- ISO 639
ar- Its own name
- العربية
- Script
- Arabic
- Direction
- Right to left
Arabic
Arabic (العربية) is spoken by 378.6M people across 34 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 26 of them. Egypt holds 28% of its speakers.
Reach summary
What one translation into Arabic covers, across every market that speaks it.
Speakers
378.6M
Egypt 28% · Saudi Arabia 10% · Algeria 9%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 34 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory.
Online speakers
260.3M
0%100%
69% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
28%
0%100%
Egypt, the largest single territory, holds 28% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
34
26 where it is official nationally, 24 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$18.8T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
Translation rate
1.25×
1.0×1.6×+
About 25% above a mainstream pair, reflecting how many vendors work in it. It feeds the budget estimator.
Where Arabic is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column has no total.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EgyptEG | 94% | 104.6M | 78.1M | official |
| Saudi ArabiaSA | 100% | 36.5M | 36.5M | official |
| AlgeriaDZ | 74% | 34.8M | 26.9M | official |
| SudanSD | 61% | 30.8M | 5.7M | official |
| IraqIQ | 68% | 28.6M | 23.3M | official |
| YemenYE | 74% | 23.8M | 4.2M | official |
| MoroccoMA | 62% | 23.2M | 21.1M | official |
| SyriaSY | 80% | 19.1M | 6.4M | official |
| JordanJO | 100% | 11.2M | 10.7M | official |
| TunisiaTN | 90% | 10.8M | 8.3M | official |
| United Arab EmiratesAE | 78% | 7.8M | 7.8M | official |
| LibyaLY | 74% | 5.4M | 4.5M | official |
| Palestinian TerritoriesPS | 100% | 5.4M | 4.7M | official |
| LebanonLB | 86% | 4.6M | 3.7M | official |
| SomaliaSO | 34% | 4.4M | 1.2M | official |
| MauritaniaMR | 85% | 3.7M | 1.7M | official |
| South SudanSS | 27% | 3.4M | 228.8K | major |
| ChadTD | 17% | 3.2M | 409.9K | official |
| OmanOM | 81% | 3.2M | 3M | official |
| KuwaitKW | 100% | 3.1M | 3.1M | official |
| QatarQA | 89% | 2.3M | 2.2M | official |
| IsraelIL | 20% | 1.9M | 1.7M | official |
| IranIR | 2% | 1.8M | 1.5M | minority or diaspora |
| BahrainBH | 87% | 1.4M | 1.4M | official |
| CanadaCA | 2.3% | 892.3K | 841.9K | minority or diaspora |
| Western SaharaEH | 100% | 652.3K | — | official |
| ComorosKM | 66% | 594.1K | 193.2K | official |
| TürkiyeTR | 0.6% | 471.1K | 422.9K | minority or diaspora |
| EritreaER | 4.9% | 310.9K | 44.6K | official |
| United KingdomGB | 0.3% | 205.4K | 196.1K | minority or diaspora |
| MaliML | 0.9% | 197.9K | 72.8K | minority or diaspora |
| CameroonCM | 0.4% | 120.8K | 55.9K | minority or diaspora |
| DjiboutiDJ | 7.3% | 72.6K | 47.4K | official |
| NigerNE | 0.3% | 55.3K | 8.6K | minority or diaspora |
CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
Writing system
Arabic
Lays out right to left, so the interface mirrors as well as translates. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
6
Every counted message needs up to 6 arms, and the translator needs all of them.
Rate index
1.25×
Prices about 25% above a mainstream pair.
Engineering note. 6 plural categories. Bidi work required.