Arabs (Arabic: عرب‎, ʿarab) are a majorpanethnic group comprising the Arab world.^[15] They primarily inhabit Western Asia, North Africa, and parts of the Horn of Africa. Arabic-speaking populations in general are a highly heterogeneous collection of peoples, with different ancestral origins and identities. The ties that bind the Arab peoples are a veneer of shared heritage by virtue of commonlinguistic, cultural, and political traditions. As such, Arab identity is based on one or more of genealogical, linguistic orcultural grounds,^[16] although with competing identities often taking a more prominent role,^[17] based on considerations including regional,national, clan, kin, sect, and tribeaffiliations and relationships. If the Arab panethnicity is regarded as a single population, then it constitutes one of the world's largest groups after Han Chinese.

The Arabian Peninsula itself was not entirely originally Arab. Arabizationoccurred in some parts of the Arabian Peninsula. For example, the language shift to Arabic displaced the indigenousSouth Semitic Old South Arabianlanguages of modern-day Yemen and southern Oman. These were the languages spoken in the civilisations ofSheba, Ubar, Magan, Dilmun, andMeluhha— whose origin is debated; Lionel Bender (1997) suggesting an origin in Ethiopia,^[18] while others suggest the southern portion of the Arabian peninsula. A recent (2009) study based on a Bayesian model to estimate language change concluded that the latter viewpoint is more probable