id author title date pages extension mime words sentences flesch summary cache txt en-wikipedia-org-528 Arabic - Wikipedia .html text/html 21196 2239 64 Arabic (اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, al-ʿarabiyyah, [al ʕaraˈbijːa] (listen) or عَرَبِيّ‎, ʿarabīy, [ˈʕarabiː] (listen) or [ʕaraˈbij]) is a Semitic language that first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE.[4] It is now the lingua franca of the Arab world.[5] It is named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in Northwestern Arabia and in the Sinai Peninsula.[6] The ISO assigns language codes to thirty varieties of Arabic, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic,[7] also referred to as Literary Arabic, which is modernized Classical Arabic. 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. ./cache/en-wikipedia-org-528.html ./txt/en-wikipedia-org-528.txt