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The Arabic alphabet (Arabic: أبجدية عربية) is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world.
The alphabet was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼan, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write many languages of many language families including, at various times, Urdu, Pashto, Baloch, Malay, Hausa (in West Africa), Mandinka, Swahili (in East Africa), Balti, Brahui, Panjabi (in Pakistan), Kashmiri, Sindhi (in India and Pakistan), Arwi (in Sri Lanka), Uyghur (in China), Kazakh (in Central Asia), Uzbek (in Central Asia), Kyrgyz (in Central Asia), Azerbaijani (in Iran), Kurdish (in Iraq and Iran), Ottoman Turkish and Spanish (in Western Europe). In order to accommodate the needs of these other languages, new letters and other symbols were added to the original alphabet.
The Arabic script is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 basic letters. Because some of the vowels are indicated with optional symbols, it can be classified as an abjad. Just as different handwriting styles and typefaces exist in the Roman alphabet, the Arabic script has a number of different styles of calligraphy, including Naskh خط النسخ, Nastaʿlīq, Shahmukhi, Ruq'ah خط الرقعة, Thuluth خط الثُلث, Kufic الخط الكوفي, Sini and Hijazi.
Arabic alphabet
ا ب ت ث ج ح
خ د ذ ر ز س
ش ص ض ط ظ ع
غ ف ق ك ل
م ن ه و ي
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