Which African countries outside of North Africa have large populations of people who speak Arabic? I guess my figures are a little out of date. I'll have to grab the new ones. Portuguese now has more than 200 million, and my figure is about 180 million. Strengthens my case. Why aren't more Americans learning it?
None. I was saying that if you add up Arabic speakers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the African Horn, and Turkey, you are going to get millions. Arabic speakers in the Turkish Hatay province alone are probably about a million now. Arabic is spoken in Turkey as far as Mersin. In Africa, Arabic is spoken as far south as Nigeria. You can google up Nigerian Arabic if you want.
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Well, I'm sort of puzzled by some of the letters in this chart. If this is Arabic, then there seems to be more letters than I have ever seen. So I'm wondering if this chart is maybe Persian, or Urdu or something else that uses Arabic as well as other letters/characters that are not part of the main Arabic alphabet.
My biggest issue isn't with learning the Arabic alphabet, but learning to spell words in Arabic. Many times the Arabic word is NOT spelled the way it is pronounced. For example, the use of tanween on the end of some word (مرحبا شكرا) Neither of these words end with the letter ن, yet there is an "n" pronounced on the end of the word. Or in Egyptian Arabic, you have such a word as دلوقتي that has a ق right in the middle of the word, but it is treated more like a hamza than a letter.