Arabic Alphabet Pronunciation

Published by Khaled Nassra on

Arabic Alphabet Pronunciation

The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight letters including consonants and vowels. Letters are connected both in print and in handwriting.  Arabic is written in horizontal lines from right to left, the opposite of written English. Have a look at the alphabet in the chart below:

Arabic Alphabet Pronunciation

ث
tha
ت
ta
ب
ba
ا
alif
د
da
خ
kha
ح
7a
ج
ja
س
sa
ز
za
ر
ra
ذ
Tha
ط
Ta
ض
Da
ص
Sa
ش
sha
ف
fa
غ
gah
ع
3a
ظ
Zah
م
ma
ل
la
ك
ka
ق
qa
ي
ya
و
wa
هـ
ha
ن
na

Arabic Alphabet Letter Shape

Each Arabic letter has four different shapes:

  1. When it stands alone
  2. At the beginning of a word
  3. In the middle of a word
  4. At the end of a word

See the following table:

At the endIn the middleAt the beginningLetter alone
في نهاية الكلمةفي وسط الكلمةفي بداية الكلمةالحرف منفردًا
ــــــــأ / ـــــــاــــــــأ / ـــــــاأ / اأ
ــــــــــــــبـــــــــــبـــــبـــــب
ــــــــــــــتـــــــتـــــتـــــت
ــــــــــــــــــثـــــــثـــــثـــــث
ــــــــــــــــــجــــــــجـــــــــجـــــــــج
ــــــــــــــــــــحـــــــــحــــــــــــحــــــــــــح
ـــــــــــــــــــخــــــــــخـــــــــخـــــــــخ
ـــــــــــــــــــدــــــــددد
ـــــــــــــــــــذـــــــــذذذ
ــــــــــــــــــــرـــــــــــررر
ـــــــــــــــــــــزـــــــــززز
ـــــــــــــــــســــــســــســــس
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــشــــــــشـــشـــش
ـــــــــــــــــصـــــــصـــصـــص
ـــــــــــــــــضـــــــــضـــضـــض
ـــــــــــــطــــــــــطـــــــطـــــــط
ــــــــــــــــــــــظـــــــظــــــظــــــظ
ــــــــــــــــــــعــــــــعـــــــــعـــــــــع
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــغــــــــغـــــــــــغـــــــــــغ
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــفــــــــفـــــــــفـــــــــف
ـــــــــــــــــــــــقـــــــقـــــــــقـــــــــق
ــــــــــــــــــــــكـــــــــكـــــــــــكـــــــــــك
ــــــــــــــــــــــلـــــــلـــــــــــلـــــــــــل
ـــــــــــــــــمـــــــمـــــــمـــــــم
ــــــــــــــــــــــــنـــــــنــــــــــنــــــــــن
ــــــــــــــهـــــــــهــــــــــهـــــــه
ـــــــــــوـــــــــووو
ـــــــــيـــــــيـــــــيـــــــي

The word “grandpa” in Arabic is “جدي”. There are no spaces (ــــــــــــــــــ) between the letters (د) and (ي). As mentioned above, when the letter (ي) comes at the end of a word, it is written with this shape (ــــــــــــــــــــــي). However, here, the letter (ي) is preceded by the letter (د), one of the letters that cannot be joined with those that follow it. A letter that comes after the letters (د – ذ – ر – ز – و) should always be written separately, such as the letter (ي) in this example.

Short & Long Vowels

 In Arabic, there are three short vowels and three long vowels. The short vowels are called Fatha, Damma, and Kassra and the long vowels are (ا_و_ي)

Short Vowels

(فَتْحَة) /Fat-7a/

/Fat-7a/(فَتْحَة) is a short vowel sound for “a” and it looks like a dash above the letter 

  (دَ) (تَ) (رَ)(بُ)

(ضمة) /Damma/

(ضمة) is a short vowel sound for “u” “o” and it looks small nine above the letter 

  (دُ) (تُ) (رُ) (بُ)  

(كَسْرة) /Kasra/

(كَسْرة) is a short vowel sound for “i”/“e” it looks like a dash underneath the letter.

(دِ) (تِ) (رِ) (بِ)

Long vowels In Arabic

The long vowels (ا٫ و٫ي) are at least twice as long as the short vowels:

Long vowelsيوا
Pronunciation/ii//uu//aa/

Shadda

In Arabic, Shadda is equivalent to write the same letter twice

ب + ب = بّ

Shadda with short vowels

بَّ، بُّ، بِّ

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