The SAC is here to pro­vide you with op­por­tu­ni­ties to study Ara­bic out­side class time. If you need ad­vice and guid­ance on what to study, you should talk to your class tu­tor, who will help you iden­tify your strengths and weak­nesses and make rec­om­men­da­tions on what to study.

A bit about the language

Ara­bic (العربية al-‘arabīyah, or عربي ‘arabi) Se­mitic lan­guages, such as He­brew and the Neo-Ara­maic lan­guages. In terms of speak­ers, Ara­bic is the largest mem­ber of the Se­mitic lan­guage fam­ily. It is spo­ken by more than 280 mil­lion peo­ple as a first lan­guage, most of whom live in the Mid­dle East and North Africa, and by 250 mil­lion  more as a sec­ond lan­guage.

Ara­bic has many dif­fer­ent, ge­o­graph­i­cally-dis­trib­uted spo­ken va­ri­eties, some of which are mu­tu­ally un­in­tel­li­gi­ble.  Mod­ern Stan­dard Ara­bic is widely taught in schools, uni­ver­si­ties, and used in work­places, gov­ern­ment and the me­dia. It de­rives from Clas­si­cal Ara­bic, which has been a lit­er­ary and litur­gi­cal lan­guage of Is­lam since its in­cep­tion in the 7th cen­tury.