Arabic is written in its own script, right-to-left, using 28 letters that primarily represent consonants — short vowels are typically indicated through optional diacritical marks (tashkeel) rather than full letters, especially in everyday writing, though they appear consistently in the Quran and educational texts.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family — a completely different language family from the Indo-Aryan languages (Hindi, Maithili, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri) covered elsewhere in this syllabus, sharing its deepest roots instead with Hebrew and Aramaic.

• ›This Semitic ancestry is the source of Arabic's most distinctive grammatical features, fundamentally different in structure from Indo-Aryan grammar
• ›Recognizing Arabic's separate language family is important context — its grammar cannot be approached through Hindi/Sanskrit grammatical analogies