Influence of Arabic on other languages
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries dominated by Islam or Islamic power. Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for languages as diverse as Amharic, Tigrinya, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. For example, the Arabic word for book (كتاب kitāb) is used in most of the languages listed, (exceptions are Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, which use the Latin-derived words "libro," "llibre" and "livro"). Other languages such as Maltese and Nubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary. Spanish has the largest Arabic influenced vocabulary outside the Islamic world due to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 until 1492 known as Al-Andalus, although Spain's re-christianization and resulting loss of contact with Quranic Arabic has led to a significant shift in both meaning and pronunciation of Spanish words of Arabic etymology.
The terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber taẓallit "prayer" < salat), academic terms (like Uyghur mentiq "logic"), to everyday conjunctions (like Urdu/Hindi/Punjabi lekin "but".) Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most religious terms used by Muslims around the world are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as ṣalāt 'prayer' and imām 'prayer leader'. In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often mediated by other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic; for example many older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri.
Outside the Islamic world, there are more limited borrowings from Arabic, usually to denote vegetables and other articles in commerce, such as "aubergine", "alcohol" and also some other terms like "admiral". Among European languages, these mostly were transmitted through Turkish and Spanish.
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