Arabic/Arabic alphabet (by group)

Recognising Characters

Written Arabic has 4 forms for each letter. This might appear much at first, but it's not as hard as you might think. For starters, Arabic does not have any capital letters, so this drops us from 4:1 ratio with the Roman alphabet to a meager 2:1 ratio. Secondly, Arabic does not have a separate cursive and manuscript versions of the letters; since what you're learning already is cursive, one could conceivably argue that we're dropping from a 2:1 to a 1:1 ratio.

There's better news still. A lot of these letters are really just derivations of other letters, and many of the ones that aren't derivations behave in a similar enough fashion to be learned together. This page is aimed at exploiting these similarities to help you learn how to read and write Arabic letters.

At a glance

Here are the letter-groups at a glance. We mentioned earlier that there are 4 forms for each character: isolated, initial, medial and final. In this table, we only show the isolated form of each character. But we also break the letters into groups that have similar shapes. Notice how some letters are derived from other letters by adding dots above or below some base form. You might be wondering why it is claimed that certain letters are similar to each other. (FIXME: for example). This is because the table is organised by similarity the medial form of each letter, that is the shape the letter takes when it is in the middle of a word. Let's proceed to the next set of tables, where you shall learn about these forms in greater detail.

Disclaimer: the organisation of letters into groups is based strictly on the authors' personal opinions. If an authority on the Arabic language tells you that things are otherwise, you should believe them and not us

	no dots	1 dot	2 dots	3 dots
constant	س ص ط	ض ظ ف	ق	ش
isolated	ا د ر و	ذ ز
curve/pointy		ب ن	ت   ي	ث
hook	ح ع	ج خ غ
other	ل م ه ك

Arabic letters in detail

Now, we will look at each of the letter classes in detail. Every row in this table represents a separate letter. There are 8 constant letters, 6 isolated ones, 5 curve-pointy ones, 5 hook ones, and 4 other ones. You'll note also that we group the rows by number of dots; this is to show you the similarities between letters that differ only by the dots that they use. Even though ba ( ب ) and tha ( ث ) are completely different letters, they pretty much act the same way.

Constant

The constant forms behave roughly the same way no matter what position they are in.

	final	medial	initial	isolated
no dots	ـس	ـسـ	سـ	س
	ـص	ـصـ	صـ	ص
	ـط	ـطـ	ـط	ط
1 dot
	ـض	ـضـ	ضـ	ض
	ـظ	ـظـ	ظـ	ظ
	ـف	ـفـ	فـ	ف
2 dots
	ـق	ـقـ	قـ	ق
3 dots	ـش	ـشـ	شـ	ش

Note: technically fa and qa are not related to each other, but for us, being beginners, we'll pretend that they are for now.

Isolated

The isolated characters do not connect to the next letter in the medial form. Consider alef and lam... written in the middle of words, they would look almost the same, but because alef does not connect to the next character (ـاـ) but lam does (ـلـ), you can tell them apart.

	final	medial	initial	isolated
no dots	ـا	ـاـ	اـ	ا
	ـد	ـدـ	دـ	د
	ـر	ـرـ	رـ	ر
	ـو	ـوـ	وـ	و
1 dot
	ـذ	ـذـ	ـذ	ذ
	ـز	ـزـ	زـ	ز

Curve-pointy

The curve-pointy letters have a single curve in isolated or initial form, but when they are in the middle of a word, they form a simple point up.

	final	medial	initial	isolated
1 dot	ـب	ـبـ	بـ	ب
	ـن	ـنـ	نـ	ن
2 dots	ـت	ـتـ	تـ	ت
	ـي	ـيـ	يـ	ي
3 dots	ـث	ـثـ	ثـ	ث

Hook

The hook letters have a downward hook in their final form and an upward hook in their medial form.

	final	medial	initial	isolated
no dots	ـح	ـحـ	حـ	ح
	ـع	ـعـ	عـ	ع
1 dot above	ـخ	ـخـ	خـ	خ
	ـغ	ـغـ	غـ	غ
1 dot below	ـج	ـجـ	جـ	ج

Other

Finally, there are four letters which have their own idiosyncratic behaviours.

	final	medial	initial	isolated
no dots	ـك	ـكـ	كـ	ك
	ـل	ـلـ	لـ	ل
	ـم	ـمـ	مـ	م
	ـه	ـهـ	هـ	ه

Special letters

Tâ marbûta

One letter which you will encounter rather frequently is the tâ marbûta (ة, not to be confused with ه). This letter always occurs in final position and has two forms:

	final	medial	initial	isolated
2 dots	ـة			ة

Ligatures

Sometimes two letters combine (and form a ligature) to be written in a prettier or more convenient manner. When lam ( ل ) is followed by alif ( ا ), it generally forms the lam-alif ligature ( لا ):

	final	medial	initial	isolated
no dots	ـلا			لا