who won the mayoral election in 2019.
Ankara is politically a triple battleground between the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party AKP, the opposition Kemalist centerleft Republican People's Party CHP and the nationalist farright Nationalist Movement Party |
MHP. The province of Ankara is divided into 25 districts. The CHP's key and almost only political stronghold in Ankara lies within the central area of ankaya, which is the city's most populous district. While the CHP has always gained between 60 and 70 of the vote in ankaya since 2002, political support elsewhere throughout Ankara is minimal. The high population within ankaya, as well as Yenimahalle to an extent, has allowed the CHP to take overall second place behind the AKP in both local and general elections, with the MHP a close third, despite the fact that the MHP is politically stronger than the CHP in almost every other district. Overall, the AKP enjoys the most support throughout the city. The electorate of Ankara thus tend to vote in favor of the political right, far more so than the other main cities of Istanbul and zmir. In retrospect, the 201314 protests against the AKP government were particularly strong in Ankara, proving to be fatal on multiple occasions.The city suffered from a series of terro |
rist attacks in 2015 and 2016, most notably on 10 October 2015; 17 February 2016; 13 March 2016; and 15 July 2016.
Melih Gkek was the Metropolitan Mayor of Ankara between 1994 and 2017. Initially elected in the 1994 local elections, he was reelected in 1999, 2004 and 2009. In the 2014 local elections, Gkek stood for a fifth term. The MHP's metropolitan mayoral candidate for the 2009 local elections, Mansur Yava, stood as the CHP's candidate against Gkek in 2014. In a heavily controversial election, Gkek was declared the winner by just 1 ahead of Yava amid allegations of systematic electoral fraud. With the Supreme Electoral Council and courts rejecting his appeals, Yava declared his intention to take the irregularities to the European Court of Human Rights. Although Gkek was inaugurated for a fifth term, most election observers believe that Yava was the winner of the election. Gkek resigned on 28 October 2017 and was replaced by the former mayor of Sincan district, Mustafa Tuna; who was succeeded by Mansur Y |
ava of the CHP, the current Mayor of Ankara, elected in 2019.
Main sights
Ancientarcheological sites
Ankara Citadel
The foundations of the Ankara castle and citadel were laid by the Galatians on a prominent lava outcrop , and the rest was completed by the Romans. The Byzantines and Seljuks further made restorations and additions. The area around and inside the citadel, being the oldest part of Ankara, contains many fine examples of traditional architecture. There are also recreational areas to relax. Many restored traditional Turkish houses inside the citadel area have found new life as restaurants, serving local cuisine.
The citadel was depicted in various Turkish banknotes during 19271952 and 19831989.
Roman Theater
The remains, the stage, and the backstage of the Roman theater can be seen outside the castle. Roman statues that were found here are exhibited in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The seating area is still under excavation.
Temple of Augustus and Rome
The Augusteum, now known as the |
Temple of Augustus and Rome, was built 25 20 BC following the conquest of Central Anatolia by the Roman Empire. Ancyra then formed the capital of the new province of Galatia. After the death of Augustus in AD 14, a copy of the text of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti the Monumentum Ancyranum was inscribed on the interior of the temple's in Latin and a Greek translation on an exterior wall of the . The temple on the ancient acropolis of Ancyra was enlarged in the 2nd century and converted into a church in the 5th century. It is located in the Ulus quarter of the city. It was subsequently publicized by the Austrian ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in the 16th century.
Roman Baths
The Roman Baths of Ankara have all the typical features of a classical Roman bath complex a frigidarium cold room, a tepidarium warm room and a caldarium hot room. The baths were built during the reign of the Roman emperor Caracalla in the early 3rd century to honor Asclepios, the God of Medicine. Today, only the basement and first |
floors remain. It is situated in the Ulus quarter.
Roman Road
The Roman Road of Ankara or Cardo Maximus was found in 1995 by Turkish archeologist Cevdet Bayburtluolu. It is long and wide. Many ancient artifacts were discovered during the excavations along the road and most of them are displayed at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.
Column of Julian
The Column of Julian or Julianus, now in the Ulus district, was erected in honor of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate's visit to Ancyra in 362.
Mosques
Kocatepe Mosque
Kocatepe Mosque is the largest mosque in the city. Located in the Kocatepe quarter, it was constructed between 1967 and 1987 in classical Ottoman style with four minarets. Its size and prominent location have made it a landmark for the city.
Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque
Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque is located near the Presidency of Religious Affairs on the Eskiehir Road. Built in the Turkish neoclassical style, it is one of the largest new mosques in the city, completed and opened in 2013. |
It can accommodate 6 thousand people during general prayers, and up to 30 thousand people during funeral prayers. The mosque was decorated with Anatolian Seljuk style patterns.
Yeni Cenab Ahmet Mosque
It is the largest Ottoman mosque in Ankara and was built by the famous architect Sinan in the 16th century. The mimber pulpit and mihrap prayer niche are of white marble, and the mosque itself is of Ankara stone, an example of very fine workmanship.
Hac Bayram Mosque
This mosque, in the Ulus quarter next to the Temple of Augustus, was built in the early 15th century in Seljuk style by an unknown architect. It was subsequently restored by architect Mimar Sinan in the 16th century, with Ktahya tiles being added in the 18th century. The mosque was built in honor of Hac Bayram Veli, whose tomb is next to the mosque, two years before his death 142728. The usable space inside this mosque is on the first floor and on the second floor.
Ahi Elvan Mosque
It was founded in the Ulus quarter near the Ankara Citadel and |
was constructed by the Ahi fraternity during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The finely carved walnut mimber pulpit is of particular interest.
Aleddin Mosque
The Aleddin Mosque is the oldest mosque in Ankara. It has a carved walnut mimber, the inscription on which records that the mosque was completed in early AH 574 which corresponds to the summer of 1178 AD and was built by the Seljuk prince Muhiddin Mesud ah died 1204, the Bey of Ankara, who was the son of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Kl Arslan II reigned 11561192.
Modern monuments
Victory Monument
The Victory Monument Turkish Zafer Ant was crafted by Austrian sculptor Heinrich Krippel in 1925 and was erected in 1927 at Ulus Square. The monument is made of marble and bronze and features an equestrian statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, who wears a Republic era modern military uniform, with the rank Field Marshal.
Statue of Atatrk
Located at ZaferVictory Square Turkish Zafer Meydan, the marble and bronze statue was crafted by the renowned Italian s |
culptor Pietro Canonica in 1927 and depicts a standing Atatrk who wears a Republic era modern military uniform, with the rank Field Marshal.
Monument to a Secure, Confident Future
This monument, located in Gven Park near Kzlay Square, was erected in 1935 and bears Atatrk's advice to his people "Turk! Be proud, work hard, and believe in yourself."
The monument was depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 5 lira banknote of 19371952 and of the 1000 lira banknotes of 19391946.
Hatti Monument
Erected in 1978 at Shhiye Square, this impressive monument symbolizes the Hatti Sun Disc which was later adopted by the Hittites and commemorates Anatolia's earliest known civilization. The Hatti Sun Disc has been used in the previous logo of Ankara Metropolitan Municipality. It was also used in the previous logo of the Ministry of Culture Tourism.
Inns
Suluhan
Suluhan is a historical Inn in Ankara. It is also called the Hasanpaa Han. It is about southeast of Ulus Square and situated in the Hacdoan neighborhood. Accord |
ing to the vakfiye inscription of the building, the Ottoman era han was commissioned by Hasan Pasha, a regional beylerbey, and was constructed between 1508 and 1511, during the final years of the reign of Sultan Bayezid II.
There are 102 rooms now shops which face the two yards. In each room there is a window, a niche and a chimney.
engelhan Rahmi Ko Museum
engelhan Rahmi Ko Museum is a museum of industrial technology situated in engel Han, an Ottoman era Inn which was completed in 1523, during the early years of the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The exhibits include industrialtechnological artifacts from the 1850s onwards. There are also sections about Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey; Vehbi Ko, Rahmi Ko's father and one of the first industrialists of Turkey, and Ankara city.
Shopping
Foreign visitors to Ankara usually like to visit the old shops in krklar Yokuu Weavers' Road near Ulus, where myriad things ranging from traditional fabrics, handwoven carpets and leather produ |
cts can be found at bargain prices. Bakrclar ars Bazaar of Coppersmiths is particularly popular, and many interesting items, not just of copper, can be found here like jewelry, carpets, costumes, antiques and embroidery. Up the hill to the castle gate, there are many shops selling a huge and fresh collection of spices, dried fruits, nuts, and other produce.
Modern shopping areas are mostly found in Kzlay, or on Tunal Hilmi Avenue, including the modern mall of Karum named after the ancient Assyrian merchant colonies called Krum that were established in central Anatolia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC which is located towards the end of the Avenue; and in ankaya, the quarter with the highest elevation in the city. Atakule Tower next to Atrium Mall in ankaya has views over Ankara and also has a revolving restaurant at the top. The symbol of the Armada Shopping Mall is an anchor, and there's a large anchor monument at its entrance, as a reference to the ancient Greek name of the city, nkyra, which mea |
ns anchor. Likewise, the anchor monument is also related with the Spanish name of the mall, Armada, which means naval fleet.
As Ankara started expanding westward in the 1970s, several modern, suburbiastyle developments and minicities began to rise along the western highway, also known as the Eskiehir Road. The Armada, CEPA and Kentpark malls on the highway, the Galleria, Arcadium and Gordion in mitky, and a huge mall, Real in Bilkent Center, offer North American and European style shopping opportunities these places can be reached through the Eskiehir Highway. There is also the newly expanded ANKAmall at the outskirts, on the Istanbul Highway, which houses most of the wellknown international brands. This mall is the largest throughout the Ankara region. In 2014, a few more shopping malls were open in Ankara. They are Next Level and Taurus on the Boulevard of Mevlana also known as Konya Road.
Culture
The arts
Turkish State Opera and Ballet, the national directorate of opera and ballet companies of Turkey, |
has its headquarters in Ankara, and serves the city with three venues
Ankara Opera House Opera Sahnesi, also known as Byk Tiyatro is the largest of the three venues for opera and ballet in Ankara.
Music
Ankara is host to five classical music orchestras
Presidential Symphony Orchestra Turkish Presidential Symphony Orchestra
Bilkent Symphony Orchestra BSO is a major symphony orchestra of Turkey.
Hacettepe Symphony Orchestra was founded in 2003 and is conducted by Erol Erdin.
Bakent Oda Orkestras Chamber Orchestra of the Capital
There are four concert halls in the city
CSO Concert Hall
Bilkent Concert Hall is a performing arts center in Ankara. It is located in the Bilkent University campus.
MEB ura Salonu also known as the Festival Hall, It is noted for its tango performances.
ankaya ada Sanatlar Merkezi Concert Hall was founded in 1994.
The city has been host to several wellestablished, annual theater, music, film festivals
Ankara International Music Festival, a music festival organized in the Turkish |
capital presenting classical music and ballet programs.
Ankara also has a number of concert venues such as Eskiyeni, IF Performance Hall, Jolly Joker, Kite, Nefes Bar, Noxus Pub, Passage Pub and Route, which host the live performances and events of popular musicians.
Theater
The Turkish State Theatres also has its head office in Ankara and runs the following stages in the city
125. Yl ayyolu Sahnesi
Byk Tiyatro,
Kk Tiyatro,
inasi Sahnesi,
Akn Sahnesi,
Altnda Tiyatrosu,
rfan ahinba Atlye Sahnesi,
Oda Tiyatrosu,
Mahir Canova Sahnesi,
Muhsin Erturul Sahnesi.
In addition, the city is served by several private theater companies, among which Ankara Sanat Tiyatrosu, who have their own stage in the city center, is a notable example.
Museums
There are about 50 museums in the city.
Museum of Anatolian Civilizations
The Museum of Anatolian Civilizations Anadolu Medeniyetleri Mzesi is situated at the entrance of the Ankara Castle. It is an old 15th century bedesten covered bazaar that has been restored and now |
houses a collection of Paleolithic, Neolithic, Hatti, Hittite, Phrygian, Urartian and Roman works as well as a major section dedicated to Lydian treasures.
Antkabir
Antkabir is located on an imposing hill, which forms the Anttepe quarter of the city, where the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, stands. Completed in 1953, it is an impressive fusion of ancient and modern architectural styles. An adjacent museum houses a wax statue of Atatrk, his writings, letters and personal items, as well as an exhibition of photographs recording important moments in his life and during the establishment of the Republic. Antkabir is open every day, while the adjacent museum is open every day except Mondays.
Ankara Ethnography Museum
Ankara Ethnography Museum Etnorafya Mzesi is located opposite to the Ankara Opera House on Talat Paa Boulevard, in the Ulus district. There is a fine collection of folkloric items, as well as artifacts from the Seljuk and Ottoman periods. In front of the muse |
um building, there is a marble and bronze equestrian statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatrk who wears a Republic era modern military uniform, with the rank Field Marshal which was crafted in 1927 by the renowned Italian sculptor Pietro Canonica.
State Art and Sculpture Museum
The State Art and Sculpture Museum ResimHeykel Mzesi which opened to the public in 1980 is close to the Ethnography Museum and houses a rich collection of Turkish art from the late 19th century to the present day. There are also galleries which host guest exhibitions.
Cer Modern
Cer Modern is the modernarts museum of Ankara, inaugurated on 1 April 2010. It is situated in the renovated building of the historic TCDD Cer Atlyeleri, formerly a workshop of the Turkish State Railways. The museum incorporates the largest exhibition hall in Turkey. The museum holds periodic exhibitions of modern and contemporary art as well as hosting other contemporary arts events.
War of Independence Museum
The War of Independence Museum Kurtulu Sava Mzesi is loc |
ated on Ulus Square. It was originally the first Parliament building TBMM of the Republic of Turkey. The War of Independence was planned and directed here as recorded in various photographs and items presently on exhibition. In another display, wax figures of former presidents of the Republic of Turkey are on exhibit.
Mehmet Akif Literature Museum Library
The Mehmet Akif Literature Museum Library is an important literary museum and archive opened in 2011 and dedicated to Mehmet Akif Ersoy 18731936, the poet of the Turkish National Anthem.
TCDD Open Air Steam Locomotive Museum
The TCDD Open Air Steam Locomotive Museum is an openair museum which traces the history of steam locomotives.
Ankara Aviation Museum
Ankara Aviation Museum Hava Kuvvetleri Mzesi Komutanl is located near the Istanbul Road in Etimesgut. The museum opened to the public in September 1998. It is home to various missiles, avionics, aviation materials and aircraft that have served in the Turkish Air Force e.g. combat aircraft such as the F86 |
Sabre, F100 Super Sabre, F102 Delta Dagger, F104 Starfighter, F5 Freedom Fighter, F4 Phantom; and cargo planes such as the Transall C160. Also a Hungarian MiG21, a Pakistani MiG19, and a Bulgarian MiG17 are on display at the museum.
METU Science and Technology Museum
The METU Science and Technology Museum ODT Bilim ve Teknoloji Mzesi is located inside the Middle East Technical University campus.
Sports
As with all other cities of Turkey, football is the most popular sport in Ankara. The city has two football clubs competing in the Turkish Sper Lig Ankaragc, founded in 1910, is the oldest club in Ankara and is associated with Ankara's military arsenal manufacturing company MKE. They were the Turkish Cup winners in 1972 and 1981. Genlerbirlii, founded in 1923, are known as the Ankara Gale or the Poppies because of their colors red and black. They were the Turkish Cup winners in 1987 and 2001. Genlerbirlii's B team, Hacettepe S.K. formerly known as Genlerbirlii OFTA played in the Sper Lig but currently play |
s in the TFF Second League. A fourth team, Bykehir Belediye Ankaraspor, played in the Sper Lig until 2010, when they were expelled. The club was reconstituted in 2014 as Osmanlspor but have since returned to their old identity as Ankaraspor. Ankaraspor currently play in the TFF First League at the Osmanl Stadium in the Sincan district of Yenikent, outside the city center. Keirengc also currently play in the TFF First League.
Ankara has a large number of minor teams, playing at regional levels. In the TFF Second League Mamak FK in Mamak, Ankara Demirspor in ankaya, Etimesgut Belediyespor in Etimesgut; in the TFF Third League ankaya FK in Keiren; Altndaspor in Altnda; in the Amateur League Turanspor in Etimesgut, Trk Telekomspor owned by the phone company in Yenimahalle, ubukspor in ubuk, and Balumspor in Keiren.
In the Turkish Basketball League, Ankara is represented by Trk Telekom, whose home is the Ankara Arena, and CASA TED Kolejliler, whose home is the TOBB Sports Hall.
Halkbank Ankara is the leading do |
mestic powerhouse in men's volleyball, having won many championships and cups in the Turkish Men's Volleyball League and even the CEV Cup in 2013.
Ankara Buz Pateni Saray is where the ice skating and ice hockey competitions take place in the city.
There are many popular spots for skateboarding which is active in the city since the 1980s. Skaters in Ankara usually meet in the park near the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.
The 2012built THF Sport Hall hosts the Handball Super League and Women's Handball Super League matches scheduled in Ankara.
Parks
Ankara has many parks and open spaces mainly established in the early years of the Republic and well maintained and expanded thereafter. The most important of these parks are Genlik Park houses an amusement park with a large pond for rowing, the Botanical garden, Semenler Park, Anayasa Park, Kuulu Park famous for the swans received as a gift from the Chinese government, Abdi peki Park, Esertepe Park, Gven Park see above for the monument, Kurtulu Park has an |
iceskating rink, Altnpark also a prominent expositionfair area, Harikalar Diyar claimed to be Biggest Park of Europe inside city borders and Gksu Park. Dikmen Vadisi Dikmen Valley is a park and recreation area situated in ankaya district.
Genlik Park was depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 100 lira banknotes of 19521976.
Atatrk Forest Farm and Zoo Atatrk Orman iftlii is an expansive recreational farming area which houses a zoo, several small agricultural farms, greenhouses, restaurants, a dairy farm and a brewery. It is a pleasant place to spend a day with family, be it for having picnics, hiking, biking or simply enjoying good food and nature. There is also an exact replica of the house where Atatrk was born in 1881, in Thessaloniki, Greece. Visitors to the "iftlik" farm as it is affectionately called by Ankarans, can sample such famous products of the farm such as oldfashioned beer and ice cream, fresh dairy products and meat rollskebaps made on charcoal, at a traditional restaurant Merkez Lokantas, |
Central Restaurant, cafs and other establishments scattered around the farm.
Education
Universities
Ankara is noted, within Turkey, for the multitude of universities it is home to. These include the following, several of them being among the most reputable in the country
Ankara University
Atlm University
Bakent University
Bilkent University
ankaya University
Gazi University
Glhane Military Medical Academy
Hacettepe University
pek University
Middle East Technical University
TED University
TOBB University of Economics and Technology
Turkish Aeronautical Association University
Turkish Military Academy
Turkish National Police Academy
Ufuk University
Yldrm Beyazt University
Fauna
Angora cat
Ankara is home to a worldfamous domestic cat breed the Turkish Angora, called Ankara kedisi Ankara cat in Turkish. Turkish Angoras are one of the ancient, naturally occurring cat breeds, having originated in Ankara and its surrounding region in central Anatolia.
They mostly have a white, silky, medium to long length coa |
t, no undercoat and a fine bone structure. There seems to be a connection between the Angora Cats and Persians, and the Turkish Angora is also a distant cousin of the Turkish Van. Although they are known for their shimmery white coat, there are more than twenty varieties including black, blue and reddish fur. They come in tabby and tabbywhite, along with smoke varieties, and are in every color other than pointed, lavender, and cinnamon all of which would indicate breeding to an outcross.
Eyes may be blue, green, or amber, or even one blue and one amber or green. The W gene which is responsible for the white coat and blue eye is closely related to the hearing ability, and the presence of a blue eye can indicate that the cat is deaf to the side the blue eye is located. However, a great many blue and oddeyed white cats have normal hearing, and even deaf cats lead a very normal life if kept indoors.
Ears are pointed and large, eyes are almond shaped and the head is massive with a two plane profile. Another char |
acteristic is the tail, which is often kept parallel to the back.
Angora goat
The Angora goat is a breed of domestic goat that originated in Ankara and its surrounding region in central Anatolia.
This breed was first mentioned in the time of Moses, roughly in 1500 BC. The first Angora goats were brought to Europe by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, about 1554, but, like later imports, were not very successful. Angora goats were first introduced in the United States in 1849 by Dr. James P. Davis. Seven adult goats were a gift from Sultan Abdlmecid I in appreciation for his services and advice on the raising of cotton.
The fleece taken from an Angora goat is called mohair. A single goat produces between of hair per year. Angoras are shorn twice a year, unlike sheep, which are shorn only once. Angoras have high nutritional requirements due to their rapid hair growth. A poor quality diet will curtail mohair development. The United States, Turkey, and South Africa are the top producers of mohair.
For a long p |
eriod of time, Angora goats were bred for their white coat. In 1998, the Colored Angora Goat Breeders Association was set up to promote breeding of colored Angoras. Today, Angora goats produce white, black deep black to greys and silver, red the color fades significantly as the goat gets older, and brownish fiber.
Angora goats were depicted on the reverse of the Turkish 50 lira banknotes of 19381952.
Angora rabbit
The Angora rabbit is a variety of domestic rabbit bred for its long, soft hair. The Angora is one of the oldest types of domestic rabbit, originating in Ankara and its surrounding region in central Anatolia, along with the Angora cat and Angora goat. The rabbits were popular pets with French royalty in the mid18th century, and spread to other parts of Europe by the end of the century. They first appeared in the United States in the early 20th century. They are bred largely for their long Angora wool, which may be removed by shearing, combing, or plucking gently pulling loose wool.
Angoras are b |
red mainly for their wool because it is silky and soft. They have a humorous appearance, as they oddly resemble a fur ball. Most are calm and docile but should be handled carefully. Grooming is necessary to prevent the fiber from matting and felting on the rabbit. A condition called "wool block" is common in Angora rabbits and should be treated quickly. Sometimes they are shorn in the summer as the long fur can cause the rabbits to overheat.
International relations
Twin towns and sister cities
Ankara is twinned with
Seoul, South Korea since 1971
Islamabad, Pakistan since 1982
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia since 1984
Beijing, China since 1990
Amman, Jordan since 1992
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan since 1992
Budapest, Hungary since 1992
Khartoum, Sudan since 1992
Moscow, Russia since 1992
Sofia, Bulgaria since 1992
Havana, Cuba since 1993
Kyiv, Ukraine since 1993
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan since 1994
Kuwait City, Kuwait since 1994
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1994
Tirana, Albania since 1995
Tbilisi, |
Georgia since 1996
Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia since 1997
Alanya, Turkey
Bucharest, Romania since 1998
Hanoi, Vietnam since 1998
Manama, Bahrain since 2000
Mogadishu, Somalia since 2000
Santiago, Chile since 2000
NurSultan, Kazakhstan since 2001
Dushanbe, Tajikistan since 2003
Kabul, Afghanistan since 2003
Ulan Bator, Mongolia since 2003
Cairo, Egypt since 2004
Chiinu, Moldova since 2004
Sana'a, Yemen since 2004
Tashkent, Uzbekistan since 2004
Pristina, Kosovo since 2005
Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia since 2005
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2005
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia since 2006
Minsk, Belarus since 2007
Zagreb, Croatia since 2008
Damascus, Syria since 2010
Bissau, GuineaBissau since 2011
Washington, D.C., USA since 2011
Bangkok, Thailand since 2012
Tehran, Iran since 2013
Doha, Qatar since 2016
Podgorica, Montenegro since 7 March 2019
North Nicosia, Northern Cyprus
Djibouti City, Djibouti since 2017
Partner cities
Skopje, North Macedonia since 1995
Vienna, Austria |
See also
Angora cat
Angora goat
Angora rabbit
Ankara Agreement
Ankara Arena
Ankara Central Station
Ankara Esenboa International Airport
Ankara Metro
Ankara Province
Ankara University
ATO Congresium
Basil of Ancyra
Battle of Ancyra
Battle of Ankara
Clement of Ancyra
Gemellus of Ancyra
History of Ankara
List of hospitals in Ankara Province
List of mayors of Ankara
List of municipalities in Ankara Province
List of districts of Ankara
List of people from Ankara
List of tallest buildings in Ankara
Marcellus of Ancyra
Monumentum Ancyranum
Nilus of Ancyra
Roman Baths of Ankara
Synod of Ancyra
Theodotus of Ancyra bishop
Theodotus of Ancyra martyr
Timeline of Ankara
Treaty of Ankara disambiguation
Victory Monument Ankara
Notes
References
43. iliki durumu evli izle
Attribution
Further reading
External links
Governorate of Ankara
Municipality of Ankara
GCatholic former and Latin titular see
GCatholic former and titular Armenian Catholic see
Ankara Development Agency
Esenboa International Airport
|
Capitals in Asia
Populated places in Ankara Province |
Arabic , or , or is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam. It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the Arabian Peninsula bounded by eastern Egypt in the west, Mesopotamia in the east, and the AntiLebanon mountains and northern Syria in the north, as perceived by ancient Greek geographers. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as "the eloquent Arabic" or simply .
Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. Arabic, in its |
Modern Standard Arabic form, is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory, the third most after English and French;
it is also the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and the Hadiths were written in Classical Arabic.
During the early Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in the Mediterranean region, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages have also borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languagesmainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, and Sicilianowing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arabized civilizations and the longlasting Muslim culture and Arabic language presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the AlAndalus era. The Maltese language is a Semitic language developed from a dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet. The Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have also acquired a significan |
t number of words of Arabic origin through contact with Ottoman Turkish.
Arabic has influenced many other languages around the globe throughout its history especially languages of Muslim cultures and countries that were conquered by Muslims. Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani Hindi and Urdu, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay Indonesian and Malaysian, Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia Hebrew and Hausa and some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Aramaic as well as Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Persian and to a lesser extent Turkish due to the Ottoman Empire, English and French due to their colonization of the Levant and other Semitic languages such as Abyssinian.
Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.9 billion Muslims, and Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combine |
d are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers native and nonnative in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic the fourth most useful language for business, after English, Standard Mandarin Chinese, and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography.
Classification
Arabic is usually, but not universally, classified as a Central Semitic language. It is related to languages in other subgroups of the Semitic language group Northwest Semitic, South Semitic, East Semitic, West Semitic, such as Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Canaanite, Amorite, Ammonite, Eblaite, epigraphic Ancient North Arabian, epigraphic Ancient South Arabian, Ethiopic, Modern South Arabian, an |
d numerous other dead and modern languages. Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language subgroups.
The Semitic languages changed a great deal between ProtoSemitic and the emergence of the Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languagesall maintained in Arabicinclude
The conversion of the suffixconjugated stative formation jalas into a past tense.
The conversion of the prefixconjugated preteritetense formation yajlis into a present tense.
The elimination of other prefixconjugated moodaspect forms e.g., a present tense formed by doubling the middle root, a perfect formed by infixing a after the first root consonant, probably a jussive formed by a stress shift in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefixconjugation forms e.g., u for indicative, a for subjunctive, no ending for jussive, an or anna for energetic.
The development of an internal passive.
There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern A |
rabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz. These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor, ProtoArabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for ProtoArabic
negative particles ; to Classical Arabic
Gpassive participle
prepositions and adverbs , , , ,
a subjunctive in
demonstratives
leveling of the allomorph of the feminine ending
complementizer and subordinator
the use of to introduce modal clauses
independent object pronoun in
vestiges of nunation
History
Old Arabic
Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family e.g. Southern Thamudic were spoken. It is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages nonCentral |
Semitic languages were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic. Finally, on the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B, Thamudic D, Safaitic, and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are in fact early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.
Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic" a collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic first emerged around the 1st century CE. Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qarya |
t AlFaw, in southern presentday Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as the conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum.
It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongsideand then gradually displacedepigraphic Ancient North Arabian ANA, which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after the towns where the inscriptions were discovered Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic. However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h. It has been argued that the h is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypo |
thesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to the fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic.The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm'allhe found in En Avdat, Israel, and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' alQays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolves into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria Zabad, Jabal 'Usays, Harran, Umm alJimaal. The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an are r |
eferred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical Arabic".
Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic
In late preIslamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in JudeoChristian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition Classical Arabic. This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Qur'an was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi.
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on t |
he Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the court of alra. During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabicwriting persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of nonstandardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax.
Standardization
Abu alAswad alDu'ali c. 603689 is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar, or annaw "the way", and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants nuqat li'jm "pointing for nonArabs" and indicate vocalization attashkil. AlKhalil ibn Ahmad alFarahidi 718 786 compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitb al'Ayn "The Book of the Letter ", and is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody. AlJahiz 776868 proposed to AlAkhfash alAkbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehens |
ive description of the arabiyya "Arabic", Sbawayhi's alKitb, is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the arabiyya.
Spread
Arabic spread with the spread of Islam. Following the early Muslim conquests, Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish. In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom.
By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and nonMuslims. For example, Maimonides, the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in JudeoArabicArabic written in Hebrew scriptincluding his famous The Guide for the Perplexed Dallat alirn.
Development
Ibn Jinni of Mosul, a pioneer in phonology, wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kit |
b AlMunif, Kitb AlMutasab, and .
Ibn Mada' of Cordoba 11161196 realized the overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by AlJahiz 200 years prior.
The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled , "Tongue of Arabs", a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290.
NeoArabic
Charles Ferguson's koine theory Ferguson 1959 claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad alJallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests Northern and Central AlJallad 2009. The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialect |
s arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA.
In around the 11th and 12th centuries in alAndalus, the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb.
Nahda
The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin, "Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to a wider audience."
In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali 1819, dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a alTahtawi pr |
oposed the establishment of in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted the need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and postindustrial age. In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Acadmie franaise were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus 1919, then in Cairo 1932, Baghdad 1948, Rabat 1960, Amman 1977, 1993, and Tunis 1993. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League. These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward the standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabicspeaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language. This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic.
From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial |
nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan.
Classical, Modern Standard and spoken Arabic
Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of a variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects, which are not necessarily mutually intelligible.
Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran, used from the period of PreIslamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians such as Sibawayh and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries such as the Lisn alArab.
Modern Standard Arabic MSA largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions |
and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and postindustrial era, especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschoolaged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars which became Romance languages in medieval and early modern Europe. This view though does not take into account the widespread use of Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of |
audiovisual communication in today's mass mediaa function Latin has never performed.
MSA is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.
Some of the differences between Classical Arabic CA and Modern Standard Arabic MSA are as follows
Certain grammatical constructions of CA that have no counterpart in any modern vernacular dialect e.g., the energetic mood are almost never used in Modern Standard Arabic.
Case distinctions are very rare in Arabic vernaculars. As a result, MSA is generally composed without case distinctions in mind, and the proper cases are added after the fact, when necessary. Because most case endings are noted using final short vowels, which are normally left unwritten in the Arabic script, it is unnecessary to det |
ermine the proper case of most words. The practical result of this is that MSA, like English and Standard Chinese, is written in a strongly determined word order and alternative orders that were used in CA for emphasis are rare. In addition, because of the lack of case marking in the spoken varieties, most speakers cannot consistently use the correct endings in extemporaneous speech. As a result, spoken MSA tends to drop or regularize the endings except when reading from a prepared text.
The numeral system in CA is complex and heavily tied in with the case system. This system is never used in MSA, even in the most formal of circumstances; instead, a significantly simplified system is used, approximating the system of the conservative spoken varieties.
MSA uses much Classical vocabulary e.g., 'to go' that is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA |
continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languagesnotice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation e.g., 'film' or 'democracy'.
However, the current preference is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations e.g., 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc., or to coin new words using forms within existing roots 'apoptosis', using the root mwt 'death' put into the Xth form, or 'university', based on 'to gather, unite'; 'republic', based on 'multitude'. An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse e.g., 'telephone' 'invisible caller in Sufism'; 'newspaper' 'palmleaf stalk'.
Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language and evolved from Classical Arabic. Colloquial Arabic has many regional v |
ariants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible, and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations.
The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows, as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising.
The only variety of modern Arabic to have acquired official language status is Maltese, which is spoken in predominantly Catholic Malta and written with the Latin script. It is descended from Classical Arabic through SiculoArabic, but is not mutually intelligible with any other variety of Arabic. Most linguists list it as a separate language rather than as a dialect of Arabic.
Even during Muhammad's lifetime |
, there were dialects of spoken Arabic. Muhammad spoke in the dialect of Mecca, in the western Arabian peninsula, and it was in this dialect that the Quran was written down. However, the dialects of the eastern Arabian peninsula were considered the most prestigious at the time, so the language of the Quran was ultimately converted to follow the eastern phonology. It is this phonology that underlies the modern pronunciation of Classical Arabic. The phonological differences between these two dialects account for some of the complexities of Arabic writing, most notably the writing of the glottal stop or hamzah which was preserved in the eastern dialects but lost in western speech and the use of representing a sound preserved in the western dialects but merged with in eastern speech.
Language and dialect
The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in di |
fferent social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, alhatif lexicographically, means the one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term alhatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their schooltaught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on the region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have subdialects of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese, many speakers codeswitch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their f |
amiliarity with other dialects via music or film.
The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese, Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a significant complicating factor A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all |
speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.
From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages. This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similarperhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages.
Influence of Arabic on other languages
The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries, because it is the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Quran. Arabic |
is also an important source of vocabulary for languages such as Amharic, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Chaldean, Chechen, Chittagonian, Croatian, Dagestani, Dhivehi, English, German, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Malay Malaysian and Indonesian, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Rohingya, Romance languages French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, etc. Saraiki, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken.Modern Hebrew has been also influenced by Arabic especially during the process of revival, as MSA was used as a source for modern Hebrew vocabulary and roots, as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang.
The Education Minister of France JeanMichel Blanquer has emphasized the learning and usage of Arabic in French schools.
In addition, English has many Arabic loanwords, some directly, but most via other Mediterranean langua |
ges. Examples of such words include admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, ghoul, hazard, jar, kismet, lemon, loofah, magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sumac, tariff, and zenith. Other languages such as Maltese and Kinubi derive ultimately from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammatical rules.
Terms borrowed range from religious terminology like Berber taallit, "prayer", from salat , academic terms like Uyghur mentiq, "logic", and economic items like English coffee to placeholders like Spanish fulano, "soandso", everyday terms like Hindustani lekin, "but", or Spanish taza and French tasse, meaning "cup", and expressions like Catalan a betzef, "galore, in quantity". Most Berber varieties such as Kabyle, along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as salat, "prayer", and imam, "prayer leader."
In languages not di |
rectly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly via other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic. For example, most Arabic loanwords in Hindustani and Turkish entered through Persian. Older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri. Most Arabic loanwords in Yoruba entered through Hausa.
Arabic words also made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. Variants of Arabic words such as kitb "book" have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders.
Since, throughout the Islamic world, Arabic occupied a position similar to that of Latin in Europe, many of the Arabic concepts in the fields of science, philosophy, commerce, etc. were coined from Arabic roots by nonnative Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian translators, and then found their way into other languages. This process of using Arabic roots, especially in Kurdish and Persian, to translate for |
eign concepts continued through to the 18th and 19th centuries, when swaths of Arabinhabited lands were under Ottoman rule.
Influence of other languages on Arabic
The most important sources of borrowings into preIslamic Arabic are from the related Semitic languages Aramaic, which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, and Ethiopic. In addition, many cultural, religious and political terms have entered Arabic from Iranian languages, notably Middle Persian, Parthian, and Classical Persian, and Hellenistic Greek kmiy has as origin the Greek khymia, meaning in that language the melting of metals; see Roger Dachez, Histoire de la Mdecine de l'Antiquit au XXe sicle, Tallandier, 2008, p. 251, alembic distiller from ambix cup, almanac climate from almenichiakon calendar. For the origin of the last three borrowed words, see AlfredLouis de Prmare, Foundations of Islam, Seuil, L'Univers Historique, 2002. Some Arabic borrowings from Semitic or Persi |
an languages are, as presented in De Prmare's abovecited book
madnahmedina , city or city square, a word of Aramaic origin madenta in which it means "a state".
jazrah , as in the wellknown form "AlJazeera," means "island" and has its origin in the Syriac gazarta.
lzaward is taken from Persian ljvard, the name of a blue stone, lapis lazuli. This word was borrowed in several European languages to mean light blue azure in English, azur in French and azul in Portuguese and Spanish.
A comprehensive overview of the influence of other languages on Arabic is found in Lucas Manfredi 2020.
Arabic alphabet and nationalism
There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to Romanize the language. Currently, the only language derived from Classical Arabic to use Latin script is Maltese.
Lebanon
The Beirut newspaper La Syrie pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin letters in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, a French Orientalis |
t, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at Romanization failed as the Academy and population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the Academy, mentioned that the movement to Romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon.
Said Akl created a Latinbased alphabet for Lebanese and used it in a newspaper he founded, Lebnaan, as well as in some books he wrote.
Egypt
After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and reemphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. There was also the idea of finding a way to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but this was seen as too complicated to use. A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea |
of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made it difficult for nonnative speakers to learn. Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization. The idea that Romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd AlAziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet. In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic alphabet had strong connections to Arab |
values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic alphabet Shrivtiel, 189 in Muslim societies.
The language of the Quran and its influence on poetry
The Quran introduced a new way of writing to the world. People began studying and applying the unique styles they learned from the Quran to not only their own writing, but also their culture. Writers studied the unique structure and format of the Quran in order to identify and apply the figurative devices and their impact on the reader.
Quran's figurative devices
The Quran inspired musicality in poetry through the internal rhythm of the verses. The arrangement of words, how certain sounds create harmony, and the agreement of rhymes create the sense of rhythm within each verse. At times, the chapters of the Quran only have the rhythm in common.
The repetition in the Quran introduced the true power and impact repetition can have in poetry. The repetition of certain words and phrases made them appear more firm and explicit in the Quran. The Quran uses c |
onstant metaphors of blindness and deafness to imply unbelief. Metaphors were not a new concept to poetry, however the strength of extended metaphors was. The explicit imagery in the Quran inspired many poets to include and focus on the feature in their own work. The poet ibn alMu'tazz wrote a book regarding the figures of speech inspired by his study of the Quran. Poet Badr Shakir alSayyab expresses his political opinion in his work through imagery inspired by the forms of more harsher imagery used in the Quran.
The Quran uses figurative devices in order to express the meaning in the most beautiful form possible. The study of the pauses in the Quran as well as other rhetoric allow it to be approached in a multiple ways.
Structure
Although the Quran is known for its fluency and harmony, the structure can be best described as not always being inherently chronological, but can also flow thematically instead the chapters in the Quran have segments that flow in chronological order, however segments can transitio |
n into other segments not related in chronology, but could be related in topic. The suras, also known as chapters of the Quran, are not placed in chronological order. The only constant in their structure is that the longest are placed first and shorter ones follow. The topics discussed in the chapters can also have no direct relation to each other as seen in many suras and can share in their sense of rhyme. The Quran introduces to poetry the idea of abandoning order and scattering narratives throughout the text. Harmony is also present in the sound of the Quran. The elongations and accents present in the Quran create a harmonious flow within the writing. Unique sound of the Quran recited, due to the accents, create a deeper level of understanding through a deeper emotional connection.
The Quran is written in a language that is simple and understandable by people. The simplicity of the writing inspired later poets to write in a more clear and clearcut style. The words of the Quran, although unchanged, are to |
this day understandable and frequently used in both formal and informal Arabic. The simplicity of the language makes memorizing and reciting the Quran a slightly easier task.
Culture and the Quran
The writer alKhattabi explains how culture is a required element to create a sense of art in work as well as understand it. He believes that the fluency and harmony which the Quran possess are not the only elements that make it beautiful and create a bond between the reader and the text. While a lot of poetry was deemed comparable to the Quran in that it is equal to or better than the composition of the Quran, a debate rose that such statements are not possible because humans are incapable of composing work comparable to the Quran.
Because the structure of the Quran made it difficult for a clear timeline to be seen, Hadith were the main source of chronological order. The Hadith were passed down from generation to generation and this tradition became a large resource for understanding the context. Poetry after the Q |
uran began possessing this element of tradition by including ambiguity and background information to be required to understand the meaning.
After the Quran came down to the people, the tradition of memorizing the verses became present. It is believed that the greater the amount of the Quran memorized, the greater the faith. As technology improved over time, hearing recitations of the Quran became more available as well as more tools to help memorize the verses.
The tradition of Love Poetry served as a symbolic representation of a Muslim's desire for a closer contact with their Lord.
While the influence of the Quran on Arabic poetry is explained and defended by numerous writers, some writers such as AlBaqillani believe that poetry and the Quran are in no conceivable way related due to the uniqueness of the Quran. Poetry's imperfections prove his points that they cannot be compared with the fluency the Quran holds.
Arabic and Islam
Classical Arabic is the language of poetry and literature including news; it |
is also mainly the language of the Quran. Classical Arabic is closely associated with the religion of Islam because the Quran was written in it. Most of the world's Muslims do not speak Classical Arabic as their native language, but many can read the Quranic script and recite the Quran. Among nonArab Muslims, translations of the Quran are most often accompanied by the original text. At present, Modern Standard Arabic MSA is also used in modernized versions of literary forms of the Quran.
Some Muslims present a monogenesis of languages and claim that the Arabic language was the language revealed by God for the benefit of mankind and the original language as a prototype system of symbolic communication, based upon its system of triconsonantal roots, spoken by man from which all other languages were derived, having first been corrupted. Judaism has a similar account with the Tower of Babel.
Dialects and descendants
Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken dialects of Arabic used throughout the |
Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the varieties within and outside of the Arabian peninsula, followed by that between sedentary varieties and the much more conservative Bedouin varieties. All the varieties outside of the Arabian peninsula which include the large majority of speakers have many features in common with each other that are not found in Classical Arabic. This has led researchers to postulate the existence of a prestige koine dialect in the one or two centuries immediately following the Arab conquest, whose features eventually spread to all newly conquered areas. These features are present to varying degrees inside the Arabian peninsula. Generally, the Arabian peninsula varieties have much more diversity than the nonpeninsula varieties, but these have been understudied.
Within the nonpeninsula varieties, the largest difference is between the nonEgyptian North African dialects especially Moroccan Arabic and the others. Moroccan Ara |
bic in particular is hardly comprehensible to Arabic speakers east of Libya although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Egyptian films and other media.
One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention or change of meaning of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fh and North African kayn all mean 'there is', and all come from Classical Arabic forms yakn, fhi, k'in respectively, but now sound very different.
Examples
Transcription is a broad IPA transcription, so minor differences were ignored for easier comparison. Also, the pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic differs significantly from region to region.
Koin
According to Charles A. Ferguson, the following are some of the cha |
racteristic features of the koin that underlies all the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice and together suggest the existence of the koine
Loss of the dual number except on nouns, with consistent plural agreement cf. feminine singular agreement in plural inanimates.
Change of a to i in many affixes e.g., nonpasttense prefixes ti yi ni; wi 'and'; il 'the'; feminine it in the construct state.
Loss of thirdweak verbs ending in w which merge with verbs ending in y.
Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., 'I untied' .
Conversion of separate words l 'to me', laka 'to you', etc. into indirectobject clitic suffixes.
Certain changes in the cardinal number system, e.g., 'five days' , where certain words have a special plural with prefixed t.
Loss of the feminine elative comparative.
Adjective plurals of the |
form 'big' .
Change of nisba suffix .
Certain lexical items, e.g., 'bring' 'come with'; 'see'; 'what' or similar 'which thing'; relative pronoun.
Merger of and .
Dialect groups
Egyptian Arabic is spoken by around 53 million people in Egypt 55 million worldwide. It is one of the most understood varieties of Arabic, due in large part to the widespread distribution of Egyptian films and television shows throughout the Arabicspeaking world
Levantine Arabic includes North Levantine Arabic, South Levantine Arabic and Cypriot Arabic. It is spoken by about 21 million people in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus and Turkey.
Lebanese Arabic is a variety of Levantine Arabic spoken primarily in Lebanon.
Jordanian Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by the population of the Kingdom of Jordan.
Palestinian Arabic is a name of several dialects of the subgroup of Levantine Arabic spoken by the Palestinians in Palestine, by Arab citizens of I |
srael and in most Palestinian populations around the world.
Samaritan Arabic, spoken by only several hundred in the Nablus region
Cypriot Maronite Arabic, spoken in Cyprus
Maghrebi Arabic, also called "Darija" spoken by about 70 million people in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It also forms the basis of Maltese via the extinct Sicilian Arabic dialect. Maghrebi Arabic is very hard to understand for Arabic speakers from the Mashriq or Mesopotamia, the most comprehensible being Libyan Arabic and the most difficult Moroccan Arabic. The others such as Algerian Arabic can be considered in between the two in terms of difficulty.
Libyan Arabic spoken in Libya and neighboring countries.
Tunisian Arabic spoken in Tunisia and Northeastern Algeria
Algerian Arabic spoken in Algeria
JudeoAlgerian Arabic was spoken by Jews in Algeria until 1962
Moroccan Arabic spoken in Morocco
Hassaniya Arabic 3 million speakers, spoken in Mauritania, Western Sahara, some parts of the Azawad in northern Mali, southern Morocc |
o and southwestern Algeria.
Andalusian Arabic, spoken in Spain until the 16th century.
SiculoArabic Sicilian Arabic, was spoken in Sicily and Malta between the end of the 9th century and the end of the 12th century and eventually evolved into the Maltese language.
Maltese, spoken on the island of Malta, is the only fully separate standardized language to have originated from an Arabic dialect the extinct SiculoArabic dialect, with independent literary norms. Maltese has evolved independently of Modern Standard Arabic and its varieties into a standardized language over the past 800 years in a gradual process of Latinisation. Maltese is therefore considered an exceptional descendant of Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Maltese is also different from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, Italian and Sicilian. It is also the only Semitic language written in the Latin script. In terms of basic ev |
eryday language, speakers of Maltese are reported to be able to understand less than a third of what is said to them in Tunisian Arabic, which is related to SiculoArabic, whereas speakers of Tunisian are able to understand about 40 of what is said to them in Maltese. This asymmetric intelligibility is considerably lower than the mutual intelligibility found between Maghrebi Arabic dialects. Maltese has its own dialects, with urban varieties of Maltese being closer to Standard Maltese than rural varieties.
Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken by about 41.2 million people in Iraq where it is called "Aamiyah", eastern Syria and southwestern Iran Khuzestan and in the southeastern of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeastern Anatolia Region
North Mesopotamian Arabic is a spoken north of the Hamrin Mountains in Iraq, in western Iran, northern Syria, and in southeastern Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean Region, Southeastern Anatolia Region, and southern Eastern Anatolia Region.
JudeoMesopotamian Arabic, also known |
as Iraqi Judeo Arabic and Yahudic, is a variety of Arabic spoken by Iraqi Jews of Mosul.
Baghdad Arabic is the Arabic dialect spoken in Baghdad, and the surrounding cities and it is a subvariety of Mesopotamian Arabic.
Baghdad Jewish Arabic is the dialect spoken by the Iraqi Jews of Baghdad.
South Mesopotamian Arabic Basrawi dialect is the dialect spoken in southern Iraq, such as Basra, Dhi Qar and Najaf.
Khuzestani Arabic is the dialect spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan. This dialect is a mix of Southen Mesopotamian Arabic and Gulf Arabic.
Khorasani Arabic spoken in the Iranian province of Khorasan.
Kuwaiti Arabic is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Kuwait.
Sudanese Arabic is spoken by 17 million people in Sudan and some parts of southern Egypt. Sudanese Arabic is quite distinct from the dialect of its neighbor to the north; rather, the Sudanese have a dialect similar to the Hejazi dialect.
Juba Arabic spoken in South Sudan and southern Sudan
Gulf Arabic, spoken by around four million people, p |
redominantly in Kuwait, Bahrain, some parts of Oman, eastern Saudi Arabia coastal areas and some parts of UAE and Qatar. Also spoken in Iran's Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. Although Gulf Arabic is spoken in Qatar, most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic Bedawi.
Omani Arabic, distinct from the Gulf Arabic of Eastern Arabia and Bahrain, spoken in Central Oman. With recent oil wealth and mobility has spread over other parts of the Sultanate.
Hadhrami Arabic, spoken by around 8 million people, predominantly in Hadhramaut, and in parts of the Arabian Peninsula, South and Southeast Asia, and East Africa by Hadhrami descendants.
Yemeni Arabic spoken in Yemen, and southern Saudi Arabia by 15 million people. Similar to Gulf Arabic.
Najdi Arabic, spoken by around 10 million people, mainly spoken in Najd, central and northern Saudi Arabia. Most Qatari citizens speak Najdi Arabic Bedawi.
Hejazi Arabic 6 million speakers, spoken in Hejaz, western Saudi Arabia
Saharan Arabic spoken in some parts of Algeria, Niger |
and Mali
Baharna Arabic 600,000 speakers, spoken by Bahrani Shiah in Bahrain and Qatif, the dialect exhibits many big differences from Gulf Arabic. It is also spoken to a lesser extent in Oman.
JudeoArabic dialects these are the dialects spoken by the Jews that had lived or continue to live in the Arab World. As Jewish migration to Israel took hold, the language did not thrive and is now considered endangered. Socalled Qltu Arabic.
Chadian Arabic, spoken in Chad, Sudan, some parts of South Sudan, Central African Republic, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon
Central Asian Arabic, spoken in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is highly endangered
Shirvani Arabic, spoken in Azerbaijan and Dagestan until the 1930s, now extinct.
Phonology
History
Of the 29 ProtoSemitic consonants, only one has been lost , which merged with , while became see Semitic languages. Various other consonants have changed their sound too, but have remained distinct. An original lenited to , and consistently attested in preIslamic G |
reek transcription of Arabic languages became palatalized to or by the time of the Quran and , , or after early Muslim conquests and in MSA see Arabic phonologyLocal variations for more detail. An original voiceless alveolar lateral fricative became . Its emphatic counterpart was considered by Arabs to be the most unusual sound in Arabic Hence the Classical Arabic's appellation or "language of the "; for most modern dialects, it has become an emphatic stop with loss of the laterality or with complete loss of any pharyngealization or velarization, . The classical pronunciation of pharyngealization still occurs in the Mehri language, and the similar sound without velarization, , exists in other Modern South Arabian languages.
Other changes may also have happened. Classical Arabic pronunciation is not thoroughly recorded and different reconstructions of the sound system of ProtoSemitic propose different phonetic values. One example is the emphatic consonants, which are pharyngealized in modern pronu |
nciations but may have been velarized in the eighth century and glottalized in ProtoSemitic.
Reduction of and between vowels occurs in a number of circumstances and is responsible for much of the complexity of thirdweak "defective" verbs. Early Akkadian transcriptions of Arabic names shows that this reduction had not yet occurred as of the early part of the 1st millennium BC.
The Classical Arabic language as recorded was a poetic koine that reflected a consciously archaizing dialect, chosen based on the tribes of the western part of the Arabian Peninsula, who spoke the most conservative variants of Arabic. Even at the time of Muhammed and before, other dialects existed with many more changes, including the loss of most glottal stops, the loss of case endings, the reduction of the diphthongs and into monophthongs , etc. Most of these changes are present in most or all modern varieties of Arabic.
An interesting feature of the writing system of the Quran and hence of Classical Arabic is that it contains c |
ertain features of Muhammad's native dialect of Mecca, corrected through diacritics into the forms of standard Classical Arabic. Among these features visible under the corrections are the loss of the glottal stop and a differing development of the reduction of certain final sequences containing Evidently, final became as in the Classical language, but final became a different sound, possibly rather than again in the Classical language. This is the apparent source of the alif maqrah 'restricted alif' where a final is reconstructed a letter that would normally indicate or some similar highvowel sound, but is taken in this context to be a logical variant of alif and represent the sound .
Although Classical Arabic was a unitary language and is now used in Quran, its pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country and from region to region within a country. It is influenced by colloquial dialects.
Literary Arabic
The "colloquial" spoken dialects of Arabic are learned at home and constitute the nat |
ive languages of Arabic speakers. "Formal" Modern Standard Arabic is learned at school; although many speakers have a nativelike command of the language, it is technically not the native language of any speakers. Both varieties can be both written and spoken, although the colloquial varieties are rarely written down and the formal variety is spoken mostly in formal circumstances, e.g., in radio and TV broadcasts, formal lectures, parliamentary discussions and to some extent between speakers of different colloquial dialects. Even when the literary language is spoken, however, it is normally only spoken in its pure form when reading a prepared text out loud and communication between speakers of different colloquial dialects. When speaking extemporaneously i.e. making up the language on the spot, as in a normal discussion among people, speakers tend to deviate somewhat from the strict literary language in the direction of the colloquial varieties. In fact, there is a continuous range of "inbetween" spoken variet |
ies from nearly pure Modern Standard Arabic MSA, to a form that still uses MSA grammar and vocabulary but with significant colloquial influence, to a form of the colloquial language that imports a number of words and grammatical constructions in MSA, to a form that is close to pure colloquial but with the "rough edges" the most noticeably "vulgar" or nonClassical aspects smoothed out, to pure colloquial. The particular variant or register used depends on the social class and education level of the speakers involved and the level of formality of the speech situation. Often it will vary within a single encounter, e.g., moving from nearly pure MSA to a more mixed language in the process of a radio interview, as the interviewee becomes more comfortable with the interviewer. This type of variation is characteristic of the diglossia that exists throughout the Arabicspeaking world.
Although Modern Standard Arabic MSA is a unitary language, its pronunciation varies somewhat from country to country and from region to |
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