Souqs

A souq or souk (Arabic: سوق‎‎, Hebrew: שוק‎ suq, Hindi: सूक, also spelled shuk, shooq, soq, esouk, succ, suk, sooq, suq, soek) is a marketplace or commercial quarter in Western Asian and North African cities.Suq, and sometimes monti, is also used for a marketplace in Malta. The equivalent Persian term is "bazaar".

The Arabic word is a loan from Aramaic "šūqā" (“street, market”‎), itself a loanword from the Akkadian "sūqu" (“street”‎, from "sāqu", meaning “narrow”). The spelling souk entered European languages probably through French during the French occupation of the Arab countries Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, the word "souk" most likely refers to Arabic/North African traditional markets. Other spellings of this word involving the letter "Q" (sooq, souq...) were likely developed using English and thus refer to Western Asian/Arab traditional markets, as British colonialism was present there during the 19th and 20th centuries. In Modern Standard Arabic the term al-sooq refers to markets in both the physical sense and the abstract economic sense (e.g., an Arabic-speaker would speak of the sooq in the old city as well as the sooq for oil, and would call the concept of the free market السوق الحرّ as-sūq al-ḥurr).

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