What are the countries where Arabic is spoken?

Arabic ( ? ), the language of the Arabs, belongs to the Semitic group of the Semitic family of languages, and is mainly spoken in West Asia and North Africa, where it is the official language of the following 21 countries and territories:

Saudi Arabia, Yemen, UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Mauritania, Algeria, Comoros, Djibouti, Somalia, and Morocco. More than 260 million people have Arabic as their mother tongue.

Expanded Information

Arabic is derived from the ancient Semitic language, and around the 5th century AD, a unified Arabic literary language was formed based on the northern dialects. Ancient Arabic literature is available from the 6th century AD, and with the rise of the Arab Empire in the 7th century.

Along with wars and cultural invasions, the Arabs wiped out many of the languages that had existed historically and replaced the languages formerly spoken in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. Many linguists consider Arabic to be the closest of the Semitic family of languages to Semitic ancestral languages.

This language soon became the lingua franca of the peoples of a vast area stretching from the Indus River in the east to Gibraltar in the west, from North Africa in the south to the Caspian Sea in the north, and in medieval Europe it served as a medium for the preservation of Hellenistic culture and for the communication between East and West.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Arabic Language