Primary
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters.
Did You Know? Facts About the Arabic Language
Fascinating facts about the Arabic language, its letters, history and scholars.
12 facts3 stages
Tip for school assemblies: pick 5 to 7 facts from different subjects and start each one with "Did you know that...".
Facts for Primary students
Primary
World Arabic Language Day is celebrated every year on 18 December.
Primary
Arabic has many names for the lion, including layth, dirgham, ghadanfar and hizabr.
Primary
Six Arabic letters never join to the letter after them: ا، د، ذ، ر، ز، و.
Facts for Middle school students
Middle school
Around 400 million people speak Arabic, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Middle school
Arabic is called "the language of the ḍād" because the letter ض is one of its most distinctive sounds.
Middle school
Arabic is written from right to left, but numbers are written with the largest place value on the left.
Middle school
Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali is credited with the first marks for word endings; al-Khalil ibn Ahmad later developed them into today's vowel marks.
Middle school
Many English words came from Arabic, such as sugar (sukkar), coffee (qahwa) and cotton (qutn).
Facts for Secondary students
Secondary
The oldest known Arabic dictionary is "Kitab al-Ayn" by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi.
Secondary
Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi founded the science of Arabic prosody, the study of poetic metres.
Secondary
Arabic became one of the six official languages of the United Nations in 1973.