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العربية Arabic
Family	Sub-family	Language of	Script
Afro-Asiatic	Central Semitic	Saudi Arabia, Syria, and 23 other countries. United Nations	عربي Arabic

In Arabic, a noun can either be singular, dual or plural. A singular represents one thing, the dual two and the plural represents three or more.

To spot a dual or plural noun in a text, all you have to do is look for their markers. Dual nouns have the ان/ين ending while masculine plurals have the ون/ين ending and the feminine plurals have ات.

Do not confuse the dual ين with the plural ين. The difference between the two is that the dual marker will have a fatHa (فتحة) on the letter that precedes it making a "ayn" sound while the letter preceding the plural marker will hold a kasra (كسرة) making a long "ee" sound.

Ex. The Arabic word for "teacher:"

Singular	مُعَلِّمٌ
Dual	مُعَلِّمَانِ/مُعَلِّمَينِ
Masculine Plural	مُعَلِّمُونَ/مُعَلِّمِينَ
Feminine Plural	مُعَلِّماتٌ

Both dual and plural have two different markers both used for different cases. The dual ان and the plural ون are used when the case is nominative while the dual ين and the plural ين are used for both accusative and genitive cases. We will talk more about cases later.

The plural form we talked about here is the regular form. We also have the irregular plurals which we will talk about separately.

Arabic pages
Introduction · Articles · Gender · Plurality · Adpositions · Pronouns · Sounds and Writing · Syntax · Verbs