The Arabic Alphabet: 28 Letters, Forms and Vowel Marks

The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, written from right to left and joined up like handwriting. It is an abjad: the letters write the consonants and the long vowels, while the short vowels are small marks above and below the line that everyday text leaves out. Each letter changes shape depending on where it sits in a word, and six letters never join to the letter after them. Learn the letters in families that share a shape, then the joined forms, and you can sound out real Arabic words.

This guide uses the letters, names and sounds from our free Arabic alphabet chart, and every practice word comes from our list of the 7,589 most common Arabic words, with its rank on that list.

#What kind of script is Arabic?

Arabic is an abjad, a script built around consonants. In English every vowel gets a letter. In Arabic, the long vowels do (ا for aa, و for uu, ي for ii), but the short vowels a, i and u are written as small marks called harakat, and most printed Arabic leaves them out. A reader who knows the language supplies them from the word and the sentence.

It also runs right to left, it is always joined (letters connect along a baseline, in print and by hand), and it has no capital letters. Instead, a letter’s shape changes with its position in the word.

The same script is used, with extra letters, for other languages, among them Persian and Urdu. Persian adds four letters for sounds Arabic lacks, پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (the s in measure) and گ (g), which is why our Persian alphabet chart lists 32 letters. Hebrew is an abjad too, with its own letters and 22 of them in our chart.

The alphabet is the same across the Arabic-speaking world. The spoken dialects differ in how they pronounce a few letters (ق and ج are the best-known examples), but they are written with the same 28.

#The 28 Arabic letters

Here is the full alphabet in its traditional order, in the isolated form, with the name and a rough English sound from our chart.

#Learn them in families

Many letters share a base shape and differ only in their dots. Learn the shape once, then the dots.

Train your eye to check the dots first. At the start or in the middle of a word, ن (nun) and ي (ya) also take the same small tooth as ب, told apart only by their dots.

#The four positional forms

Because Arabic is always joined, most letters have four forms: isolated (standing alone), initial (joined only to the letter after it), medial (joined on both sides) and final (joined only to the letter before it). The joining line (ـ) in the table shows which side each form connects on; “after” means to the left.

For most letters the initial and medial forms simply lose the tail of the isolated form. A few change a lot; ه and ع are the hardest to recognize. Our Arabic alphabet chart shows the isolated forms; when you practice, write each letter in all four.

#The six letters that don’t connect

Six letters join to the letter before them but never to the letter after. When one of them appears in a word, the word breaks, and the next letter starts again in its initial or isolated form.

That is why some words look like separate pieces. خارج (outside, #178) is kha, alif, ra, jim: kha joins alif, but alif does not join ra and ra does not join jim, so the word is written in three pieces. Knowing these six letters is how you tell such a gap from a space between words.

One more joining rule: when lam is followed by alif, the two merge into a single shape, لا. It is worth learning early, because لا (no) is the most common word on our list.

#Short vowels: harakat, and why they are left out

Arabic has three short vowels, a, i and u, and they are written as marks called harakat. Here they are on ب (ba), with the other marks you will see in voweled text:

Everyday Arabic, in newspapers, signs, books and messages, leaves the harakat out. Words are built from root consonants in regular patterns, so a fluent reader knows which vowels belong. The three letters ك ت ب, for example, can be read as kataba (he wrote), kutub (books) or kutiba (it was written), and a fluent reader picks the right one from the sentence. Full vowel marks appear in the Quran, children’s books, poetry and learner textbooks, and now and then on a single word to clear up an ambiguity.

#The letters with no English equivalent

Five letters have no close English match, and they are the ones worth practicing with a native speaker.

Then there are the heavy letters, ص (heavy s), ض (heavy d), ط (heavy t) and ظ (heavy th) in our chart, said with the tongue pulled back, which darkens the vowels around them too. Note that our chart romanizes both ت and ط as “ta” and both ح and ه as “ha”: ط is the heavy t, and ح is the throat h, while ه is an ordinary English h.

#Sun letters and moon letters

The word for “the” is ال (al-), attached to the front of a noun. Before 14 letters, the sun letters, the l is silent and the next letter is doubled: الشمس (the sun, #407) is ash-shams and النار (the fire, #170) is an-nar. Before the other 14, the moon letters (named after qamar, moon), the l stays: اليوم (today, #76) is al-yawm and المدينة (the city, #191) is al-madina. The spelling never changes, only the pronunciation.

The sun letters are ta, tha, dal, dhal, ra, zay, sin, shin, sad, dad, the heavy ta, za, lam and nun. A rule of thumb: they are made with the tip of the tongue.

#A few marks outside the 28

Real Arabic text uses a few marks that are not on the 28-letter chart:

• Hamza (ء), a glottal stop, the catch in “uh-oh”. It often sits on an alif, as in أنا (I, #8), or stands alone, as at the end of ماء (water, #826).
• Ta marbuta (ة), a ta that appears only at the end of words, mostly feminine ones, and is usually said as a plain -a: غرفة (room, #198), قهوة (coffee, #796).
• Alif maqsura (ى), an alif sound at the end of a word written like a ya without dots: على (on, #6), إلى (to, #18).

#Read your first Arabic words

Each word below is on our most common words list, with its rank. The letters are listed in reading order, right to left.

Start with بيت and قلب: every letter joins, and the only vowel you supply is the a. Then باب and كتاب show alif breaking the word, and in كتاب the short i after kaf is not written, which is the abjad at work.

#A learning plan for the Arabic alphabet

The chart is at /tools/alphabet/arabic. After the letters, move to vocabulary: the most common Arabic words, each with its English meaning. When you can read a few hundred, the Arabic vocabulary test samples words from across the list and estimates how many you know.

#Practice reading and writing with native speakers

A chart gives you the shapes. The throat letters, and the vowels everyday text doesn’t show, come from hearing a person and being corrected. On LangX, Arabic is one of the 182 languages you can pick, and matching runs both ways: you see people who speak Arabic and are learning a language you speak.

9:41

Lucía M. Online

Today

Hold any message to correct it — corrections are the most useful thing you can send.

¿Cómo fue tu fin de semana? Cuéntame en inglés si quieres. How was your weekend? Tell me in English if you like. 09:12

Fui a la playa con mi hermana. Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. 09:14 · Read

Correction from Lucía Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. Hacía mucho calor y no llevé agua. The «yo» isn't wrong, it just sounds emphatic — like you specifically forgot. 09:15

Message in Spanish…

Write in Arabic script from the start, and your partner can correct your spelling as well as your grammar. Replies are unlimited, and translation is built into the chat (20 a day on the free plan, which includes 5 new conversations a day). LangX has voice and photo messages rather than live calls. If you want live calls or paid tutors instead, our roundup of the best apps to practice Arabic with native speakers compares the options. To start, get the app or read how to do a language exchange.

#FAQ

#How many letters are in the Arabic alphabet?

28. Some counts add the hamza (ء) as a 29th; our chart lists the standard 28. Most of them have four forms depending on their position in the word.

#Is Arabic written right to left?

Yes, words and sentences run right to left. Numbers are the exception: multi-digit numbers are written with the largest digit on the left, as in English.

#Why doesn’t Arabic write the short vowels?

Fluent readers don’t need them: the consonants, long vowels and the sentence tell them how to say a word. Vowel marks appear in the Quran, children’s books, poetry and learner materials.

#Is the Persian alphabet the same as the Arabic alphabet?

Persian uses the Arabic script plus four letters: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (the s in measure) and گ (g). The shapes and joining rules carry over. See our Persian alphabet guide.

More alphabet guides: Hebrew, another right-to-left abjad, and Persian; Greek, Georgian and Armenian; the Cyrillic Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian alphabets; Korean; and the abugidas Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam.