# There are more than 300 million Arabic speakers in the world
Arabic is the official language of the 22 countries that form the Arab League. There are more than 300 million Arabic speakers across the world, though they predominantly live in the region stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations (UN). Yet, in the UK, only one per cent of the adult population can hold a basic conversation in Arabic.
# Each region has its own spoken variety, and they are massively different
There's the Modern Standard Arabic ("MSA"), which is more or less uniform across all the Arab countries in books, newspapers, documents and solemn speeches, but each region has its own spoken variety, and they are massively different. Arabic is almost at a point at which the Latin language was in the tenth century or so, when it started to split to French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Galician and other Romance languages. People from Morocco and Yemen, for example, may have difficulty understanding each other if they speak the language that they are used to speak in their home towns to each other, but nevertheless I saw people from different Arab countries adapt and understand each other.
# Arabic is also an official language in several countries that don't have an Arab majority
In addition to being the official language in all the Arab countries, it is also an official language in several countries that don't have an Arab majority: Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea and Israel. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Because of how central it is to Islam, Arabic words can be found in languages spoken by all Muslims, far beyond the Arab countries. Arabic words can be found in many non-Arabic languages of Africa, like Swahili; in Turkish and other Turkic languages like Azeri, Tatar, Kazakh and Uzbek; in Persian, Pashto and other languages of Iran and Afghanistan; in Urdu, Punjabi and many languages of India; and even as far as Malaysian and Indonesian.
But before you start your adventure, how about understanding the Arabic language in the quickest way possible?
The Lebanese dialect of Arabic is similar to that spoken in Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, somewhat different to that spoken in Egypt, and very different to other forms of Arabic. As with all dialects of Arabic, the dialect is a spoken language only; the written language always conforms to standard Arabic.
Arabic is significantly different from English: different forms are used when addressing males, females and groups; plurals and verb conjugations are highly irregular and difficult to figure out from their roots; and the pronunciation includes some very difficult sounds. Lebanese, luckily, is a much-simplified from standard Arabic, and should not be overly difficult for the traveler.
Learning some basic Lebanese Arabic dialect expressions could always come in handy; however, knowing either English or French should be enough for a tourist visiting Lebanon, since many Lebanese people (especially the youth, particularly in Beirut) are trilingual.
For some Arabic sounds, there is no easy transliteration (and no single agreed transliteration). The pronunciation guide shown below is case sensitive; for example, 'th' is a different sound to 'Th' and 'TH'. Note that there is no such things as a diphthong in Arabic; instead, some consonants map to English diphthongs.
a
like 'a' in "apple"
i
like 'ee' in "cheese"
u
like 'oo' in "too"
o
like 'o' in "more"
e
like 'e' in "bed"
é
like 'ai' in "claire"
b
like 'b' in "bed"
t
like 't' in "top"
j
like 's' in "pleasure"
kh
like 'ch' in Scottish "loch" (or German "nach")
d
like 'd' in "mad"
r
like 'r' in "row"
z
like 'z' in "haze"
s
like 's' in "sing"
sh
like 'sh' in "sheep"
f
like 'f' in "fun"
k
like 'k' in "kitten"
l
like 'l' in "love"
m
like 'm' in "mother"
n
like 'n' in "nice"
h
like 'h' in "help"
w
like 'w' in "weight"
y
like 'y' in "yes"
The following 3 consonants are pronounced by rounding the mouth as you say them. You can get an approximate effect by accentuating them in the following pronunciations.
S
like 's' in "sorry"
D
like 'd' in "dot"
T
like 't' in "taught"
The following consonant is almost never pronounced in the Lebanese Arabic dialect but replaced with a glottal stop, which can also be represented by an apostrophe.
q
in regular arabic : like 'c' in "call" (with the back of the throat)
gh
like a French or German letter "r"
The following consonant (called "ha", which will be represented by the number 7), is similar to English "h" but stronger. It is pronounced deep in the throat, like the sound you make when breathing on a pair of glasses to clean them.
7
a little like a mixture of "h" and "kh"
2
a glottal stop (IPA: ʔ), or the constriction of the throat as between the syllables uh-oh, but in Arabic this is often found in strange places such as the beginning of a word. Known in Arabic as hamza ء
The following consonant (called "ayn", which we will be represented by the number 3), is very difficult to say. In English, the only time you will use the throat muscles used to say this letter is when you are throwing up; if that's how it feels, you're probably doing it right.
3
like the sound represented by "aargh"