Arabic script

Arabic
Type	Impure Abjad (Abugida or True Alphabet in some adaptations)
Languages	See below
Time period	400 AD to the present
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Aramaic Syriac Nabataean Arabic
Child systems	inspired the N'Ko alphabet
Direction	Right-to-left
ISO 15924	Arab, 160
Unicode alias	Arabic
Unicode range	U+0600–U+06FF Arabic U+0750–U+077F Arabic Supplement U+08A0–U+08FF Arabic Extended-A U+FB50–U+FDFF Arabic Pres. Forms-A U+FE70–U+FEFF Arabic Pres. Forms-B U+1EE00–U+1EEFF Arabic Mathematical... U+10E60–U+10E7F Rumi Numeral Symbols

The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic, dialects of Mandinka, Central Kurdish, Luri, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and others. Until the 16th century, it was even used to write some texts in Spanish. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it and the third by the number of users, after Latin and Chinese characters.

The Arabic script is written from right to left in a cursive style. In most cases the letters transcribe consonants, or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads.

The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Qurʼān, the holy book of Islam. With the spread of Islam, it came to be used to write languages of many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols, with some versions, such as Kurdish, Uyghur, and old Bosnian being abugidas or true alphabets. It is also the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy.

The Arabic script has been adopted for use in a wide variety of languages besides Arabic, including Persian, Malay and Urdu which are not Semitic. Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology. For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive (the [p] sound), so many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though the specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: all the Indian and Turkic languages written in the Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters, whereas the languages of Indonesia tend to imitate those of Jawi. The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars.