Passive voice in Arabic
So far, in all our examples, we’ve used the active voice, where the doer of the action is the subject of the verb. In the passive voice, however, the entity affected by the action becomes the subject.
In Arabic, the passive can be formed in two ways:
By changing the internal vowel pattern of the verb (without adding new letters).
By using specific verb forms, typically Form 5, Form 7, or Form 8 (and sometimes Form 2 or Form 6 depending on context).
Both methods can exist simultaneously. This means you can either change the verb’s conjugation to make it passive or use a verb pattern that inherently expresses a passive or reflexive meaning.
First, let’s look at the difference between active and passive voice:
Let’s see how to conjugate a verb in the passive form in the past tense:
And now, let’s look at some examples:
As you can see, almost any type of verb can be placed in the passive voice.
Now, let’s move on to the present tense and see how to conjugate a verb in the passive form:
And now, let’s look at some examples:
