Arabic Alphabet: 28 Letters, Four Forms, First Words

How many letters does the Arabic alphabet have, and how do you learn them?

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, written right to left and joined like handwriting. Most letters take four shapes, alone or at the start, middle or end of a word, and the four shapes share one skeleton. Six letters never join the next one. Short vowels are small marks, so a handful of letters already spells real words.

How many letters are in the Arabic alphabet?

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters. All of them write consonants except ا, which writes a long a or carries a hamza, and و and ي do double duty as consonants and long vowels. Arabic is written from right to left, has no capital letters, and joins its letters in print as well as by hand.

Some books count 29. The extra one is hamza (ء), a catch in the voice that often sits on a carrier: أ إ ؤ ئ. A few more shapes look like letters but are not counted separately: ة (tāʾ marbūṭa) is a t that ends a word, ى (alif maqṣūra) is a long a at the end of a word, and لا is the compulsory joined form of ل and ا.

Numbers are the one exception to right to left. Digits inside Arabic text run left to right, so a year still reads 1948 in that order. The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, which phones and browsers follow, specifies exactly this behaviour.

Why Arabic letters change shape: the four positional forms

Each Arabic letter has up to four shapes: alone (isolated), at the start of a word (initial), between two letters (medial) and at the end (final). The shape depends only on whether the letter joins its neighbours. The sound never changes: ب is b in all four places.

22 letters have all four shapes. The six letters that cannot join forward have two, because nothing attaches after them. That gives 22 × 4 + 6 × 2 = 100 shapes in the full table, the number that makes beginners close the book. It is not 100 things to memorise. Most shapes are one skeleton with the tail cut off or a joining stroke added: alone, ب is a shallow bowl with a dot below; in the middle of a word, ـبـ is a short tooth with the same dot.

A few letters really do change, so look twice at them in the table: ه, which looks different in each position (هـ ـهـ ـه); ع and غ, whose open head closes once a letter joins them from the right; and ك, which loses its small inner stroke at the start and in the middle.

The six letters that never join forward: ا د ذ ر ز و

Six letters accept a join from the letter before them but never join the letter after: ا د ذ ر ز و. Any word that contains one of them breaks visually after it. مدرسة (madrasa, school) has five letters, م د ر س ة, but you see three pieces, مد ر سة, because د and ر do not join forward.

Beginners read those pieces as separate words. Two habits fix it. The gap inside a word is narrower than the space between words, so train your eye on the width. And ا is one of the six and among the most frequent letters in Arabic, so the break appears in almost every line. After a few hundred words you stop noticing it.

Letters that differ only by their dots

Twenty of the 28 letters fall into nine families that share one skeleton and differ only in the number and position of their dots: ب ت ث; ج ح خ; د ذ; ر ز; س ش; ص ض; ط ظ; ع غ; ف ق. In the middle of a word one family grows larger still: ب ت ث ن ي all become the same short tooth, told apart by one dot below, two above, three above, one above or two below.

So the useful drill is the contrast, not the single letter. Practise ب ت ث together and ج ح خ together, never one letter a day. Read the dots first, then the shape. Once the five-way tooth contrast is reliable, a large share of ordinary Arabic text becomes legible.

The Arabic sounds English does not have

Most Arabic letters are sounds English already has: b, t, j, d, r, z, s, sh, f, k, l, m, n, h, w and y. Nine are new: ع ح خ غ ق ص ض ط ظ. Two more, ث and ذ, are the two English th sounds, as in think and this, each with a letter of its own.

ح and ع come from the middle of the throat: ح is a strong breath without rasp, ع the same place with a squeeze and the voice on. خ and غ sit further back: خ like the ch in Scottish loch, غ its voiced partner, close to a French r. ق is a k made further back than English k.

The four heavy letters ص ض ط ظ are said with the back of the tongue raised and a fuller mouth, and they colour the vowels next to them. That is why سيف (sword) and صيف (summer), or تين (figs) and طين (clay), differ to the ear mainly in the vowel. In each pair below one letter changes the meaning, so say both words aloud.

• قَلْب / كَلْب: heart / dog. ق is made further back than ك.
• صَبْر / سَبْر: patience / probing. ص is a heavy s.
• حَمْد / هَمَدَ: praise / it died down. ح is breathed from the throat; ه is a light h.
• عَلِمَ / أَلِمَ: he knew / he felt pain. ع is a squeeze; the hamza is a plain catch.

Vowel marks: fatha, kasra, damma and sukun

Arabic writes its three short vowels as small marks: a stroke above for a (fatha, ◌َ), a stroke below for i (kasra, ◌ِ) and a small curl above for u (damma, ◌ُ). A small circle (sukun, ◌ْ) means no vowel follows, and shadda (◌ّ) doubles the consonant. Long vowels are written with letters: ا for ā, ي for ī and و for ū. بَ is ba; بَا is bā.

Beginner books, children’s books and printed Qurʼans carry these marks. Newspapers, websites and most books leave them out, and readers supply the vowels from words they recognise. Learn to read with the marks first. They are scaffolding you remove later, gradually.

One more rule appears in your first sentences. The word for the, ال, is always written the same way, but its l is not always said. Before the 14 sun letters the l merges into the next sound: الشَّمْس is ash-shams, the sun. Before the other 14, the moon letters, it stays: الْقَمَر is al-qamar, the moon.

Your first Arabic words: seven letters are enough

You do not need all 28 letters to start reading. With ب, ا and one vowel mark you can read بَابَا, dad, and بَاب, door. Add ت and ن and you have بِنْت, girl. Add ي, و and م and the list grows to بَيْت house, تِين figs, تُوت mulberries and يَوْم day.

This is the order of Fasaha’s Reading Key course. It does not teach the alphabet from ا to ي. It starts with a few letters that combine into real words at once, and its lessons end in words to read, not a chart. Its first sentence, الْوَلَدُ هُنَا (The boy is here), comes after eleven letters: ب ا ت ن ي و م ل ر د ه.

The list below gives those first words with the letter or mark each one adds. Read every word aloud before you look at the transliteration.

How long does it take to learn the Arabic alphabet?

Recognising 28 letters is a small memory task. The time goes into the new sounds and into reading fast enough that you see words rather than letters. That depends more on how often you read than on how long you sit: a short session every day does more than one long session a week.

For the language as a whole, the honest reference point is the US Foreign Service Institute, which puts Arabic in its hardest category for English speakers: 88 weeks, about 2,200 class hours, to professional working proficiency. The alphabet is the first and smallest part of that.

Your first nine Arabic words

In the order Fasaha’s Reading Key teaches them. Each one adds a single new letter or mark, and the last is a whole sentence.

1. ب + ا: بَابَا — dad
2. no vowel at the end: بَاب — door
3. new: ت ن and kasra: بِنْت — girl
4. new: ي as a consonant: بَيْت — house
5. ي as a long vowel: تِين — figs
6. new: و and damma: تُوت — mulberries
7. new: م: يَوْم — day
8. new: ر: نُور — light
9. your first sentence: الْوَلَدُ هُنَا. — The boy is here.

Is the Arabic alphabet 28 or 29 letters?

28 is the standard count. Hamza (ء) is sometimes counted as a 29th letter because it is a distinct sound. ة, ى and لا are shapes of letters already in the 28, not extra letters.

Which Arabic letters do not connect?

Six: ا د ذ ر ز و. They join the letter before them but never the letter after, so any word that contains one of them shows a small gap.

Do I need to learn the letter names?

Not first. Sounds let you read; names let you spell aloud, use a dictionary and follow a teacher. They attach themselves once the letters are familiar.

Can I learn Arabic with transliteration instead of the script?

For a few days, as a bridge. After that it slows you down: the romanization systems disagree with each other, and nothing printed in Arabic uses them.

Are Arabic numbers written right to left?

No. Arabic text runs right to left, but the digits of a number inside it run left to right. Arabic also has two sets of digit shapes: the familiar 0 to 9 in North Africa, and Eastern Arabic digits in much of the Middle East.

What are sun and moon letters?

After the article ال, the l merges into the next sound before 14 sun letters, ت ث د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ل ن, and is pronounced before the other 14, the moon letters: الشَّمْس ash-shams, but الْقَمَر al-qamar.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Arabic alphabet (28 letters, positional forms, non-joining letters)
• Wikipedia, Sun and moon letters (the 14 sun letters)
• Unicode Standard Annex #9, Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (numbers inside right-to-left text)
• Unicode code chart, Arabic, U+0600 to U+06FF
• US Foreign Service Institute, Foreign Language Training (Arabic: 88 weeks, 2,200 class hours)
• Library of Congress, ALA-LC Arabic romanization table

About Fasaha

Fasaha is a reading-first Arabic app. Every word in a story, a podcast, a video or an article opens into its meaning, root, pattern and family, and can be saved for spaced review.

• Available on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android.
• Interface languages: English, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Uzbek, Spanish, French, German, Indonesian, Malay, Urdu, Italian, Portuguese, Bengali and Kazakh.
• Free to start; Premium opens the complete library and the stores handle billing.

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