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Chiefly, the Arabic alphabet consists of 28 primary letters, these are letters 1 to 28 in Table 1. However, when scripting in Arabic, the eight modified letters listed in positions 29 to 36 in the same table are used just the same. If these 8 modified forms are lumped back into the primary list based on shape or phonetic similarity, the outcome then is as shown in Table 2. For accurate frequency analysis, each of the 36 letters of Table 1 gets its frequency counted independently. The ordering of the alphabet shown in the tables is more logical than is used by the Unicode standard.
Although the full set of Arabic characters includes about ten diacritics as as shown in the Figure 1, frequency analysis of Arabic characters is only concerned with computing the frequency of alphabet letters shown in Table 2.
The following famous Arabic sources are used to generate an acceptable amount of data on which frequency statistics are conducted.
Collectively, these sources add up to 3,378 pages, generating 1,297,259 words, or, 5,122,132 letters. The following two figures show the letter frequency distribution for the counted letters; Figure 2 shows a histogram data sorted on Unicode value. Figure 3 shows a histogram data sorted on frequency.
Using the Qur'an as data source for Arabic letter frequency generation, the frequency distribution of letters is much in line with what's reported and exhibited in the Figures 2 and 3 above.[4] The following list highlights statistics particular to one of the most common print editions (the recitation of Hafs through Asim) also available online.
A detailed study of letter and word frequency analysis of the entire book of Qur'an is provided by Intellaren Articles.[5]