How to Pronounce the Arabic Letters English Doesn't Have

Arabic pronunciation is hard for English speakers because of eleven sounds: ع ح ء in the throat, خ غ ق at the back of the mouth, the emphatics ص ض ط ظ, and ر. Every other letter has a close English match. Each of the eleven changes meaning: قلب qalb is heart, كلب kalb is dog.

This page covers how the Arabic letters are pronounced. For their shapes and the sun and moon letters, use our Arabic alphabet chart. Transliteration follows the same scheme as that chart: a dot under a letter marks an emphatic (ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ) or the throat ḥ, ʿ is ع, ʾ is the glottal stop ء, and a line over a vowel (ā ī ū) makes it long. Our Arabic transliteration guide compares it with other systems.

The 11 Arabic sounds English does not have

Eleven Arabic sounds give English speakers trouble: most have no English equivalent, and the two that do (ء and خ) hide in places English speakers do not notice. Each has a look-alike that English speakers swap in by mistake. The last column gives two real words that only that sound separates. Places of articulation follow the Arabic phonology article on Wikipedia and the University of Victoria consonant table. Every word pair was checked against its Wiktionary entry, for example qalb, heart.

Four of these letters have native recordings on the site, made for our page on Levantine Arabic and its 38 pronunciation recordings.

• ق qāf:
• ض ḍād:
• ظ ẓāʾ:
• أ hamza, the glottal stop:

How to make each hard sound

Each hard Arabic sound is close to a sound you already make, moved somewhere English never uses: down into the throat, back to the uvula, or with the tongue pulled back. The eleven fall into four groups that share one movement each, so learn the movement once per group.

The throat letters: ḥāʾ ح, ʿayn ع and hamza ء

ح and ع are made in the pharynx, the part of the throat behind the root of your tongue. Wikipedia lists them as the voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricatives, which means they are the same squeeze, once without voice and once with it.

Start with ح. Breathe out a normal h, the way you would fog a pair of glasses. Now tighten the back of your throat as if something very spicy has just gone down, and breathe out through the narrow gap. It should sound like a loud, harsh whisper. That is ḥāʾ. Say حَال ḥāl (condition) and then هَال hāl (cardamom), and you should feel the difference in your throat, not your mouth.

ع is ح with your voice switched on. Hold the ḥ squeeze, then hum through it. The result sounds strangled at first, and that is fine; it relaxes with practice. Many learners replace ع with a glottal stop, which is why the first pair in the table, ʿalam and ʾalam, matters. If those two words sound the same when you record yourself, the squeeze is missing.

ء hamza is the easy one. English already has it: it is the catch in uh-oh, and many British speakers use it for the t in bottle. The difficulty is remembering to say it in the middle or end of a word. Skip it in سَأَلَ saʾala (he asked) and you have said سَالَ sāla (it flowed). The dialects do drop it, which is why you hear sāl for "he asked" in speech, but in Modern Standard Arabic it is a full consonant.

The back of the mouth: khāʾ خ, ghayn غ and qāf ق

These three are made where the back of the tongue meets the soft palate and the uvula, the small flap hanging at the back of your mouth. خ is the easiest of all eleven, because Scottish loch and German Bach already have it. Keep it scratchy. If it comes out as a k, the tongue is closing completely instead of leaving a gap for air.

غ is خ with voice, the same move as ح to ع. It sounds like gargling water, or like the r in French Paris. The trap here is spelling: English readers see gh and say g, which turns غَرِيب gharīb (strange) into something a Gulf speaker hears as قَرِيب garīb (near).

ق is a stop, not a rasp. Say k, then say it again with your tongue further back, then again further back, until the back of the tongue touches the uvula. A k said in that back position is close enough for most listeners. A k said in the normal English position turns قَلْب qalb (heart) into كَلْب kalb (dog).

The four emphatics: ṣād ص, ḍād ض, ṭāʾ ط and ẓāʾ ظ

The emphatic letters are s, d, t and dh with the back of the tongue raised and pulled back toward the throat. Wikipedia describes them as pronounced with "the back of the tongue approaching the pharynx". The tip of the tongue stays where it is for the plain letter. What changes is the shape behind it, and that shape darkens the vowels next to it: the a after an emphatic moves toward the a of father or the vowel of caught.

Listen for that vowel change first. Most English speakers hear the vowel before they hear the consonant, so practise in pairs. Say سَيْف sayf (sword) with a bright a, then صَيْف ṣayf (summer) with your tongue pulled back and a darker, rounder vowel. Do the same with تِين tīn (figs) and طِين ṭīn (mud). If someone listening can tell which word you meant, you have it.

ض is the one learners finish last. The early Arabic grammarians called Arabic the language of the ḍād because they thought no other language had this sound, and its old pronunciation has changed: the Wikipedia article notes it was once a lateral sound, a value it keeps only among older speakers in a few isolated dialects. Today it is an emphatic d. Practise it against دَرْب darb (path) with ضَرْب ḍarb (hitting). ظ is the emphatic version of the th in this, and the pair ذَلَّ dhalla / ظَلَّ ẓalla trains it.

The Arabic r: rāʾ ر

ر is made with the tip of the tongue against the ridge just behind the upper teeth. A single ر is often one quick tap, close to the tt in American butter. A doubled ر, written with a shadda, is a real trill of several taps, like the Spanish rr in perro. The English r, where the tongue bunches up without touching anything, is the wrong sound in every position.

Learners whose first language is French or German have the opposite problem. They make r at the back of the mouth, which in Arabic is غ. That is why رَيْب rayb (doubt) and غَيْب ghayb (the unseen) are in the table. The two words appear a verse apart in the opening of the Quran's second chapter, so anyone reciting it meets the contrast early.

A practice order for the hard letters

Practise the hard letters easiest first, one group at a time, in word pairs rather than letters alone. Spend about ten minutes a day and record yourself on your phone, because you will not hear your own mistakes while speaking.

1. The free sounds first: ء, خ, ث and ذ. The glottal stop is in uh-oh, خ is in loch, and ث and ذ are the two English th sounds of think and this. Say the alphabet chart's letter names with these sounds in place until they are automatic.
2. ح against ه. Fog-the-glasses h, then the squeezed h. Drill حَرَم ḥaram / هَرَم haram and حَال ḥāl / هَال hāl. Do not move on until a listener can tell each pair apart.
3. ع out of ح. Hold the ḥ squeeze and add voice. Drill عَلَم ʿalam / أَلَم ʾalam. Expect this step to take the longest.
4. غ out of خ. The same move as step 3, one place further forward. Drill خَال khāl / حَال ḥāl so you keep خ and ح apart, then غَرِيب gharīb / قَرِيب qarīb.
5. ق against ك. Walk the k backwards until the tongue meets the uvula. Drill قَلْب qalb / كَلْب kalb, then play the qāf recording above and copy it.
6. ص and ط. Listen for the vowel. Drill صَيْف ṣayf / سَيْف sayf and طِين ṭīn / تِين tīn.
7. ض and ظ last. Drill ضَرْب ḍarb / دَرْب darb and ظَلَّ ẓalla / ذَلَّ dhalla, copying the ḍād and ẓāʾ recordings.
8. ر throughout. Tap a single ر from day one, and trill only when it is doubled. Use رَيْب rayb / غَيْب ghayb if your r sits in the back of the throat.
9. Move into whole words. Once every pair is clean, read through our list of the most common Arabic words aloud. Those words carry the hard letters in the places you will actually meet them.

Sound before reading is how I was taught. I lived in an Arabic-speaking country for a year at the age of six and still remember both the words I learned and how to pronounce the hard letters. When I came back to Arabic as an adult, my tutor started me on Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah, a book that teaches the correct sound of each letter before anything else, and only then moved on to reading. The full story is in the way I was taught Arabic sounds.

Letters that Arabic dialects pronounce differently

Five letters change their sound from one spoken dialect to the next: ق, ج, ث, ذ and ظ. Modern Standard Arabic keeps one value for each, and that is the value to learn first, because every dialect speaker recognises it. The table shows what you will hear instead. It is compiled from our dialect pages and from the Wikipedia articles on Egyptian Arabic phonology, Levantine Arabic, Gulf Arabic and Libyan Arabic.

The pattern behind the table is old. The Varieties of Arabic article sets Bedouin-descended speech, which says ق as g and keeps the th sounds, against the old city dialects, which turned ق into a glottal stop or kept it as q. That is why Gulf Arabic sounds closer to Modern Standard Arabic than Egyptian Arabic does, although Egyptian is the dialect most Arabs understand. The Gulf also has shifts of its own: Emirati Arabic turns ج into y, and Kuwaiti and Qatari speech turn ك into ch next to an i sound. Libyan Arabic splits east from west, with Benghazi keeping the th sounds that Tripoli has lost.

The recordings from our Levantine page let you hear the shifts word by word. Each row gives the Standard form, then the way a Levantine speaker says it.

Note the second Levantine form of qalam. Said with a glottal stop, it comes out as ʾalam, which in Standard Arabic is أَلَم, pain. Context sorts it out for native speakers, but it shows why you should learn the Standard value first and pick up a dialect's shifts afterwards.

Mistakes that give away an English accent

Beyond the eleven letters, five English habits make Arabic sound foreign: clipping long vowels, saying doubled letters once, keeping vowels bright beside emphatics, dropping hamza and ʿayn, and reading from transliteration. Each one can change the meaning of a word.

• Vowel length. Arabic has short a, i, u and long ā, ī, ū, and the length changes the word. Hold a long vowel noticeably longer than a short one. English speakers clip long vowels, especially in unstressed syllables. The short vowels are the marks covered in our Arabic diacritics chart, and the long ones are written as letters.
• Doubled consonants. A shadda means the consonant is held for twice as long, as in the two t's of cat tail. ظَلَّ ẓalla has a held l. English only doubles a consonant across two words, so learners say them single.
• Bright vowels next to emphatics. If the vowel in ṣayf sounds like the one in sayf, the listener hears sword, not summer. Fix the vowel and the consonant usually follows.
• Dropped hamza and ʿayn. Both are full consonants in Standard Arabic. Leave them out and a listener has to guess which word you meant.
• Reading transliteration instead of script. The Latin letters are a crutch, and they hide the difference between ح and ه or ص and س once you stop looking for the dots. Read the Arabic letters as early as you can.

A note for learners who already speak Hebrew. Hebrew has letters that match ح and ع, but Modern Hebrew merged ח with the kh sound and ע with the glottal stop, so most Israeli speakers will need to relearn both throat sounds for Arabic. Our Arabic vs Hebrew comparison covers what else carries over between the two.

Where to hear the sounds and check yourself

Native recordings are the best check on your pronunciation, so pair this page with them. Start with the 38 recordings on our Levantine Arabic page, which include the qāf, ḍād and ẓāʾ used above. For Modern Standard Arabic, listen to Quran recitation: tajweed, the discipline of reciting it, fixes the point of articulation for every letter. I learned tajweed with a colour-coded Quran, which marks the rules in the text, and I recommend one.

Record yourself saying each word pair from the table, wait a day, then play it back without looking at the page. If you cannot tell which word of a pair you said, a listener cannot either. When the pairs are clean, take our self-check of your Arabic reading level to see where the rest of your Arabic stands.

Frequently asked questions

What are the hardest Arabic letters to pronounce?

For English speakers, the hardest are the two throat letters ع (ʿayn) and ح (ḥāʾ), then the four emphatic letters ص ض ط ظ, which are an s, d, t and dh said with the back of the tongue pulled back. ق (qāf), a k made at the uvula, comes next. The letter ض is usually the last to settle, and Arabic is sometimes called the language of the ḍād because of it.

How do you pronounce ع (ʿayn)?

ع is made by squeezing the throat behind the tongue root, as if starting to gag, while the voice is on. The easiest route is through ح: whisper a hard, squeezed h, then add your voice to the same squeeze and you have ʿayn. Test it with the pair عَلَم ʿalam (flag) and أَلَم ʾalam (pain). If both words sound the same, the squeeze is missing.

What is the difference between ح and ه in Arabic?

ه (hāʾ) is the ordinary English h, breathed out with a relaxed throat. ح (ḥāʾ) is breathed through a throat narrowed at the back, so it sounds tighter and raspier, like a loud whisper of h. They are separate letters that make separate words: حَرَم ḥaram is a sanctuary and هَرَم haram is a pyramid.

Is Arabic pronounced the way it is written?

Mostly, once the short vowels are shown. Each consonant letter has one sound in Modern Standard Arabic, and long vowels are written as letters. The catch is that everyday text leaves out the short vowels, so you need the diacritics or the word itself to know how to say it. The spoken dialects also change some letters, such as ق, which Cairo says as a glottal stop and the Gulf says as g.

Why do Arabic speakers pronounce ق differently?

Because the dialects inherited different sounds for it. Modern Standard Arabic has q, made at the uvula. City speech in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus turned it into a glottal stop, so قلب qalb (heart) is said ʾalb. The Gulf, Iraq, Libya and rural Jordan say it as g, so the same word is galb. Most speakers switch back to q in formal Arabic and in words borrowed from it.

Keep learning Arabic

• Arabic Vocabulary Lists & Anki DecksFour free Arabic vocabulary lists: Al Kitaab, A New Arabic Grammar, Quran ayat and the 99 Names, each as a printable file and a ready-made Anki deck.
• 40 Arabic Proverbs and Sayings, Word by Word40 Arabic proverbs and sayings in script and transliteration, glossed word by word, with the English equivalent, when to say each, and the book it comes from.
• Arabic Slang Words, and Which Dialect Says ThemArabic slang words with the dialects that really use them: 42 words in script and transliteration, from yalla and wallah to Moroccan wakha, flagged by register.
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