Arabic is an official language in 23 countries: the 22 members of the Arab League (Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen) plus Chad, which is not a League member. Together they stretch from Mauritania's Atlantic coast to Oman's shore on the Arabian Sea, and Arabic is the first language of roughly 300–400 million people, with estimates varying widely by source.
That headline list hides a lot of variety. In some of these countries almost everyone speaks Arabic at home; in others it is an official or religious language that most people learn as a second tongue. The clearest way to understand the Arabic-speaking world is to travel across it region by region, from west to east. Population figures below are rounded mid-2020s estimates and should be read as approximate.
The Maghreb: Arabic Alongside Tamazight and French
The Maghreb ("the west" in Arabic) is the band of North Africa between the Atlantic and Egypt. Arabic arrived with the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and spread gradually over the next millennium, mixing with the Berber (Amazigh) languages already spoken there.
- Morocco (about 37 million): Arabic and, since the 2011 constitution, Tamazight are both official. French remains widely used in business and higher education.
- Algeria (about 46 million): Arabic is official; Tamazight became a national language in 2002 and an official one in 2016. Algeria is the largest country in Africa by area.
- Tunisia (about 12 million): Arabic is the sole official language, though French is common in commerce.
- Libya (about 7 million): Arabic is official; most people live on a thin coastal strip, with the Sahara behind.
- Mauritania (about 5 million): Arabic is official, and Hassaniya Arabic is the main spoken variety, alongside Pulaar, Soninke and Wolof.
Spoken Maghrebi Arabic, called Darija in Morocco and Algeria, borrows heavily from Berber and French and is the variety eastern Arabs find hardest to follow. Our Maghreb countries guide covers the region's geography.
Egypt and Sudan: The Nile's Arabic
Egypt, with well over 100 million people, has the largest Arabic-speaking population of any country, more than twice that of the next-largest. Its dialect, Egyptian Arabic, is also the most widely understood across the region, because Cairo's film, television and music industries have been exported across the Arab world since the mid-20th century.
Sudan (roughly 50 million) lists both Arabic and English as official languages, a pairing set out in its 2005 interim constitution. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it chose English as its official language, though a pidgin known as Juba Arabic remains a common everyday lingua franca there. That makes South Sudan one of several places where Arabic is widely spoken without being official.
The Levant and Iraq: Shared Dialects, Many Languages
The Levant, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, shares a family of closely related dialects spoken in Syria (around 23 million), Lebanon (around 5–6 million), Jordan (around 11 million) and Palestine (around 5.5 million). Levantine Arabic is heard widely beyond the region thanks to Syrian and Lebanese television drama.
These countries are linguistically diverse. Lebanon keeps strong ties to French, a legacy of the French Mandate from 1920 to 1943. Armenian, Kurdish and Aramaic are spoken in pockets of Syria, and Aramaic survives in villages such as Maaloula, near Damascus. Iraq (about 45 million) is officially bilingual: its 2005 constitution made Kurdish co-official with Arabic, and Kurdish is the main language of the Kurdistan Region in the north. Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken in Baghdad and along the Tigris and Euphrates, is a dialect group of its own.
The Arabian Peninsula, Where Arabic Began
Arabic originated in the Arabian Peninsula, and inscriptions in early forms of the language date back well over 1,500 years. The Qur'an, compiled in the 7th century, fixed the classical form that still underpins the written language.
- Saudi Arabia (about 35 million) occupies most of the peninsula; Arabic is the only official language.
- Yemen (roughly 35–40 million, a figure made uncertain by war) is home not only to Arabic but also to Mehri and Soqotri, members of a separate Modern South Arabian family that also survives in western Oman.
- Oman (about 5 million), Kuwait (about 5 million), Bahrain (about 1.5 million), Qatar (about 3 million) and the United Arab Emirates (about 10–11 million) complete the Gulf.
Within Saudi Arabia alone, speech varies noticeably: Najdi Arabic in Riyadh and the central plateau, Hejazi Arabic in Jeddah, Mecca and Medina on the Red Sea side, and Gulf Arabic in the oil-producing Eastern Province, which shares much of its vocabulary with Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar across the water.
The Gulf states are a special case. In Qatar and the UAE, citizens make up only around 10–15% of residents, and the majority are workers from South Asia, the Philippines and elsewhere, so English functions as the everyday lingua franca in shops and offices even though Arabic is the sole official language.
The Horn of Africa, the Comoros and Chad
The countries on the southern edge of the Arabic-speaking world show how "official" and "spoken at home" can differ.
- Somalia (about 18 million) lists Somali and Arabic as official. Almost everyone speaks Somali as a first language; Arabic is used mainly in religion and education.
- Djibouti (about 1 million) makes French and Arabic official, while most people speak Somali or Afar at home.
- Comoros (under 1 million), an island nation between Mozambique and Madagascar, has three official languages: Comorian, Arabic and French. It joined the Arab League in 1993, the most recent member.
- Chad (about 19 million) has French and Arabic as official languages. Chadian Arabic is a lingua franca across much of the country, yet Chad has never joined the Arab League, which is why lists that count "Arab League members" and lists that count "countries where Arabic is official" differ by one.
Two edge cases often cause confusion. Eritrea has no official language but uses Arabic and Tigrinya as working languages. Israel listed Arabic as an official language until a 2018 Basic Law gave it a "special status" instead; around a fifth of Israel's citizens are Arab. For the organisation itself, see our list of Arab League countries.
Fusha and the Dialects: One Language or Many?
Arabic has a feature linguists call diglossia: two forms used side by side. Modern Standard Arabic (fusha) is the written language of newspapers, books, official documents and news broadcasts, and it is broadly the same from Rabat to Muscat. Nobody grows up speaking it at home, though. Everyday life happens in regional dialects, which differ in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.
How different are they? A Moroccan and an Iraqi chatting in their home dialects may struggle to understand each other, roughly as a Portuguese and a Romanian speaker would. Levantine and Egyptian speakers usually manage fine. In practice, educated speakers shift toward Modern Standard Arabic, or toward Egyptian or Levantine forms familiar from television, when they need to be understood across the region.
The writing system is shared everywhere. Arabic is written right to left in a 28-letter alphabet in which most letters join to their neighbours, and short vowels are usually left out, so readers infer them from context. Even the numbers have a regional split. The digits used in Europe and the Americas, 0 to 9, descend from forms used in the medieval Maghreb and Al-Andalus, and they are still standard in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia today. Egypt, Sudan, the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf more often use the "Eastern Arabic" digits (٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩) on signs, prices and number plates, so a traveller crossing from Tunisia to Egypt sees the numerals change at the border even though the language does not.
How Arabic Compares With French and Spanish as a Multi-Country Language
Arabic is one of only a handful of languages official in more than 20 countries, and it is instructive to compare it with its closest peers.
- English is official in far more countries than any other language, well over 50.
- French is official in about 29 countries, spread across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is more scattered than Arabic, and in most of its African countries it is a second language for most people, much as Arabic is in Somalia or Djibouti.
- Arabic, at 23, is the most geographically continuous: its countries form one unbroken block from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea, apart from the Comoros.
- Spanish is official in about 20 countries, and Spanish speakers generally understand each other more easily across borders than Arabic speakers do in their home dialects.
Arabic also has global institutional weight: it became the sixth official language of the United Nations in 1973, and the UN marks World Arabic Language Day each 18 December, the anniversary of that decision. Its script travels further still, adapted to write Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish (in Iraq and Iran). For a comparison with the French-speaking world, see our guide to French-speaking countries.