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60 free Arabic trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Arabic is spoken by around 380 million people, written right to left in a 28-letter script, and split between a formal standard everyone learns at school and dozens of dialects that can be mutually unintelligible. This quiz covers the language itself: the alphabet and its dots, how words are built from three-letter roots, the difference between Egyptian, Levantine and Maghrebi Arabic, and the surprising number of English words (algebra, coffee, mattress, sofa) that arrived from Arabic. It works for language learners, teachers introducing the Arab world, or a general trivia night that wants something beyond capital cities. Early questions are accessible to anyone; the later ones reach into the grammarians of the 8th century, the Nahda, and the story of the Namara inscription. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Arabic, the Arabic alphabet and Arabic numerals, and each question links to the sentence that supports it.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arabic belongs to which language family?
Afroasiatic
Within Afroasiatic it is a Central Semitic language, a cousin of Hebrew and Aramaic.
Q 02In which direction is Arabic written?
Right to left
Like other Semitic scripts, apart from Latin-written Maltese and the Ge'ez script languages, it runs right to left.
Q 03How many letters are in the basic Arabic alphabet?
28
Most letters change shape depending on whether they sit at the start, middle or end of a word.
Q 04What kind of writing system is the Arabic alphabet, in which letters record only consonants?
An abjad
Because vowel marks are optional it is classed as an impure abjad.
Q 05Roughly how many people speak Arabic, native and non-native combined?
380 million
That makes it the fifth-most spoken language on Earth and the fourth-most used on the internet by users.
Q 06Arabic is one of how many official languages of the United Nations?
Six
The others are English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese; Arabic joined in 1973.
Q 07On what date is UN Arabic Language Day observed?
December 18
It marks the day in 1973 when the General Assembly approved Arabic as an official UN language.
Q 08Which national language grew from an Arabic dialect but is written in the Latin alphabet?
Maltese
It descends from extinct Siculo-Arabic and is the only Semitic language written in Latin script.
Q 09Which European language shows the heaviest Arabic influence, thanks to centuries of Al-Andalus?
Spanish
Portuguese, Catalan and Sicilian picked up plenty too, and the Balkan languages got theirs via Ottoman Turkish.
Q 10Which of these English words is of Arabic origin?
Algebra
Admiral, alcohol, algorithm, coffee, magazine, sofa and zenith all arrived the same way, mostly via other Mediterranean languages.
Q 11Which of these everyday English words also came from Arabic?
Mattress
So did sherbet, candy, lemon, cotton and jar.
Q 12What do Arabic speakers call classical and modern standard Arabic, meaning "the eloquent"?
Al-fuṣḥā
The split into Classical and Modern Standard Arabic is mainly a Western linguists' distinction.
Q 13What is the term for using two varieties of one language in different social settings, as in Arabic?
Diglossia
Educated Arabs speak their school-taught standard plus a native dialect, and switch between them, sometimes mid-sentence.
Q 21Whose al-Kitāb was the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language?
Sibawayhi
He built it on a corpus of poetry, Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants he considered reliable speakers.
Q 22Most Arabic words are built from a root of how many consonants?
Three
The root k-t-b ('write') plus the pattern -a-a-tu gives katabtu, 'I wrote'.
Q 23How many consonant phonemes does Modern Standard Arabic have?
28
It also has six vowel phonemes, and length is contrastive for both consonants and vowels.
Q 24Which script style is the one used in print and by computers?
Q 14Which spoken dialect is among the most widely understood in the Arab world, thanks to its films and TV?
Egyptian Arabic
Around 67 million people speak it in Egypt alone.
Q 15Which North African dialect is hardest for Arabic speakers east of Libya to understand?
Moroccan
The reverse is not true, largely because Egyptian media is watched everywhere.
Q 16Maghrebi Arabic, spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, is also known by what name?
Darija
It has roughly 70 million speakers and, through extinct Sicilian Arabic, is the ancestor of Maltese.
Q 17Which Iraqi word means "there is", where a Levantine speaker would say fīh and a North African kayən?
Aku
All three descend from different Classical Arabic forms, much as Romance languages kept different Latin words.
Q 18Who is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar and pioneering the dots that distinguish consonants?
Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali
He lived from about 603 to 689; the standardization of the language was complete by around the end of the 8th century.
Q 19Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi compiled the first Arabic dictionary. What was it called?
Kitāb al-'Ayn
Its title means 'The Book of the Letter ع'; al-Farahidi also set down the rules of Arabic prosody.
Q 20Ibn Manzur's great 1290 dictionary Lisān al-ʿArab has a title meaning what?
Tongue of the Arabs
It records 9,273 roots; the later Tāj al-ʿArūs of 1774 lists 11,978.
Naskh
Ruqʻah is the everyday handwriting style used for correspondence.
Q 25Which two letters form the only mandatory ligature in Arabic writing?
Lām and alif
Six letters, including alif, dāl and wāw, can only join to the letter before them, never the one after.
Q 26Which three Arabic letters share one basic shape and differ only by their dots?
b, t and th
One dot below makes b, two above make t and three above make th; early Quran manuscripts often omitted the dots entirely.
Q 27Arabic script evolved from which earlier script between the 4th and 6th centuries?
Nabataean
Nabataean itself came from Aramaic, so the relationship is like that of Cyrillic to Greek.
Q 28The Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays, dates to which year?
328 CE
It was found at Namaraa in Syria; the oldest surviving Arabic papyrus dates from 643 CE.
Q 29Where were the earliest known lines of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern script found?
En Avdat, Israel
They are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm'allāhe, dated to around 125 CE.
Q 30In Egypt and countries east of it, which set of digits is normally used?
Eastern Arabic numerals
Most of North Africa uses the 0-9 Western forms familiar in Europe.