Translate your app into العربية
Arabic · ~370M native, ~420M total worldwide
Arabic is the official language of more than 20 countries spanning the Middle East and North Africa, a region with rapidly growing mobile penetration, young demographics and some of the world's wealthiest per-capita consumers in the Gulf. It is also the most under-localized major language in SaaS — shipping Arabic is a genuine competitive edge.
Arabic around the world
Arabic is spoken by ~370m native, ~420m total worldwide. It is used as an official or working language across 19+ countries and territories.
- Saudi Arabia
- Egypt
- Iraq
- Algeria
- Morocco
- Sudan
- Yemen
- Syria
- Tunisia
- United Arab Emirates
- Jordan
- Lebanon
- Libya
- Palestine
- Oman
- Kuwait
- Mauritania
- Qatar
- Bahrain
What you gain from a Arabic locale
MENA has among the youngest median populations on Earth and some of the highest smartphone-per-capita rates. Social and e-commerce adoption are outpacing global averages.
UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait consistently rank among the highest per-user spending geographies for mobile apps and SaaS.
Most Western SaaS products never ship Arabic. A polished ar locale makes you the obvious choice in the region, not the afterthought.
Shipping Arabic on Localize.to
MSA is understood across the entire Arabic-speaking world and is the right choice for UI, documentation and marketing copy. Dialects (Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, Maghrebi) are for voice and video — not apps.
Arabic reads right-to-left. Flip layout direction (dir="rtl"), mirror icons that imply direction (arrows, chevrons, progress bars), and keep numerals LTR inside RTL strings.
Create an ar target on Localize.to, import your source file, and assign a native MSA translator. Arabic typography is nuanced — machine translation alone rarely ships well.
Render every screen with long Arabic strings, mixed numbers, and Hijri/Gregorian dates. RTL bugs hide until you see them.
Common questions
MSA for your app. Every educated Arabic speaker reads MSA; dialects are conversational and vary so much that a Moroccan build is unreadable to a Kuwaiti user.
Usually a couple of days of CSS and icon work if your frontend was built with a CSS logical-properties mindset. Much more if you hardcoded left/right everywhere — budget accordingly.
Most Arabic users now prefer Western digits in UI. Keep numerals LTR inside RTL text and only use Arabic-Indic if your audience specifically expects them.
Ready to reach العربية speakers?
Create a project, add Arabic as a target language, and ship your first localized build today.