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Make the Definite Article in Arabic

Edited by Hotelier, priya, Eng

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Video: Make the Definite Article in Arabic

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Hello, and thank you for watching VisiHow. In today's tutorial, we will learn how to make the definite article in the Arabic language. If you're a non-native speaker, and you've always wanted to say, "the dog" in Arabic (as opposed to just "dog" or "a dog"), we're going to teach you how to do that today.

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Make the definite article in Arabic.mp4-canvas7 978543.jpg

Steps

1
As we can see, we have three English words written to the left-hand side of the whiteboard
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They are "Door", "Pen" and "House".

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2
Now, we will write those in Arabic, which is written from the right to the left, so we can see how they look
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The word for door in Arabic is "baab", which is spelled baa-alif-baa. Again, it's "baab".

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3
The word for pen is "qalam", which is spelled qaaf-laam-miim
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Again, it's "qalam".
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4
The word for house is "bayt", which is spelled baa-yaa-taa
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We will fully vowel these for our language learners. As a note, the Arabic language is not typically written with all of the vowels. There may only be some vowels for clarification. A native or fluent speaker will be able to read and understand these words perfectly, but for a person who is just learning Arabic, it's very helpful to have all of the vowels written in so we can get used to how they look, and how to read the language correctly.

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5
In order to make "baab" with a long A, we will add fat-ha on top of the baa, which followed by the letter alif makes a long vowel sound
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6
To keep this word in the nominative case, we will need a dammah
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Also, since it's indefinite, we will use tanween. That makes it "baabun". Tanween is expressed with the dammah by a little tail off of the dammah.

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7
It may also be expressed as two dammahs
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Either way is completely fine.
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8
To make "qalam", we will need a fat-ha above qaaf and laam
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9
Then, we will need tanween with a dammah in normative case above miim
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10
For "bayt", we will need a fat-ha just above the baa
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11
The yaa does not have a following vowel sound, so we will use sukoon, which is the absence of a vowel
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12
To make this nominative with tanween, it will be "baytun"
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13
How can we make these into "the door", "the pen" and "the house"
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We need to use the definite article, which is expressed in Arabic as "al".
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14
"Al" will be placed before each of these words, but when we are placing "al" before, we need to remove tanween
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A word cannot have both "al" and tanween. In the case of "baab", it will have a single, regular dammah if it is nominative case. We will keep the words in nominative case for this exercise.
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15
"Baabun" will become "al-baab"
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We can also say it as "al-baabu".
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16
"Qalamun" will become "al-qalam" or "al-qalamu"
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17
"Baytun" will become "al-bayt" or "al-baytu"
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18
If we vowel all of these, it would look almost the same, just without tanween at the end
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19
This concludes our tutorial today on how to use the definite article "al" in Arabic language
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If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please leave them in the space below.
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