Variation among languages
Among the world’s most widely spoken languages, articles are found almost exclusively in Indo-European and SemiticPandora charms languages. Strictly speaking, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Malay, and Russian have no articles, but certain words can be used like articles, when needed.
Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles. Most of the languages in this family do not have definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the Baltic languages and most Slavic languages. Although Classical Greek has a definite article (which has survived into Modern Greek and which bears strong resemblance to the German definite article), the earlier Homeric Greek did not. Articles developed independently in several language families.
Not all languages have both definite and indefinite articles. Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, were thought to have only a definite article. In fact, this is not true at all. For example, the Arabic tanween which is part of the Arabic vowel system, is an identifier of a number of linguistic features, from them the word’s being indefinite.[8] For languages that do have only one article, it is far less common for a language to have an indefinite article without having a definite article.
Some languages have different types of definite and indefinite articles to distinguish finer shades of meaning; for example, French and Italian have a partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns, while Colognian has two distinct sets of definite articles indicating focus and uniqueness, and Macedonian uses definite articles in a demonstrative sense, distinguishing this from that (with an intermediate degree). The words this and that (and their plurals, these and those) can be understood in English as, ultimately, forms of the definite article the (whose declension in Old English included thaes, an ancestral form of this/that and these/those).
In many languages, the form of the article may vary according to the gender, number, or case of its noun. In some languages the article may pandora necklacebe the only indication of the case, e.g., German Der Hut des Napoleon, “Napoleon’s hat”. Many languages do not use articles at all, and may use other ways of indicating old versus new information, such as topic-comment constructions.