Arabic Voice Over Agency

Everything you never needed to know about speaking Arabic:

There are 25 countries in the world that have Arabic as an official or co-official language. These countries include Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Camels are a popular form of transport in North Africa and the Middle East. Did you know a camel can survive for a week without water, that’s 4 more days than a human. It’s all down to the fat stored in their humps which they can use for energy when there’s not enough food or water.

If you want to go to the world’s largest underwater theme park, brush up on your Arabic and pay a visit to Bahrain. The park is more than 100,000 square metres and is extremely popular with scuba divers of all levels.

People in Morocco can celebrate New Year 3 times. There is New Year on the 1st of January from the Gregorian calendar, Amazigh New Year on 12^th January from the Agrarian calendar and finally, the Islamic New Year in July.

In Morocco they don’t celebrate love with heart shapes. Instead, the symbol of love is your liver. There is an expression of affection which says, “you’ve conquered my liver.” It is because in Morocco well-being is promoted by a healthy liver, not a healthy heart!

If you want to lose weight don’t go to Kuwait. About 75% of the population are overweight and it is the 8^th country in the world for overweight people. Maybe the food is delicious, and the heat makes it too hot to exercise!

Did you know some Egyptologists think that the cause of Tutankhamun’s death was being attacked by a Hippopotamus. Tutankhamun had a fracture to his leg which may have become infected and caused his death. It was common to hunt Hippo’s during Tutankhamun’s lifetime and they are known to be very aggressive animals.

If you visit the city of Mos Espa in Tunisia, you might think you’ve landed in space. Most of the city of Mos Espa were built for the production of the Star Wars films. You can see the buildings that were used in the first film which constructed to represent the city where Anakin Skywalker was a slave.

When the three Kings came to see the baby Jesus and brought him Frankincense it could well have come from the country of Oman. Frankincense trees grow abundantly here, and most households burn it in their homes. In Western society Frankincense is used to make expensive perfume.

If you want to see one of the most active volcanoes in the world, then visit Comoros where Mount Karthala often scares its residents. Comoros isn’t popular with visitors in fact it is the least visited country in the world which might be because it averages one coup every two years which could mean the country is as unstable as the volcano.

A short history on the Arabic language

Arabic, the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, is spoken throughout Northwest Africa and the Middle East. The spoken language consists of many varieties, which have all descended from Classical Arabic dating back to the 6th century.

Classical Arabic, in which the Qur’an is written, remains the formal version of the Arabic language. It is still taught in schools and used by religious scholars.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has evolved – as the name would suggest – as a modern, standardised version of the language. It is widely understood across the Arab world, and used to teach Arabic as a foreign language, as well as by the media and politicians. Colloquial (or dialectal) Arabic is the everyday spoken language, which has a great many regional variants. These can be mutually unintelligible enough to be considered separate languages, although this is a very contentious issue (many Arabs profess that they speak a single language).

Which countries have Arabic as a national language?

Arabic is an official language in 25 sovereign states: Algeria, Bahrain, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

How many people speak Arabic as their first language?

As there are so many different varieties of Arabic, it’s hard to pin down just how many people speak it as their first language, but estimates range from 200 to 400 million. This makes it around the fifth or sixth most spoken language in the world.

Here are some recent figures for the top five most widely spoken dialects:

Egyptian Arabic – 55 million
Levantine Arabic – 21 million
Sudanese Arabic – 17 million
Mesopotamian Arabic – 15 million
Yemeni Arabic – 15 million

Did you know…

• Maltese is the only variety of modern Arabic that is officially recognised as a separate language, rather than an Arabic dialect. It is written with the Latin script.
• Arabic is written using the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script written from right to left. It uses Western rules of punctuation, but some of the symbols are inverted (eg commas) or reversed (eg question marks).
• The use of different types of Arabic for different social situations within communities is an example of diglossia. Diglossia is an interesting linguistic concept that usually applies to languages with ‘high’ (ie MSA) and ‘low’ (ie colloquial) varieties.
• Arabic has had a major influence on many European languages, particularly Spanish and Portuguese. Many Arabic words have been incorporated into the English language – mainly through the medium of other European languages – including alcohol, coffee, lemon, magazine and sofa.

The Middle Eastern economy

This diverse – and largely Arabic-speaking – part of the world is most famous for the production and export of oil. The oil industry has a major impact on the economies of all Middle Eastern countries, both through the revenue it generates and the movement of labour through these countries.

Due to the fluctuating price of oil, most Middle Eastern countries are also investing heavily in new industries, so that they are not overly reliant on the oil industry. These include banking, tourism, manufacturing and agriculture.

However, the instability caused by the 2010/2011 Arab Spring uprisings has put a major brake on development. A report from HSBC in October 2013 predicted that at the end of 2014, the GDP in the seven worst-hit countries – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Bahrain – would be 35% lower than if the uprisings had not happened.