Ethnologue estimated first-language speakers of Arabic, counting all its spoken varieties, at about 315 million in 58 countries, fourth among the world’s languages on that measure (21st ed., 2018); counting first- and second-language users together, it ranks fifth (29th ed., 2026).

Arabic is an official language, alone or with others, in the constitutions of twenty-one states: twenty of the twenty-two Arab League members, and Chad.

Arabic is one of the six official languages of the United Nations: adopted in the General Assembly and its Main Committees by resolution 3190 of 18 December 1973, then in its subsidiary bodies (1980), and in ECOSOC and the Security Council (1982). It has also been one of the six official languages of the World Health Organization since 1978.

UNESCO has celebrated World Arabic Language Day on 18 December every year since 2012; the item was placed before the 190th session of its Executive Board at the request of Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

‘Ali Hilmi Musa and ‘Abd al-Sabur Shahin counted by computer the roots of al-Zabidi’s Taj al-‘Arus, the largest Arabic dictionary: 11,978 roots (1973). This is a count of roots — dictionary entries — not of words; the words derived from them are many times more.

Computational corpora count the words of the Qur’an as 77,429 or 77,430 depending on how the text is segmented, of which 19,009 are distinct word forms (Quranic Arabic Corpus, University of Leeds; QuranMorph, Birzeit University, 2025).

Arabic now has two completed historical dictionaries: the Sharjah Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language, completed on 21 September 2024 in 127 volumes, with about 73,000 entries, 11,300 roots and some 351,000 citations; and the Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic, completed on 22 December 2025, with over 300,000 entries, over 10,000 roots and a corpus of over a billion words.

Websites whose content is in Arabic have ranged between 0.5% and 1.2% in W3Techs’ yearly measurement since 2015, and stand at 0.6% in October 2026; Arabic speakers, by contrast, are about 5% of internet users, fourth among languages (2020). The often-quoted 3% is an ESCWA–ITU estimate (2014) made by a different method, not a point in the same series.

The Falak corpus platform of the King Salman Global Academy for Arabic Language holds 21 corpora totalling about 1.55 billion words (1,554,970,750), according to the platform’s own data in October 2026.

Rafael Lapesa estimated that Spanish words of Arabic origin, counting general vocabulary and place names together, exceed four thousand forms, and judged the Arabic element the most important in the Spanish vocabulary after Latin until the sixteenth century (Historia de la lengua española, 9th ed., 1981, p. 133).

Abdelilah Suisse compiled six published counts of Arabisms in Portuguese ranging from 600 to 4,000, and attributed the spread to differing criteria: some authors count derived forms, others only simple words still in use (Língua-lugar, 2020).

John R. Perry reports that a dictionary-based sample yields about 8,000 Arabic loanwords in current Persian use, about forty percent of an everyday literary vocabulary of 20,000 words, not counting compounds and derivatives (Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2002).

The Turkish Language Association’s dictionary contains 6,463 words of Arabic origin in its 2005 edition and 6,516 in its 2011 edition — the largest group of loanwords in it, ahead of French (5,540) and Persian (1,375).

Sergio Baldi put Arabic loans in Hausa and Swahili at over thirty per cent of their lexicon (2006); his dictionary of Arabic loanwords in the languages of West Africa and in Swahili traces 3,034 Arabic source words in about 130 languages (Karthala, 2008).

Garland Cannon and Alan Kaye’s historical dictionary of Arabic contributions to English lists 2,338 items borrowed from Arabic directly or through other languages (1994); Julia Schultz found 302 Arabic words in the OED that entered English after 1801 alone (2016).

Lexicologist Jean Pruvost said that French general dictionaries contain at least five to six hundred words from Arabic or passed through Arabic, against about a hundred Gaulish words, and that the figure rises considerably if specialised vocabularies are counted (Le Courrier de l'Atlas, 2018).

Arabic script is in use today for 288 of the 368 languages linked to it in SIL’s writing-systems list (2025); Meikal Mumin documented between eighty and ninety-five African languages written in it, known as Ajami (Brill, 2014).