Arabization

Arabization or Arabisation (Arabic: تعريب‎ taʻrīb) describes a growing cultural influence on a non-Arab area that gradually changes into one that speaks Arabic and/or incorporates Arab culture and Arab identity. It was most prominently achieved during the 7th century Arabian Muslim conquests which spread the Arabic language, culture, and—having been carried out by Arabian Muslims as opposed to Arab Christians or Arabic speaking Jews—the religion of Islam to the lands they conquered. The result: some elements of Arabian origin combined in various forms and degrees with elements taken from conquered civilizations and ultimately denominated "Arab", as opposed to "Arabian".

After the rise of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula, Arab culture and language spread through trade with African states, conquest, and intermarriage of the non-Arab local population with the Arabs, in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and the Sudan. The peninsular Arabic language became common among these areas; dialects also formed. Also, though Yemen is traditionally held to be the homeland of Arabs, most of the population did not speak Arabic (but instead South Semitic languages) prior to the spread of Islam.

The influence of Arabic has also been profound in many other countries whose cultures have been influenced by Islam. Arabic was a major source of vocabulary for languages as diverse as Berber, spoken Indonesian, Kurdish, Malay, Maltese, Persian, Portuguese, Sindhi, Punjabi, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken; a process that reached its high point in the 10th to the 14th centuries, the high point of Arabic culture, and although many of these words have fallen out of use since then, many remain. For example the Arabic word for book /kita:b/ is used in all the languages listed, apart from Malay and Indonesian (where it specifically means "religious book") and Portuguese and Spanish (which use the Latin-derived "livro" and "libro", respectively).