The Richest Language? (2024)

Arabic is one of the six official languages used for communication at the United Nations, in addition to English, French, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. On Dec 18th of every year, the United Nations celebrates UN Arabic Language Day, a way of promoting equal use of its official languages across its institutions.

Arabic is also the official language of 24 countries and is the mother tongue of 422 million persons, while having a special recognition in another 35 countries. Initially, Arabic was influenced by other ancient Semitic languages, especially Aramaic, whereas it later majorly influenced many other languages throughout history such as Persian (40% of words of Arabic origin), Kurdish (30%), Urdu (29%), Turkish (6,500 words), Spanish (4,000 words), and others.

A major uniqueness of Arabic language lies in its richness. While English, French, and Russian languages have around 500,000 words, 150,000 words, and 130,000 words in its vocabulary respectively, Arabic language has 12,3 million words in its own, making it the richest language in vocabulary, by far.

To give an idea about that, there are around 500 names in Arabic for a lion, more than a 100 for love, 80 for a sword… That may sound overwhelming, however, those are “descriptive names” that describe the state of the “abstract” name and native speakers may use only few ones in daily life. For example, the name of a lion in Arabic is “Asad”, while all other names are for specific to a characteristic or a certain state of a lion; so “laith” is a powerful lion in a single word (which can be said as well as two words “Asad Qawi), “sabe” as a ferocious lion, “dergham” as a courageous/tough lion, “haidar” as a muscular lion, “abbas” as a deterring lion… The same applies to “love”, which is “hob”, with “ishq” as extreme love, “hiam” as adoring love, “hawa” as desiring love, “shagaf” as passionate love.. That made the Arabic language unmatched in terms of giving its speaker possibility of combining conciseness, precision of meaning and variety of expressions.

Two major factors contributed to the above. First, Arab’s love for poetry throughout history enriched the language with tremendous terms and words. In return, the extensive vocabulary made Arabic poetry "magical", easily rhyming and rhythmic, while maintaining its eloquence. The second factor is related to geographical scope and cultural influence. In the middle ages (Between the eighth and fourteenth century AD), Arabic was the transcultural language for science and trade from Iberian Peninsula and Marrakesh in the west, to the borders of China in the east, being used by Turks, Persians, Azeris, Berbers, Copts, Kurds, Uzbeks, and so many other ethnicities, other than Arabs themselves. That gave the language a lot of enrichment due to exposure to different regions in the world, the language’s growth pace that followed major advances in sciences wherever it was used, and the contribution of other cultures to it.