Varieties of Arabic
There are many varieties of Arabic (also called dialects of Arabic or vernacular languages) in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula. It is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are not easily comprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf. Within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages.
Defective script
A broadly defective script is the Arabic abjad. The modern script does not normally write short vowels, but for the first few centuries of the Islamic era, long vowels were not written and many consonant letters were ambiguous as well. The Arabic script derives from the Aramaic, and not only did the Aramaic language have fewer phonemes than Arabic, but several originally distinct Aramaic letters had conflated (become indistinguishable in shape), so that in the early Arabic writings 28 consonant phonemes were represented by only 18 letters—and in the middle of words, only 15 were distinct. For example, medial represented , and represented . A system of diacritic marks, or "pointing," was later developed to resolve the ambiguities, and over the centuries became nearly universal. However, even today unpointed texts of a style called " are found, where these consonants are not distinguished.