Script used to write Arabic and a number of other languages whose speakers have been influenced by Arab and Islamic culture.
The 28-character Arabic alphabet developed from a script used to write Nabataean w , y , and (historically) the glottal stop do double duty as vowel letters for long u , i , and a . Additional diacritics, representing short vowels (or the lack thereof), case endings, and geminate (duplicate) consonants, are normally employed only for the text of the Qurān , for primers, or in instances where the reading might otherwise be ambiguous. Because Arabic script is fundamentally cursive, most letters have slightly different forms depending on whether they occur in the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Non-Semitic languages for which some version of the Arabic alphabet has been or is used include Persian , Kurdish, Pashto, Urdu , some Turkic languages, Malay , Swahili , and {{link=Hausa language">Hausa . The Maltese language is the only form of Arabic to be written in the Latin alphabet.