Quranic Arabic

Classical Arabic
Verses from the Quran in Classical Arabic, written in the cursive Arabic script.
Native to	Historically in the Middle East
Era	7th century AD to 9th century AD; continued as a liturgical language of Islam, spoken with a modernized pronunciation
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Classical Arabic
Early form	Old Arabic
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None
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Classical Arabic is the form of the Arabic language used in Umayyad and Abbasid literary texts from the 7th century AD to the 9th century AD.

The orthography of the Qurʾān was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of the writer to utilize a traditional writing system for recording a non-standardized form of Classical Arabic.

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is its direct descendant used today throughout the Arab world in writing and in formal speaking, for example, prepared speeches, some radio broadcasts, and non-entertainment content. While the lexis and stylistics of Modern Standard Arabic are different from Classical Arabic, the morphology and syntax have remained basically unchanged (though MSA uses a subset of the syntactic structures available in CA). In the Arab world, little distinction is made between CA and MSA, and both are normally called al-fuṣḥá (الفصحى‎) in Arabic, meaning 'the most eloquent (Arabic language)'.

In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal ‘poetic koine’ distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the Lakhmid court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke a form of Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. The standardization of Classical Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al-Kitāb, is based first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to the Qurʾān and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya. By the 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world.