Have you ever been daunted by the thought of learning Arabic? If you’re an English, Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Malay, Indonesian, Pashto, Kurdish, Berber, Maltese or Turkish speaker, you may be surprised to know that you are already using numerous words with Arabic origins. Certainly, anyone who has visited a greengrocer and asked for ‘oranges’, ‘lemons’, ‘apricots’ or ‘artichokes’, ordered ‘coffee’ with ‘sugar’ from a waiter, bought a ‘sofa’ or complained of ‘influenza’ has spoken some Arabic words whether they know it or not.

With 186 million speakers Arabic, dating back to the 4th century, is the most prevalently used member of the Semitic language family and the sixth most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English and Bengali. Today, Arabic is the official language of 25 countries and is, of course, the liturgical language of Islam; hence, it is considered by Muslims to be ‘the language of Paradise’.

But Arabic is far from being a monolith. It is a language rich in dialects and parents as many as 27 sub-languages. The most notable are Egyptian Arabic (spoken by 80 million), Gulf Arabic (spoken by 34 million), Iraqi Arabic (spoken by 29 million), Levantine Arabic (spoken by 35 million) and North African Arabic (spoken by 45 million).

Renowned author and scholar Habeeb Salloum undertook the painstaking task of studying 500,000 English words together with his late colleague James Peters and discovered 3,000 basic words along with 5,000 of their derivatives have some connection with Arabic, while 500 of those words are commonly used by English-language speakers.

These include ‘alchemy’, ‘alcohol’, ‘algebra’, ‘arsenal’, ‘arsenic’, ‘cotton’, ‘crimson’, ‘crocus’, ‘cable’, ‘camel’, ‘elixir’, ‘gazelle’, ‘giraffe’, ‘hazard’, ‘jar’, ‘lake’, ‘lilac’, ‘lime’, ‘lute’, ‘magazine’, ‘massacre’, ‘mattress’, ‘mohair’, ‘nadir’, ‘shrub’, ‘sofa’, ‘spinach’, ‘syrup’, ‘saffron’, ‘tabby’, ‘typhoon’, ‘zenith’ and ‘zero’.

In his article “Arabic Influences in the English Language”, Salloum explains how Arabic enriched the English language: “The story of how these Arabic words entered the language of Shakespeare is a fascinating one. At the dawn of Islam in the Seventh Century, the Arabic language and Islam became inseparable. As the Muslim armies moved through North Africa then through the Iberian Peninsula, the tongue of the Arabs spread like wildfire. The masses of newly converted Muslims, in many cases, took as their own the idiom of the conquering desert men. In a few decades, Arabic became the intellectual medium that united the new world of Islam.”

“The men of letters and scientists in both eastern and western lands had to know Arabic if they wished to produce works of art or science. During these centuries, Arab Andalusia by itself generated more books in Arabic than were produced in all the other languages of Europe. The Arabic libraries in Muslim Spain, some containing over half a million manuscripts, had no match in all the countries of Christendom.”

“In the ensuing years, Arabic words began to flow into English through intermediate languages like French and Portuguese. Later, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, when Britain expanded its empire to the four corners of the world, a variety of Arabic words entered English by way of Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Even after colonialism disappeared, the inflow of Arabic words into English has continued.”

Spanish is believed to contain more than 4,000 Arabic words and another thousand that have their roots in Arabic, including ‘berengena’ (aubergine), ‘aceite’ (oil) and ‘alcalde’ (mayor). Additionally thousands of Spanish place names are derived from Arabic especially in Valencia and Andalusia. It should be mentioned, too, that the nearby Rock of Gibraltar got its name from ‘Jebel Tariq’.

French words of Arabic origin mainly found their way into the language from the occupied Maghreb during the 19th century and include ‘divan’, ‘chiffre’, ‘carat’, ‘chimie’, ‘hammam’, ‘lemonade’, ‘moiré’, ‘riz’ and ‘raquette’. Turkish was replete with Arab words until 1932 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk set about simplifying the language to increase literacy and replaced many words borrowed from Persian and Arabic with Turkish equivalents. But even so, many are still used today such as ‘insan’ (human), ‘hakim’ (judge), ‘kalb’ (heart), ‘sharq’ (east) and ‘madrassah’ (school).

Astonishingly, as much as 40 percent of the Maltese language has its roots in Arabic, which includes easily recognisable Arabic words, such as ‘ragel’ (man), ‘tifel’ (boy), ‘dar’ (house), ‘saif’ (summer), ‘qalb’ (heart),’waqt’ (time), ‘qamar’ (moon) and ‘kalb’ (dog). Hindi and Urdu both have their origins in Sanskrit but have subsumed Persian and Arabic words, which, arguably, made up 30–40 percent of the ancient languages. Modern Indonesian is thought to contain as many as 3,000 Arabic words.

It’s worth pointing out that while many languages have borrowed Arabic words, similarly, Arabic has taken words from many other languages including Sanskrit, Greek and Persian as well as contemporary European languages. In modern times, words like ‘shopping’, ‘mall’, ‘hotel’, ‘cappuccino’, ‘mobile phone’, ‘technology’ and ‘computer’ spring to mind.

As our world shrinks and becomes even more of a global village during the coming centuries so will our various languages merge to some extent and become more accessible. And as a wise old Turkish woman once said “another language is another friend”.