Language Contact: Impact of Arabic Language on African and Indian Languages

Abstract

Arabic is an international language and the language of the Holy Qur’an. It has influenced many languages around the world, including Persian, Kurdish, Hindi, Urdu, Kashmiri, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, and Malayalam. This influence primarily spread through the Muslim community, as Arabic served as their religious and cultural language and as the language of business, facilitating interaction with speakers of other languages. This language contact resulted in many Arabic loan words, similarity in the shapes of letters, grammar and even language structure too. The continuous cultural and linguistic interactions have also led to the development of new Arabic-regional languages and literary works in some places across the world. This article tries to analyse the impact of Arabic language on Indian and African languages.