Ammon News - Today, December 18, 2022 is World Arabic Language Day (WALD). This year’s celebration is the 10th since its first celebration in 2012. December 18 every year is set aside by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to commemorate the WALD.

The occasion is used to highlight Arabic’s legacy and its immense contributions as the world’s richest language to humanity.

Established by the UNESCO in 2010, the WALD is intended to celebrate Arabic as a language and promote cultural diversity. The date for the WALD, December 18, was the day in 1973 when Arabic became the sixth official language of the UN.

With a very rich history, Arabic is one of the most widely used languages globally; spoken by over 420 million native speakers and used by about 1.5 billion Muslims around the world including UNESCO’s 22-member states.

Some unique features of Arabic include being a language with no capital letters in its orthography. Unlike English and several other languages, verbs come before subject in the syntax of Arabic language. More than 7,000 words in the English language are either Arabic or derived from Arabic.

Aside the classical form of the language, Arabic has many different dialects some of which are not understood by other speakers of the language.