Arabic Reigns Supreme: World’s Richest Language Boasts 12 Million Words

English, the universal language, has approximately 750,000 different words, according to EF Education First and a UNESCO report entitled "Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger". But Arabic has about twelve million, according to the UN report, which specifies that 90% of the 7,000 languages that exist in the world are spoken by less than 100,000 people.

Arabic has approximately 280 million speakers and is the fifth most spoken language in the world, after Chinese, Spanish, English and Hindi. It is the official language in more than twenty countries and is one of the official languages of the United Nations. The most widespread Arabic dialect is Egyptian, probably because it is the most populous Arab country, thinks La Razon.

Arabic is more spoken in North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Egypt) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Iraq), where it is the official or native language. But there is also a large Arabic-speaking population in countries such as Sudan, Yemen, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, Chad, Eritrea, etc. The Arabic dialects are divided into two main categories: Maghrebi (Western) and Mashreqi (Eastern).

Arabic is also spoken in Spain, in cities such as Ceuta and Melilla, located in North Africa. Approximately 5% of the Spanish population is Muslim, which facilitates the spread of Arabic in the Iberian Peninsula. For the record, Spanish contains approximately 8% of vocabulary of Arabic origin, or about 4,000 words, such as "almohada", "alcalde", "azúcar" or names like "Álvaro" or "Andalucía".