Languages (other than Arabic and English)

After covering how to say “I don’t speak Arabic” and “Do you speak English?” it occurred to me that some people might prefer it if they could encounter someone who spoke something other than English. Only took me a day to think of that one, right? So here’s a list of languages and their Arabic translations. All language names in Arabic are constructed grammatically as feminine adjectives, because they are all technically meant to modify the feminine noun لُغة (lughah), or “language,” even though that word is generally omitted (at least in speech). This is no different from how we treat languages in English, apart from the fact that English has no grammatical gender.

  • French = فَرَنسية (faransīyah)
  • German = ألمانية (almānīyah)
  • Spanish = إسبانية (isbānīyah)
  • Portuguese = بُرتُغالية (burtughālīyah)
  • Italian = إيطالية (īṭālīyah)
  • Russian = روسية (rūsīyah)
  • Chinese (Mandarin) = صينية (ṣīnīyah)
  • Japanese = يابانية (yābānīyah)
  • Hindi = هِندية (hindīyah)
  • Urdu = أُردية (urdīyah)
  • Hebrew = عبرية (ʿibrīyah)
  • Persian = فارِسية (fārisīyah)
  • Turkish = تُركية (turkīyah)

See the same list in Persian here and Turkish here. I can throw more languages up in comments if anybody needs them.

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