LONG VOWELS

Long Vowels in Arabic:

The table below shows the long vowels in Arabic, they’re considered long vowels because of the stress they put on a given vowel, same thing exists in English, the word “exceed” should be stressed in the vowels “ee” or “loose” the stress in the “oo”, note that these long vowels are also considered some sort of consonants.

There is also the SHADDAH, it’s the symbol marked as number 1 on the image below, used when we have a double consonant, like instead of writing the proper name (ANNA with double “N”, we only write it with one N and add SHADDAH on the top of  N, the example # 2 shows how the SHADDAH placed on the top of the letter T in Arabic, the transliteration of the word is QATTA’A which mean the verb “to cut” in Arabic it’s written QATA’A and instead of writing double T, the word has only one T and a SHADAH on the top of it.

Example # 3 shows a little symbol on the top of the ALIF which looks like the Latin ~, it’s called MAD, and mostly used on the top of ALIF to express a long “A” something like “AA”, the word shown in example # 4 is AAB, it means the month of August, but the MAD is not used that often, so you will come across it but rarely.

 Finally, This may surprise you but short vowels in Arabic are not used that often, you may come across them if two words look the same and the writer wants you to distinguish between them so that they won’t be confused, the person would than add only the vowel which doesn’t exist in the other word, but other than that sometimes you can read a whole text without coming across any short vowel. The reason is that in Arabic most words are distinctive without short vowels; I will give you an example in English in the Image below:

 It doesn’t take that much thinking to know what do these words mean, I omitted 2 vowels from Canada for example, and two vowels from the word Computer ... that’s how reading Arabic works. Sometimes we have to add a vowel because it’s a long vowel and not a short one like the “a” in Cnda.

 Below is an example of how the verb “to write” is written in Arabic, it’s written كتب   which is equal to “ktb” in Latin alphabet, but we don’t read it like “ktb” but as “kataba”, as you have noticed 3 vowels are added when you pronounce it, but when you write it, only the consonants are enough to give us an idea about the word. Writing only one verb in Arabic alphabet without short vowels saved you the time to write 3 vowels, imagine how much it could save you when you write a text…

In short, short vowels that are presented as symbols are not important to read Arabic, but they make it easy to read for beginner and also to avoid confusion between two similar looking words.

Try to master these Arabic vowels as they’re very important for beginners.