Influence of Arabic on other languages

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Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries visited by Islam or Islamic power.

Arabic loanwords have made into many languages as diverse as Amharic, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chaldean, Chechen, Croatian, Dagestani, English, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kutchi, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Malaysian, Odia, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Serbian, Sicilian, Spanish, Sindhi, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan and Wolof as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Other languages such as Maltese^[1] and Nubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary. Spanish has one of the largest Arabic-influenced vocabularies of any European language, around 8 percent, due to Arab rule mainly in the Southern Iberia from 711 until 1492 known as Al-Andalus, however Spain's re-Christianization and resulting loss of contact with Arabic culture has led to a significant shift in both meaning and pronunciation of Spanish words of Arabic etymology.

The terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber taẓallit, "prayer" < salat), academic terms (like Persian manteq, "logic"), to everyday conjunctions (like Hindi/Urdu lekin, "but"). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow numbers from Arabic. Most religious terms used by Muslims around the world are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as ṣalāt, 'prayer' and imām, 'prayer leader'. In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often mediated by other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic; for example many older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri.

Outside the Muslim world, there are more limited borrowings from Arabic, usually to denote vegetables and other articles in commerce, such as "aubergine", "alcohol" and also some other terms like "admiral". Among European languages, these mostly were transmitted through Spanish and Turkish.