Where is Arabic spoken?
Arabic is the official language of 20 countries ranging from northwest Africa to the Arabian gulf. Those countries include: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. The written language in all these countries is called Modern Standard Arabic (in Arabic, fuSHaa), and this is the literary language of the modern era. In addition to the written language, which Arabs learn in school, speakers in each geographical region of the Arab world use a spoken variant of Arabic as their mother tongue. These spoken variants are often referred to as “dialects” or “colloquial Arabic.” These colloquial variants are not generally written.
