English Literature and Language Review ISSN: 2412-1703 Vol. 1, No. 4, pp: 28-36, 2015 URL: http://arpgweb.com/?ic=journal&journal=9&info=aims *Corresponding Author 28 Academic Research Publishing Group Arabic Language: Historic and Sociolinguistic Characteristics Ibrahim Al-Huri Ph.D. Research Scholar Center for English Studies Central University of Jharkhand 1. Introduction Arabic is one of the World’s major languages with roughly 300 million speakers in twenty two Arab countries. In 1974, Arabic was attested as one of the sixth United Nation’s official languages alongside Chinese, Russian, English, French and Spanish. As a Semitic language, Arabic possesses many unique linguistic characteristics such as writing from the right to the left, the dual number of the nouns which is not found in English, the two genders, feminine and masculine, beside the root, the most salient feature of Semitic languages. Extensively, Arabic philologists have studied the Arabic language in relation to the other Semitic languages in a bid to show the uniqueness of Arabic as compared to the other Semitic languages. Versteegh (1997) mentions that within the group of Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew have always been the most-studied languages. He shows that the reason is not only the familiarity of scholars of Semitic languages with the Arabic language and the relative wealth of data about its history, but also its apparent conservatism, in particular its retention of a declensional system (Versteegh, 1997). It stands to reason that language is a living entity that always undergoes the different circumstances of life: change, development, modernization, disappearance and sometimes death. However, Arabic could have retained its unique features throughout the centuries despite some slight changes which happened due to the Arab contacts with non-Arabs causing emergence of new varieties along with Classical Arabic. Turning to the position of Arabic, Arabic has a prestigious status not only in Arabic-speaking countries, but in all Muslim communities. Prestigious position as such goes back to the very early period of Islam where Arabic throughout that period remained the language of prestige that was used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes (Versteegh, 1997). Undoubtedly, Arabic has an abundance of colloquial forms across the Arab World. All such varieties are originally derived from Classical Arabic. Consequently, a wide range of similarities has been noted between Classical Arabic and these different varieties in all linguistic levels. 2. The History of Arabic Arabic has been regarded as a member of Semitic languages which include a number of languages in the Middle East and North Africa. It is originally generated from Afro-Asiatic languages which includes besides Arabic different languages such as Hebrew, Ethiopian and other languages. The first emergence of Arabic as a world language goes back to the seventh century CE. The century of Islam diffusion that followed the death of Prophet Mohammed brought both Islam as a religion and Arabic language to the attention of a world that had possessed only the vaguest notion of what went on in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula (Versteegh, 1997). Abstract: This study tries to highlight the historical development of Arabic throughout the centuries. It also presents some linguistic characteristics of Arabic with a slight comparison to Sana’ani Yemen Dialect. In addition, the study presents the diglossic situation of Arabic through discussing the social role played by both Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) and the different Arabic dialects in the Arab societies as well as the relationship between diglossia and education. Historically, the study shows that Arabic has been undergone different stages of development and progress over the centuries and the advent of Islam marks the real occurrence of Arabic as a standard language through the revelation of the Holy Quran which was revealed in Arabic. Such a remarkable turning point immensely contributed to transmitting Arabic from the unknown side of the history to be a world language. On the other hand, Arabic has unique linguistic characteristics which make it a distinctive language. Moreover, Arabic shares with other Semitic languages the root of pattern morphology which functions as a generator of Arabic words. Keywords: Arabic; History; Sociolinguistics; Modern standard Arabic; Arabic dialects; Diglossia.