Arabic Harakat

In many language learning books (ahem, Al-Kitab, ahem) they make a big mistake in my opinion by not introducing harakat earlier to students learning Arabic. Being familiar with these types of diacritical markers helps heaps and heaps in the long run, I assure you.

What are diacritical marks? If you've been trying to sound out some of the words in my examples below, you may have found that the same letters can be pronounced slightly differently despite looking the same in script. The diacritical marks help us to pronounce each letter as it should be pronounced. Let's go over some of the basic ones for now.

These harakat represent Arabic's short vowels: a, u, and i


For example, the letter

ب

can be pronounced as either ba, bu, or bi depending on which type of harakat is introduced into the letter.

This is how they are depicted:

بَ ba

بُ bu

بِ bi
بْ b

Important note: the last diacritical mark, known as a sukoon, in fact just denotes a lack of a short vowel associated with the letter. This is why it is oftentimes not even written.

These harakat can be applied to any letter we have previously learnt, and now allows us to be able to pronounce words with absolute certainty!

Examples:

ُالـــحَــــــمــــــــد

a-l-ha-m-du = alhamdu = praise

ُالــــــبـَـــــنَـــــات

a-l-ba-na-tu = albanat = girls


ُالـــــــبِــــــــنْــــت

a-l-bi-n-tu = albint = girl