Attached is an SVG file that contains the phrase "Inkscape writes arabic" in Tahoma font.
Thank you. I added the same in Russian and put the file as i18n.svg to share/examples. The samples are now shown in two generic fonts, Sans and Serif.
Now we need more languages there! In a few hours, when the file shows up in
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/inkscape/inkscape/share/examples/
and anyone can download it, please add a phrase in _your_ language, and send it to the list or upload to the patch tracker. Non-Latin languages (Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese etc) and languages with diacritic marks are especially welcome.
Please don't use any special fonts; just add your text as new lines to the same two text objects, so that Pango does automatic font substitution on its own based on Unicode characters you are using. This should work for all languages; if something does not work, submit a bug.
Thanks in advance!