Topic 1 of 62

التنوين— Definiteness & Tanwīn

Every Arabic noun is either نكرة (indefinite, "a/an ...") or معرفة (definite, "the ..."). Tanwīn — the trailing ـٌ ـً ـٍ sound — is the spoken marker of an indefinite noun, and it disappears the moment the noun becomes definite, whether by adding أل, attaching a possessive pronoun, or being a proper noun, demonstrative, pronoun, or the first term of an idāfah whose second term is definite.