The Arabic Language 9780748645299

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The Arabic Language

The Arabic Language Second edition

Kees Versteegh

© Kees Versteegh, 2014 First edition published by Edinburgh University Press in 1997 Second edition 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Gentium Plus by Koinonia, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7486 4528 2 (hardback) 978 0 7486 4527 5 (paperback) 978 0 7486 4529 9 (webready PDF) 978 0 7486 9460 0 (epub)

The right of Kees Versteegh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in ­accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents

Preface to First Edition vii Preface to Second Edition ix List of Figures and Maps xii List of Tables xiii Note on Transcription and Glossing xiv  1. The Study of Arabic in the West  2. Arabic as a Semitic Language  3.  The Earliest Stages of Arabic  4. Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  5. The Development of Classical Arabic  6. The Structure of Arabic  7. The Arabic Linguistic Tradition  8. The Emergence of New Arabic  9. Middle Arabic 10. The Study of the Arabic Dialects 11.  The Dialects of Arabic 12. The Emergence of Modern Standard Arabic 13. Diglossia 14. Bilingualism 15.  Arabic as a Minority Language 16. Arabic Pidgins and Creoles 17. Arabic as a World Language

1 10 26 42 60 85 107 126 152 172 192 221 241 259 276 299 313

Bibliography 333 List of Abbreviations 378 Index 382

Preface to First Edition

A legal scholar once said: ‘Only a prophet is able to have perfect command of the Arabic language.’ This statement is bound to be true since, as far as we know, no one has ever claimed to have memorised this language in its entirety. (Ibn Fāris, aṣ-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-luġa, ed. Chouémi, Beirut 1964, p. 18)

The aim of this book is to give a sketch of the history of the Arabic language, mother tongue of more than 200 million speakers. Since its earliest appearance as a world language in the seventh century ce, Arabic has been characterised by an opposition between two varieties: a standard language, which occupies a prestige position and is revered as the language of religion, culture and education; and a vernacular language, which serves as the mother tongue for most speakers and is the natural means of communication throughout society. The opposition between these two varieties constitutes the major theme of the present book. The set-up of the book is basically chronological: after an introduction on the study of the Arabic language in Western Europe, Chapter 2 deals with the position of the Arabic language within the group of the Semitic languages, and Chapter 3 with its emergence in historical times. Then, the linguistic situation in the Arabian peninsula in the period immediately preceding the advent of Islam is discussed (Chapter 4). In the course of the Arab conquests, after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, the Arabic language was exported together with the religion of the Arabs to a large part of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. In the next two chapters, the development of Arabic into a literary standard is analysed. Chapter 5 describes the role of Arabic as the language of literature and administration. Chapter 6 steps outside the chronological framework and discusses the structure of the Arabic language from an unexpected perspective, that of the Arab grammarians, who analysed their own language in a way that differed in many respects from the Western model. The contact between the speakers of Arabic and the inhabitants of the conquered territories brought about a restructuring of the language, which led to an opposition between standard language and vernacular dialect. Chapter 7 attempts to explain the emergence of vernacular varieties of the Arabic language. In Chapter 8, the influence of the vernacular language in the so-called Middle Arabic texts is analysed.

viii  The Arabic Language

The next two chapters deal with the study of the modern Arabic dialects: Chapter 9 is a general introduction to the classification and geography of Arabic dialects; and Chapter 10 deals with the characteristics of the major dialects, for which text samples are provided. In Chapter 11, the development of Modern Standard Arabic in the nineteenth century is discussed, and Chapter 12 deals with the sociolinguistic relationship between standard language and dialect in the contemporary Arabophone world. Finally, the last two chapters deal with the position of Arabic outside the Arab world, both as a minority language in the so-called linguistic enclaves (Chapter 13), and as a religious language in predominantly Islamic countries (Chapter 14). Since the present survey is intended as a textbook, I have refrained from giving copious footnotes. Obviously, much of the information is based on the existing literature. The notes on further reading appended to each chapter give information about the main sources used in that chapter; in quoting concrete examples the source is indicated within the text. I wish to thank those of my colleagues who were willing to read portions of the manuscript and give me their valuable comments: Erik-Jan Zürcher, Harald Motzki, Wim Delsman and Gert Borg. Additional information was kindly given by Louis Boumans and Jan Hoogland. Knowing from personal experience how much time it takes to read other people’s manuscripts, I am ashamed of having taken up so much of the time of my friend and colleague Manfred Woidich. In a way, he himself is responsible for the burden which I imposed on him because of his enthusiasm and never-failing support. His remarks and our subsequent discussions made many things clear to me that I had failed to see for myself. Special thanks are due to Carole Hillenbrand. Although the completion of this project took many more years than we originally envisaged, she never lost confidence and stimulated me to continue with it. Her critical reading of the entire manuscript was invaluable. In a very real sense, this book would never have appeared without her. I also wish to thank the staff of Edinburgh University Press, and in particular Jane Feore and Ivor Normand, for their encouragement, patience and assistance in bringing this manuscript to press. In the paperback edition a number of mistakes have been corrected and a few bibliographical items have been added. I have gratefully used the suggestions in some of the reviews of the book by Alan Kaye, Nadia Anghelescu, Clive Holes and Mike Carter. During the preparation of the present book, I have been very fortunate in receiving the help of Yola de Lusenet. Although being a complete outsider to the field, she took the trouble of going through the pages of the manuscript and pointing out to me with uncanny accuracy every flawed argument and deficient formulation. I am immensely grateful to her for her critical reading and her support. Nijmegen, February 2000

Preface to Second Edition

The invitation by Edinburgh University Press to consider a thorough revision of the book came at a propitious moment, when I was just going to retire from the university and was looking around for interesting things to do. They proposed a new lease of life for the book, which gave me a chance to give it a general overhaul and bring it up to date. In this revised edition of the book a number of changes have been implemented. In the first place, the number of chapters has been increased. The chapter on the linguistic structure of Arabic has been split into two chapters: one dealing with the modern linguistic approaches to Arabic (Chapter 6), and the other with the Arabic linguistic tradition (Chapter 7). The chapter on the sociolinguistics of the Arab world has likewise been split into two chapters: one dealing with diglossia (Chapter 13), and the other with the linguistic situation in the former French colonies (Chapter 14). A new chapter has been added on the Arabic pidgins and creoles. On this topic a host of new material has become known, including Fida Bizri’s description of a new pidgin, Pidgin Madame, which represents a real breakthrough in the study of Arabic pidgins and foreigner talk. Another addition to the book is a lengthy note on transcription; this was one of the omissions of the first edition that was rightly criticised in some of the reviews. In this note both the conventional Arabist transcription and the use of IPA characters are explained. Updating the bibliography was one of the major tasks in the revision. The amount of literature that has appeared between 1997 and 2013 is staggering. The five volumes of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics contain more than five hundred articles on topics connected with the history and structure of Arabic in all its varieties. In the field of dialect geography, the various dialect atlases should be mentioned, which are in different stages of completion, and, of course, the large-scale Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte by Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich, of which two volumes have appeared. I have refrained from giving doi identification numbers for articles quoted in the list of references. Many of these are available at sites like Jstor, but unfortunately only for researchers affiliated to a university with a subscription to such sites. A growing number of articles on Arabic language and linguistics (at present more than 1,000) is becoming available free of charge at www.academia.edu;

x  The Arabic Language

registered users may even download a pdf of any article in the database. Some of the newer insights have forced me to revise my ideas. In the first place, I should like to mention Michael Macdonald’s work on the linguistic map of the peninsula in pre-Islamic times: so much new material has appeared that it is hardly possible to keep up with the new information, which is bound to change the direction in the field. Jan Retsö’s book on the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period contains a completely new view on their place in history. Jonathan Owens’ views on the history of Arabic differ radically from mine, but his book on the linguistic history of Arabic was inspirational, just like his many other books, in making me rethink my own ideas. Travis Zadeh’s book on the use of vernacular languages instead of Arabic in religious instruction outside the Arab world may concern a minor point, but for me it meant a new approach to the diffusion of Arabic and Islam. Enam Al Wer’s publications on variation made me more aware of the influence of prestige dialects and although we do not agree on the extent of the influence of the Classical Arabic standard, I have learnt from her not to underestimate the influence of other prestige standards. I am still not completely convinced that there are actual examples of written dialect, but I have become less sceptical, partly through the information from Jan Hoogland and Gabriel Rosenbaum. Arabic sociolinguistics are perhaps responsible for the bulk of new publications, including, among many other things, the publications by Catherine Miller on urbanisation and its effects on language variation, and the new material on code-mixing presented by Gunvor Mejdell and Reem Bassiouney. Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have not only changed the political situation thoroughly, but also the linguistic landscape, not least because of the role of social media and international news channels. Political, but also religious, developments seem to have led to a new attitude towards the use of colloquial language, for instance, in the way modern preachers use dialect. In the Maghreb countries the policy towards Berber (Tamazight) and the ­Arabicisation of society has changed significantly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Finally, a significant shift has taken place in the scholarly community dealing with Arabic linguistics. The participation of native speakers in linguistic research has increased dramatically throughout the last few decades, as is obvious from the bibliographical references in the present textbook. In some fields, especially in general linguistics, the majority of researchers are native speakers of Arabic (most of them publishing in English). In the first edition, I deliberately left out most publications in Arabic because I wished to target an audience that did not necessarily know Arabic and could not be expected to read publications in Arabic. For this revised edition, I have deliberated about changing this approach, but eventually I decided to follow the same policy. The overwhelming majority of publications referred to are in English and, to a lesser extent, in French and German.

Preface to Second Edition  xi

As always, Manfred Woidich (Nördlingen) supported me by providing information on everything related to Arabic dialects, in particular Egyptian, but most of all by setting an example of dedicated research. I wish to thank Jan Hoogland (Rabat) for information about the linguistic situation in Morocco. Nagato Youichi, who is preparing a Japanese translation of the book, sent me a long list of mistakes in the first edition, for which I am most grateful. I can only say that I am glad that some of these mistakes do not seem to have been picked up by the reviewers (the worst mistake being that I had given Hamadan as Sībawayhi’s birthplace!). I am grateful to Muhammad Sharkawi for suggestions he made in preparing the Arabic translation of the book, which appeared in 2003 under the title al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya. The staff of Edinburgh University Press, in particular Michelle Houston and Jenny Peebles, are to be thanked for their patience in waiting for the revision to be realised and for their confidence in its successful completion. During the production stage Nicola Ramsey, Lyn Flight, Eddie Clark and Rebecca Mackenzie all contributed to a smooth sailing. Batenburg, July 2013

Figures and Maps

Figures  2.1 The traditional classification of the Semitic languages  2.2 The genealogy of the Semitic languages (Hetzron 1974, 1976)  3.1 The development of Arabic script

11 15 38

Maps  3.1 North Arabia and the Fertile Crescent before Islam  4.1 Available data on the pre-Islamic dialects  4.2 Disappearance of the hamza in the pre-Islamic dialects 10.1 Pronominal prefixes of the first person of the imperfect verb in the Egyptian Delta 10.2 Pronominal suffixes of the first person in the Yemenite dialects 10.3 Reflexes of /q/ and /j/ in the Egyptian Delta 10.4 Medieval trade centres in the Egyptian Delta 10.5 Tribal areas in North Arabia 11.1 The perfect verb in the Yemenite dialects 11.2 Arab tribes in the central African Baggara belt 11.3 Berber-speaking areas in North Africa

34 48 50 178 179 181 181 185 195 206 212

Tables

  A Transcription of Arabic characters xiv    B Additional signs used in transcription xvi   C Abbreviations used in glossing xviii  2.1 The Arabic consonantal system 23  6.1 Prefix conjugation of yaktubu/kataba ‘to write’ 90  6.2 Suffix conjugation of yaktubu/kataba ‘to write’ 90  6.3 Nominal endings of jamīl ‘beautiful’ 92  6.4 The verbal measures 96  7.1 The endings of nouns and imperfect verbs 112  8.1 Genitive exponents in Arabic dialects 145  8.2 Aspectual markers in Arabic dialects 145 11.1 The verbal paradigm in Najdī Arabic 194 11.2 The verbal paradigm in Damascene Arabic 200 11.3 The distribution of gilit and qǝltu dialects 202 11.4 The verbal paradigm of Muslim Baġdādī 203 11.5 The verbal paradigm in Cairene Arabic 210 11.6 The verbal paradigm of Moroccan Arabic 214 11.7 The formation of the passive in Ḥassāniyya 215 12.1 Approved patterns of word formation in Modern Standard Arabic 230 13.1 The five levels of Egyptian Arabic according to Badawī (1973) 244 13.2 Distribution of /q/ in spoken Egyptian 245 14.1 Language proficiency of literates in North Africa 267 14.2 Preferred language varieties in the media in Morocco 268 15.1 The verbal paradigm of the loan verb kanta ‘to sing’ (< Italian cantare) in Maltese 279 15.2 The verbal paradigm in Nigerian Arabic 289

Note on Transcription and Glossing

In the present textbook we have decided not quote words and phrases from Classical Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic script, but to represent them in transliteration in order to make the book accessible for those who do not read Arabic. In transliterating the Arabic alphabet, the characters are represented by single Latin letters, often with diacritics (and always written in italics). There is no universal standard for transliteration, at least not for academic purposes, and the number of current systems of transliteration is regrettably large. The system we have chosen is more or less identical with the one used in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (EALL), with the exception of x for which ḫ is used. In Table A, the characters used in transliteration are given in the third column; in the fourth column their equivalent in IPA characters has been added. This is the standard adopted by the International Phonetic Association. Whenever a phonetic transcription is needed, IPA signs will be used, always between square brackets [ ]. Note the awkward difference between y = [j], but j = [ʤ]). With emphatic consonants there is a discussion about their realisation, which is either velarised (IPA [tɣ], [dɣ], [sɣ], etc.) or pharyngalised (IPA [tʕ], [dʕ], [sʕ], etc.). Rather than choose between velarisation and pharyngalisation, the IPA signs with a mid-tilde [], [d̴], [], etc. have been chosen, which leave both options open. Table A  Transcription of Arabic characters Name ʾalif (hamza)

bāʾ tāʾ ṯāʾ

jīm

ḥāʾ

ḫāʾ

Arabic script

Transliteration

IPA sign

‫ا‬

ʾ

[ʔ]

‫ب‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ج‬ ‫ح‬ ‫خ‬

b

[b]

ṯ

[θ]

t

[t]

j

[ʤ]

ḫ

[x]

ḥ

[ħ]

Note on Transcription and Glossing  xv

dāl ḏāl rāʾ

zāy sīn šīn

ṣād

ḍād ṭāʾ

ḏ̣āʾ ʿayn

ġayn fāʾ

qāf kāf

lām

mīm

nūn hāʾ

wāw yāʾ

‫د‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ز‬ ‫س‬ ‫ش‬ ‫ص‬ ‫ض‬ ‫ط‬ ‫ظ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ك‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ه‬ ‫و‬ ‫ي‬

d

[d]

r

[r]

ḏ

[ð]

z

[z]

š

[ʃ]

s

ṣ

[s]

[]

ḍ

[d̴]

ḏ̣ ʿ

[ð̴]

f

[f]

ṭ

[]

[ʕ]

ġ

[ɣ]

q

[q]

l

[l]

k

[k]

m

[m]

h

[h]

n

w y

[n]

[w] [j]

The vowels of Classical Arabic are represented as a, i, u; long vowels are represented with a makron (ā, ī, ū), diphthongs with ay, aw. In the convention followed here, the feminine ending tāʾ marbūṭa is transcribed as -a, except in the construct state before a vowel (thus, madīnat an-nabī, but al-madīna al-kabīra). The assimilation of the article al- before sun letters is represented as such (e.g., aš-šajara). As a general rule, short vowel verbal endings are represented in transcription, but short vowel nominal case endings are left out, unless they are essential for the understanding of the argument, or in Qurʾānic quotations. Note that initial hamza is transcribed with ʾ when it has morphological status, for example, ʾaktubu ‘I write’, but not when it is a hamzat al-waṣl, for example, ibn ‘son’ (note the difference in transcription between uktub ‘write!’ with hamzat al-waṣl and ʾaktib ‘make [someone] write!’ with morphological hamza).

xvi  The Arabic Language

In the transcription of the Arabic dialects additional signs were needed in the transcription. These, as well as some signs used in the transcription of languages other than Arabic, are indicated with their IPA equivalents in Table B. Table B  Additional signs used in transcription Transcription sign

IPA sign

g

[ɡ]

ǵ

[dz]

ž

[ʒ]

ǧ

[dʒ]

ć

[ts]

ṛ (Urdu)

[r̩]

č

ṛ (Arabic) ḷ

ḅ

[ʧ] [] [ɫ]

[b̴]

ṃ

[m̴]

ŋ

[ŋ]

ṇ ɗ ɓ ʈ

[n̴] [ɗ] [ɓ] [ʈ]

kh

[kh]

ty

[tj]

th

dy ñ ä ö

ü

[th]

[dj]

[nj]

[æ], [ɛ]

[œ], [ø] [y]

In the transcription of Arabic dialects the additional vowels e/ē, o/ō may occur; sometimes ä and å are used to indicate fronting of /a/ to [æ] and backing to [ɑ]

Note on Transcription and Glossing  xvii

or  [ɒ]. Vowels with a breve, for example, ĕ, ă, indicate extra short vowels; vowels with a tilde, for example, ã, õ, indicate nasalised vowels. The sign ǝ (shwa) indicates a central vowel (see below). For the transcription of Persian, we have followed Junker and Alavi (1986), with a few exceptions (y instead of j, v instead of w, ž instead of ǧ); since ʾ and ʿ have merged in Persian, both are transcribed as ʾ ; written long i and u are transcribed as i and u. For Turkish, the standard Turkish orthography is used (with a few exceptions in the case of Ottoman Turkish). In quoting Hebrew words, in accordance with the system followed by Lipiński (1997), the Tiberian vowel signs are simply transliterated; the so-called begadkefat consonants (b, g, d, k, p, t) are not given their spirantic realisation (v, g, ḏ, ḫ, f, ṯ), except p/f. The usual transcription of Classical Arabic is phonemic; allophonic variants are not represented in Arabic script, nor in the transcription. To give an example, in Classical Arabic there are three vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, which may be long or short. These have allophonic variants, depending on the phonetic context. Thus, for instance, /ā/ may be realised as [aː] before pharyngal consonants, as [ɑː] before or after emphatic consonants, and as [æː] or [ɛː] in all other contexts. Neither the script nor the transcription distinguish between these phonetic variants, because they are completely predictable from the context. The text samples of the major dialect varieties in Chapter 12 illustrate the differences in approach between a phonetic and a phonemic transcription. In these samples, it seemed best to use the transcription of the authors from whom they were taken, with a few minor modifications; where necessary the value of additional transcription signs used is given. Some texts are presented in a phonemic transcription, whereas others aim at a complete phonetic transcription with all allophones. In Syrian Arabic (below, p. 199), for instance, in most environments Classical Arabic /i/ and /u/ have merged in one phoneme, usually represented with the sign called shwa /ǝ/. In this transcription, no allowance is made for the different phonetic realisations of /ǝ/. Depending on the environment, /ǝ/ may have the following allophones: • fronted [ɪ] as in English pit, before plain dentals, without back vowels or emphatic consonants, for example, /sǝtt/ [sɪtt]; • between [e] as in English pet and [ʌ] as in English putt, before pharyngals, for example, /nǝḥna/ [nʌħna]; • backed [ʊ] as in English put, in an emphatic environment, for example, /ḍǝdd/ [d̴ʊdd].

The choice of allophone is dictated by the environment and has nothing to do with the etymological origin of the vowel. Older transcriptions of Syrian Arabic wrote sitt, ḍudd in an effort to represent the pronunciation as accurately as possible. In his grammar of Damascus Arabic (1965), from which the text in Chapter 12 has been chosen, Grotzfeld transcribes all allophones with /ǝ/,

xviii  The Arabic Language

because he uses a phonemic transcription. Others use a phonetic transcription, for instance, Singer (1958a) in his collection of texts from the dialect of Tetouan, and Cohen (1964) in his collection of texts from the Jewish Arabic of Tunis. This entails the use of a large number of symbols to represent the various allophones of the vowels in different environments. Both systems have their advantages: the phonemic transcription shows the structural properties of the dialect, whereas the phonetic transcription makes it easier to pronounce the written symbols. In the text samples, the transcription of the original source has been preserved as much as possible, so that some texts are written in a phonemic, others in a phonetic transcription. As explained above, phonetic transcription is always represented between square brackets [ ], and always uses IPA signs. When phonological analysis is discussed, the conventional signs from Tables A and B are used between slashes  //; an additional sign /’’/ is used to indicate the abstract element ʾalif in the theories of the Arabic grammarians (see Chapter 7, p. 118). In some chapters a morphological analysis is given; this is indicated using the conventional signs from Tables A and B, between straight lines ||. When discussion of the script is involved sharp brackets < > are used to represent written signs. In some cases Arabic phrases and sentences have been provided with a morphby-morph translation, which means that we have either translated or glossed every single morph, using a series of abbreviations (see Table C). In glossing we have more or less followed the practice of Payne (1997). Table C  Abbreviations used in glossing 1, 2, 3

first, second, third person

ACC

accusative

COMPL

complementiser

ART

CONT COP

GEN

DEM DET f

FOC

IMPERAT

definite article continuous copula

genitive

demonstrative determinate feminine focaliser

imperative

Note on Transcription and Glossing  xix

IMPERF

imperfect

INDET

indeterminate

INDEF.ART INF

INTERROG LINK m

NOM OBJ p

PART PERF

POSS

PRED REL s

SUBJ TOP

indefinite article infinitive

interrogative

linking suffix masculine

nominative

object marker plural

participle perfect

possessive

predication relative

singular

subjunctive topicaliser

Further reading The general problem of transcription is discussed by Reichmuth (2009). For the standard adopted by the IPA, see http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa. For the origin of Arabic script see below Chapter 3, pp. 37f. The use of Arabic script for languages other than Arabic is dealt with below, Chapter 17, p. 314. For the model of morphosyntactic description and glossing see Payne (1997).

Chapter 1

The Study of Arabic in the West

In 632 ce, the Prophet of Islam, Muḥammad, died in the city of Medina. The century of conquests that followed brought both the Islamic religion and the Arabic language to the attention of a world that up until then had possessed only the vaguest notion of what went on in the interior of the Arabian peninsula. Ever since this first confrontation between the Islamic world and Europe, the Arabs and their language have been part of the European experience. At first, the intellectual relationship between the two worlds was unilateral. Greek knowledge and knowledge about Greek filtered through into the Islamic world, while the Byzantines did not show themselves to be overly interested in things Arabic. Although their military prowess was feared, the Arabs’ culture and language were not deemed worthy of study. Their religion was regarded as little more than the latest in the series of Christian heresies that flourished in the East. For the Byzantines, the Greek heritage did not need any contribution from the inhabitants of a desert, whose only claim to fame rested on their ability to harass the Byzantine armies and contest Byzantine hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. In Western Europe, for a long time information about the Arabs and their religion remained limited to vague notions about paganism in the desert of Arabia. After the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711, the Arabs’ presence came to be seen as a direct threat to Europe and Christianity. Yet there was another side to this confrontation, because through the Arabs Western Europe got in touch with a part of its heritage that it had lost in the turmoil of the fall of the Roman Empire. Western medicine and philosophy became dependent on the Arab culture of Islamic Spain for knowledge of Greek medical and philosophical writings, which were practically unknown in the West. From the eleventh century onwards, after the fall of Toledo in 1085, these writings began to circulate in Latin translations of the Arabic versions. The Arabic language itself was not widely studied, since most scholars relied upon translations that were made by a small group of translators, often Jews, who had familiarised themselves with the language either in Arab Sicily or in al-ʾAndalus. In the twelfth century, during the period of the Crusades, Western Europeans became acquainted with Islamic culture and Arabic on site. This first-hand contact contributed to the ambivalence of the European reaction. On the one hand, Islam

2  The Arabic Language

was the enemy that threatened Europe and held the keys to the Holy Land. On the other hand, for the time being the Muslims, or Saracens, were the keepers of the Greek heritage in medicine and philosophy, and provided the best available access to these treasures. Thus, while crusaders were busy trying to wrest Jerusalem from the Muslims and to preserve Europe from Islam, at the same time scholars from all over Europe were travelling to Islamic Spain in order to study at the famous universities of Cordova and Granada. The study of Arabic served a double purpose. For the medical scholars at the University of Paris, who humbly sat down at the feet of the Arab doctors and called themselves arabizantes, the translations of medical writings from Arabic into Latin constituted an indispensable source of knowledge. Others devoted themselves to the translation of what in their eyes was a false religious message, in order to refute the arguments of the ‘Mohammedans’ or, preferably, to convert them to Christianity. The first Latin translation of the Qurʾān appeared in 1143 under the supervision of an abbot of the monastery of Cluny, Peter the Venerable (d. 1157), with the express aim of denouncing the fallacy of the ‘Agarenes’ (or ‘Hagarenes’), as they were often called. For both purposes, Islamic Spain remained the main gateway to Islam and the only place where people could receive the language training that they needed in order to understand both the Islamic Holy Book and the precious Greek writings. It is, therefore, quite understandable that it was in Spain that the first instruments for the study of Arabic appeared, and it is there that we find the first bilingual glossaries of the language: the Glossarium latino–arabicum (twelfth century) and the Vocabulista in arabico (thirteenth century). The end of the reconquista of Spain by the Catholic kings of Castile and Navarre changed all this. After the fall of Granada in 1492, the presence of Muslims in the Iberian peninsula was no longer tolerated. In 1502, the choice between emigration or conversion was put to them, and a century later, in 1609, the last remaining Moriscos were expelled to North Africa. This removed the last direct link with Islam in Europe. The same period also witnessed the activities of Pedro de Alcalá, who in 1505 published a large dictionary of (Spanish) Arabic (Vocabulista aravigo en letra castellana) and a manual of Arabic grammar with a conversation guide for the confessional (Arte para ligera mente saber la lengua araviga) intended for those priests who had to deal with newly converted Muslims. This was the first analysis of Arabic on the basis of a Greco-Latin model. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, interest in original Greek materials in the West grew to the point where scholars began to question the trustworthiness of the Latin translations that had been made from Arabic versions of Greek texts. As familiarity with the Greek sources increased, the new trend became to go back to these sources (ad fontes) instead of using the Arabic ones. The resulting altercation between the old-fashioned arabizantes and the modernist neoterici ended in a victory for the new trend. From now on, the writings of Avicenna became a symbol of the past, and the attitude of Europe towards Islam changed accordingly.

The Study of Arabic in the West  3

At first, some scholars refused to give up their Arabic connections. In his Defensio medicorum principis Avicennae, ad Germaniae medicos (Defence of the Prince of the Medical Scholars, Avicenna, to the Doctors of Germany, Strasbourg 1530), the Dutch physician Laurentius Frisius states that the study of Arabic is indispensable for those who wish to study medicine. To his opponents, who extolled the virtues of the Greek medical scholars, he concedes that the Arabic language is primitive compared with the Greek language, but he insists that the quality of the language does not matter in the transmission of knowledge. The Arabs, he says, have translated all the essential works of Greek scholars on medicine and philosophy, and added their own invaluable commentaries. Frisius’ example confirms that at this time some scholars in Western Europe still regarded Arabic as an important corollary to the study of medicine. But when the Greek sources became known in the West, the Arabic texts were no longer needed, and, what is worse, the comparison between the Greek originals and the Arabic translations (most of which had been made after Syriac translations and had themselves become known in the West through Latin translations) did not work out to the Arabs’ advantage. Henceforth, they came to be regarded as defilers of the Greek heritage instead of its guardians. It looked as if the study of Arabic science had become completely unnecessary. With the change of attitude towards Arabic medicine, the study of Arabic in Western universities took a new direction. Throughout the period of the Crusades, and in spite of their admiration for the knowledge and wisdom of the Arab doctors, most Christians regarded Islam as the arch-enemy of Christianity and thus of Europe. Now that the scholarly motive for studies of Arabic had disappeared, the main impetus for such studies became the missionary fervour of the new Europe. Some Christian missionaries, especially those belonging to the Dominican order, believed that the only way to convert Muslims to Christianity was to convince them by rational arguments in their own language. As early as 1250, the Dominicans established a language school of Arabic in Toledo, and some of them became extremely well read in Arabic theology. Scholars wishing to dedicate themselves to a polemic with the enemy felt the need for didactic materials on the language so that they could understand the original Arabic texts, in the first place, of course, the text of the Islamic revelation, the Qurʾān. Thus, for instance, Nicolaus Clenardus (1495–1542), in his Perigrinationum, ac de rebus Machometicis epistolae elegantissimae (Most Subtle Treatises of Wanderings and about Matters Mohammedan, Louvain 1551), writes that it would be useless to try to convince the ‘Mohammedans’ in Latin of their errors. He had studied Arabic and medicine in Granada and strongly felt that the study of Arabic was needed primarily in order to polemicise against Muslims in their own language. In this connection, a second motive for studying Arabic may be mentioned: the wish on the part of the Catholic Church to achieve reunification with Eastern Christianity. Contacts with Arabic-speaking Maronites were encouraged, and an increasing number of Levantine Christians came to Rome and Paris in order to help in this campaign.

4  The Arabic Language

At the same time, these Maronites brought information on Arabic and Islam, and became an important source of information on these topics. Even those scholars whose interest was primarily philological or historical, such as Bedwell (1563–1632) in England and Erpenius (1584–1624) in Holland, followed the prevailing views of their contemporaries in regarding Islam as a false religion. Yet, with their grammars and text editions, they laid the foundations for the study of Arabic, and their interest in the language itself was probably genuine. It may well be the case that they sometimes cited religious motives in order to legitimise their preoccupation with the language of the infidels. Erpenius also showed a special interest in the writings of the Arab Christians, and was convinced that the study of the Arabic translations of the Bible would make an important contribution to the philologia sacra, the study of the Bible. Since Arabic resembled Hebrew so much, many scholars believed that the study of the Arabic lexicon would be rewarding for the understanding of Biblical Hebrew, and accordingly it became customary to combine the two languages in the curriculum. In fact, the resemblance between the two languages, especially in the lexicon, is so striking that at a very early date scholars had begun to remark on this relationship. In the Arab world, the general disinterest in other languages did not create an atmosphere in which the relationship could be studied fruitfully, although some geographers did remark on it. Hebrew grammarians devoted a lot of attention to the relationship between the two, or, if we count Aramaic as well, the three languages. Since Jews in the Islamic empire lived in a trilingual community, their native tongue being Arabic and the language of their Holy Scripture being Hebrew, with commentary and explanation in Aramaic, they were in an ideal situation to observe similarities across the three languages. Yehuda ibn Qurayš (probably around 900) wrote a Risāla in which he stressed the importance of Arabic and Aramaic for the study of the Hebrew Scripture. The findings of the Hebrew philologists in comparative linguistics remained, however, restricted to the small circle of the indigenous grammatical tradition and did not affect the development of the study of the Semitic languages in Europe. In Western Europe, as early as the sixteenth century, philologists working with Hebrew were not completely unaware of the relationship between Hebrew and other Semitic languages, which is much more transparent than that between the Indo-European languages. They called these collectively ‘Oriental languages’, a name that at various times included not only Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, but also Ethiopic, and even unrelated languages such as Armenian and Persian. But this vague awareness of a linguistic connection did not lead to any scientific comparison, and the only practical effect was that the study of Arabic was recommended as an ancillary to the study of the Hebrew Bible. It was generally assumed that Hebrew had been the language of paradise and as such the original language of mankind. The other languages were therefore regarded as its offspring, which presented the original language in a degenerated form.

The Study of Arabic in the West  5

The idea of a relationship between the languages that are now known as Semitic found its Biblical support in the story about the sons of Noah, namely, Shem, Cham and Japheth, a division also used by Hebrew and Arab scholars. The sons of Shem had spread all over the Middle East and North Africa; the sons of Cham were the original speakers of the African languages; and the sons of Japheth were the ancestors of the speakers of a variety of languages in Europe and Asia (see p. 17). In its original form, this classification hardly evoked any diachronic connotation: the languages were seen as distant relatives and the genealogical distance between them was represented in the form of a family tree. Western linguistics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more interested in the universal structure of human speech, and the ideas of the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of Port Royal (1660) about the connections between logic and grammar greatly affected the orientation of Arabic and Semitic linguistics too, for instance, in Silvestre de Sacy’s Grammaire arabe (1806). The universalist orientation strengthened the ahistorical character of the study of Arabic and Hebrew, and did not advance the comparative study of what had become known as the Semitic languages, a term used for the first time in 1781 by August Ludwig Schlözer. The two factors that promoted the study of Arabic, the use of Arabic for polemical purposes, and its use for the study of the Hebrew Bible, combined to ensure the continuation of the study of the language, even after the decline of the influence of Arab medical science. It may be added that commercial interests, too, may have played a role in the search for knowledge about Oriental languages. Especially in the Dutch Republic, but also in Germany and France, the study of Arabic and, to a lesser degree, of Turkish and Persian became increasingly important for the growing trade with these countries. Some of the most famous Orientalists started their careers in the diplomatic service of their country. Golius (1596–1667), for instance, who was Erpenius’ successor in the Chair of Arabic at the University of Leiden and the author of the first real dictionary of Arabic in the West (Lexicon Arabico–Latinum), which for two centuries remained the only available and reliable lexical source, visited Morocco, Syria and Ottoman Turkey before accepting his appointment at Leiden. Theology and the philologia sacra remained an important factor in the study of Arabic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, as we have seen above, most scholars of Arabic were simultaneously experts in Hebrew. The emphasis on the dangers of Islam for Christian Europe continued to make itself felt until the eighteenth century, when the philosophers of the Enlightenment inaugurated a new attitude towards the Orient. Basing themselves on travellers’ reports, they concluded that much could be learnt from the ‘Oriental’ cultures. The Persian Empire, for instance, was admired by them for its orderly organisation and its tolerance towards all religions. This change in attitude made itself felt in the study of the ‘Oriental’ languages (and literatures!) as well, and although the

6  The Arabic Language

old prejudices crop up occasionally in the works of the scholars of this time, most of the interest was genuine and without ulterior motives. In the linguistic study of the Semitic languages, a major innovation took place in the nineteenth century, when European linguistics was revolutionised by the comparative–historical paradigm, which started in the field of the Indo-European languages with Franz Bopp’s comparison of the conjugational system of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic (1816), but soon spread to other language groups as well. This paradigm enabled scholars for the first time to set up a classificatory scheme of an entire language group, which still used the simile of the language tree, only this time based on systematic comparison and a search for regular relationships. In the field of Semitic linguistics, the discovery and decipherment of Assyrian material in cuneiform script in the mid-nineteenth century and the availability of epigraphic material from Old Aramaic and Epigraphic South Arabian greatly enlarged the time-depth of the comparisons and made it possible to attempt a reconstruction of a proto-Semitic language at the root of the tree of all Semitic languages, analogous to the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European. The results of the new paradigm in Semitic comparative linguistics were collected and summarised by Carl Brockelmann in his Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen (1908–13). In Chapter 2, we shall see how these new theories shaped the ideas about the classification of Arabic within the Semitic languages. The development of European linguistics affected Arabic studies in another way as well. Before the nineteenth century, most European linguists had been interested only in the standard language, whereas dialects were regarded as faulty speech which had to be eradicated. When in the nineteenth century it was discovered that the rural dialects often contained forms that were much older than the corresponding forms in the standard language, and thus could explain the etymological derivation of the standard language, a tremendous effort was made to register and analyse the dialectal forms of the standard language. Moreover, in line with the prevailing Romanticist mood, the way in which country folk spoke was seen as more natural than the artificial urban standard. Before this time, these dialects had been regarded as deviations or, at best, secondary developments of the standard language, but the new trend aimed at an explanation of the standard language from the existing dialects. Wide-ranging projects were set up to register as many dialect variants as possible, and the result was the publication of the huge dialect atlases of France, Switzerland and Germany, followed somewhat later by those of other countries such as the Netherlands and Britain. This development did not fail to make itself felt in the field of Arabic studies. In the past, Arabic, Turkish and Persian had been studied partly for practical purposes, and at least some Arabists knew the Middle East and North Africa from personal experience. They had visited these countries as diplomats or as representatives of governments or companies, and bought manuscripts into the

The Study of Arabic in the West  7

bargain. During these trips, they must also have become acquainted with the living language, and, even though their publications were concerned with the Classical language, they knew perfectly well that Arabic was used as a colloquial language in the Arab world. In the eighteenth century, this function of scholars of Arabic had more or less disappeared, and the average professor of Arabic did not leave his study to speak Arabic with native speakers. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, when more and more linguists actually went to the Middle East, they discovered that the colloquial language was vastly different from the language that they had learnt from their books. Consequently, they started to study this living language following the paradigm in which European linguists had begun the study of the European dialects. In 1820, for instance, a chair was established at the École des langues orientales in Paris for the study of ‘l’arabe vulgaire’. The interest in dialects was to remain a permanent feature of Arabic studies, even though it did not lead directly to any drastic change in the curriculum of most departments of Arabic, which continued to concentrate on the Classical language. In this introduction, we have traced the development of Arabic studies in the West, and stressed the connection between the study of Arabic and that of Hebrew and the other Semitic languages. Since the Second World War, Arabic studies have become somewhat separated from the developments in Semitic linguistics. As general linguistics in the twentieth century moved away from the comparativist paradigm, Semitic linguistics did not follow this direction, but continued to follow a comparativist–historical approach. As a result, it lost its position at the centre of linguistic interest that it had occupied for a long time, and became relegated to an isolated corner of ‘Oriental’ linguistics. Students of Arabic, which before this time had usually been studied within the framework of the Semitic languages, began to emphasise its character as an Islamic language and to study it in connection with other Islamic languages, such as Persian and Turkish. The knowledge of Arabic remained important for comparisons between Semitic languages, but increasingly these comparisons were no longer initiated from within the circle of Arabic studies. One reason for this change may have been the shift in emphasis in the field of Arabic studies from a basically historical and historicising discipline to the study of the contemporary Arab world, with important connections with social sciences, political sciences and the study of Islam. At the start of the twenty-first century, a new trend has manifested itself, the relocation of departments of Arabic within religious sciences, with an emphasis on contemporary Islamic studies. As a result, the study of Arabic in the West is increasingly relegated to the status of an ancillary to the study of Islam. Within a political context, knowledge of Arabic is required for the purpose of monitoring Islamist movements that are perceived as being dangerous. For both purposes, the philological study of (Classical) Arabic at European and American universities is regarded as largely superfluous.

8  The Arabic Language

The focus on the contemporary world has affected language teaching as well. A few decades ago, Arabic was taught as a dead language in most Western universities, and the number of departments that offered courses in Arabic dialects was very small. Nowadays, both in Europe and in the United States, almost all departments aim at a certain level of proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic, and expect students to learn at least one Arabic dialect and to spend some time in the Arab world in order to learn to speak the language fluently. The focus on the living language has strengthened the link between Arabic and general linguistics. In the United States, where the tradition of philology had never been rooted the way it was in Europe, there has always been a greater openness in Arabic linguistics towards general linguistics, a tendency that has made itself felt in European universities as well. This development has also led to an increase in cooperation between European and American scholars and those from the Arab world. At the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, some Arab linguists started to free the study of Arabic from what they regarded as the shackles of the indigenous grammatical tradition and introduced modern linguistic methods. Moreover, there was an upsurge of interest in the colloquial language. In spite of the prevailing unpopularity of dialect studies in the Arab world, scholars have started to publish grammatical descriptions of their own dialects and to analyse the sociolinguistic situation. While the emphasis in the curriculum of many universities in the Arab world is still on the philological study of Classical Arabic, a growing number of linguists, particularly in such fields as computer linguistics and psycholinguistics, are working within an international scholarly network. Further reading The most extensive handbook for the study of the Arabic language and its history is the one edited by Owens (2013), with twenty-four chapters, by different authors, on all major aspects of Arabic linguistics. The German Grundriß der arabischen Philologie (GAP), in particular the first volume, contains articles dealing with, among other things, the classification of Arabic (Hecker 1982), Early North Arabian (Müller 1982), Classical Arabic (Fischer 1982), the Arabic dialects (Jastrow 1982; Singer 1982) and the Arabic script (Endreß 1982). A bibliography of Arabic linguistics was published by Bakalla (1983); see also Hospers (1974) for a selection of older items. Older accounts of the state of the art are to be found in the Handbuch der Orientalistik (HdO), in particular a survey of the Arabic dialects (Brockelmann 1964) and an article on the expansion of the Arabic language (Spuler 1964a). The five-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (EALL, 2006–9), an international project with more than three hundred authors, provides information on a large number of topics related to the Arabic language, its history, structure and varieties.

The Study of Arabic in the West  9

There are a number of general introductions. Of the older ones, Chejne (1969) and Bateson (1967) may be mentioned. More recent introductions include one in English (Bakalla 1984), one in Romanian (Anghelescu 1984, 1986; in the meantime an Italian and a French translation have appeared), one in Spanish (AbboudHaggar 2010), and one in Dutch (Schippers and Versteegh 1987). Holes (1995a) is an extensive introduction to all aspects of Modern Standard Arabic, both linguistic and sociolinguistic; it includes a section on the history of the Arabic language. For the study of the Arabic dialects, Fischer and Jastrow (1980) produced a Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte, with a short introduction about the history of Arabic. There are two short introductions to the Arabic dialects, one in Polish (Danecki 1989) and one in Italian (Durand 1995). An important methodological introduction to Arabic dialectology was published by Behnstedt and Woidich (2005). The abovementioned Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics contains more than fifty sketches of dialects from all over the Arabic-speaking world, as well as surveys of the language situation in all Arab countries. The standard account of the history of Arabic studies in the West is still Fück (1955); a more recent publication is Bobzin (1992); Hamilton (2006) has a short survey. For the early comparative studies of Hebrew grammarians, see Téné (1980) and van Bekkum (1983). The various shifts in attitude in Western Europe towards the role of the Arabs in the transmission of Greek knowledge and the effect that these shifts had on the study of Arabic are analysed by Klein-Franke (1980), from which the quotations from Frisius and Clenardus were taken; the impact of translations from Arabic in Western Europe is studied by Daniel (1979). For the first Latin–Arabic glossaries, see van Koningsveld (1976). On the Christian perception of Islam and the Dominicans’ missionary strategy, see Nolan (2002: 233–55); on the early missionary grammars of Arabic from the seventeenth century, see Zwartjes and Woidich (2012). Comrie (1991, 2008) underscores the importance of Arabic for general linguistic studies, a highly relevant topic since Arabic is used relatively seldom in typological or general linguistic studies. The growing cooperation between general linguists and Arabic linguists has brought about an increased interest in those features of the structure of Arabic that are relevant from a general linguistic point of view (see Chapter 6).

Chapter 2

Arabic as a Semitic Language

2.1  The classification of the Semitic languages Arabic belongs to a group of languages collectively known as the Semitic languages. To this group belong a number of languages in the Middle East, some of them no longer extant. The earliest attested Semitic language is Akkadian, a language spoken in Mesopotamia between 2500 and 600 bce; from 2000 bce onwards it was differentiated into Babylonian and Assyrian. As a written language, neo-Babylonian was probably used until the beginning of the common era. From the Syro-Palestinian area, several Semitic languages are known. Eblaite is the language of the 15,000 inscriptions that were discovered in 1974 in the city of Ebla, the present-day Tell Mardīḫ, 60 km south of Aleppo; they date from the period between 2500 and 2300 bce. Ugaritic, discovered in 1929, was used during the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries bce in Ugarit, the present-day Rās Šamra, 10 km north of Latakia. Apart from Ugaritic and Eblaite, during the first half of the second millennium bce, the only traces of Semitic languages in the area are in the form of proper names in the Akkadian archives, for instance, those of Mari. The type of language that these names represent is called Amoritic. At the end of the second millennium bce, two groups of languages began to emerge: on the one hand, Canaanite, a collective term for Hebrew, Phoenician and a few other languages, of which little is known, and on the other, Aramaic. The oldest stage of Hebrew is Biblical Hebrew, the language of the Jewish Torah (1200–200 bce); later stages are represented by the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls (second and first centuries bce); the language of the Rabbinical literature known as Mishnaic Hebrew; and Modern Hebrew or Ivrit, one of the two national languages of the state of Israel. Phoenician was the language of the Phoenician cities Sidon and Tyre and their colonies such as Carthage (tenth century bce to second century ce). Old Aramaic (first millennium bce) was spoken at least from the tenth century bce onwards in Syria. Between the seventh and fourth centuries bce, it was used as a lingua franca in the Babylonian and Persian empires; it is also the language of some parts of the Jewish Torah. More recent forms of Aramaic are divided into Western and Eastern Aramaic. Western Aramaic was the spoken language of

Arabic as a Semitic Language  11

Palestine during the first centuries of the common era, which remained in use as a literary language until the fifth century ce. It was the official language of the Nabataean and Palmyrene kingdoms (cf. below, pp. 31–3). The most important representatives of Eastern Aramaic were Syriac, the language of Christian religious literature; Mandaean, the language of a large body of gnostic literature between the third and the eighth centuries ce; and the main language of the Babylonian Talmud between 200 and 500 ce. Syriac was the spoken language of the Syrian Christians until the eighth century ce. Modern varieties of Aramaic survive in a number of linguistic enclaves (cf. below, p. 127). The last language to appear in the Syro-Palestinian area was Arabic, which during the conquests of the seventh century ce spread across the entire area, and far beyond it. In the south of the Arabian peninsula and in Ethiopia, a number of Semitic languages were spoken. Epigraphic South Arabian was the language of the Sabaean, Minaean and Qaṭabānian inscriptions (probably between the eighth century bce and the sixth century ce). The modern South Arabian dialects, such as Mehri, probably go back to spoken varieties of these languages (cf. below, pp. 16, 44, 127). The oldest of the Ethiopian Semitic languages is Classical Ethiopic or Geʿez, the language of the empire of Aksum (first centuries ce). To this group belong a large number of languages spoken in Ethiopia, such as Tigre, Tigriña and the official language of Ethiopia, Amharic. Most attempts at a classification of the Semitic languages waver between an historical–genetic interpretation of the relationships between the languages involved and a purely typological–geographical approach in which the common features of the languages are recorded without any claim to a historical derivation. In the standard model of the classification of the Semitic languages, it is usually assumed that around 3000 bce a split took place between the North-east (or East) Semitic languages (i.e., Akkadian, later separated into Babylonian and Assyrian)

Proto-Semitic

West Semitic

North-west Semitic

Canaanite (Hebrew, Phoenician)

Aramaic

Arabic

East Semitic (Akkadian)

South-west Semitic South Arabian

Ethiopian

Figure 2.1  The traditional classification of the Semitic languages

12  The Arabic Language

and the rest, the West Semitic languages. Around 2000 bce, a split took place in the West Semitic group between the North-west (or North) and the South-west (or South) Semitic languages. Finally, around 1000 bce, North-west Semitic split into Canaanite and Aramaic, whereas the South-west Semitic languages divided into Arabic, South Arabian and Ethiopic. The discovery of Ugaritic and Eblaite have modified this picture considerably. Both are nowadays usually regarded as North-west Semitic languages, but the precise relations between the languages of this group are still disputed, and according to some scholars it belongs rather to the North-east Semitic languages (see Figure 2.1). Kienast (2001) rejects this classification of the Semitic languages into Northeast Semitic, North-west Semitic and South-west Semitic as being based solely on geographical location, without taking into account the time frame of the development. In his view, the Semitic languages represent one language type that was brought in successive waves by nomads into the rich agricultural area, first by the Akkadians, then the Canaanites, then the Aramaeans and finally the Arabs. Accordingly, he classifies these languages in chronological terms as Old Semitic (Altsemitisch, i.e., Akkadian), Early New Semitic (Frühjungsemitisch, i.e., South Arabian and Ethiopian) and Late New Semitic (Spätjungsemitisch, i.e., Canaanitic, Aramaic, Arabic). In the preceding chapter, we have seen how in the nineteenth century the existing ideas about the relationship between the Semitic languages crystallised into a classificatory scheme under the influence of the historical–comparativist paradigm. In this chapter, we shall discuss the implications of this paradigm for the position of Arabic within the Semitic languages, and possible alternatives. Originally, five languages, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Ethiopic, had been distinguished and presented more or less as equals. With the growing influence of historical research in the history of the Semitic-speaking peoples, the study of the relations between these languages was approached from an historical perspective, and under the influence of the paradigm of Indo-European linguistics an attempt was made to establish a family tree of the languages involved, supposedly reflecting their genetic relations. Such a genetic interpretation of the classification implied that all Semitic languages eventually derived from a protoSemitic language. In Indo-European studies, it was generally assumed that it was possible to reconstruct a proto-Indo-European language on the basis of a comparison of the structure of the known Indo-European languages. Similarly, it was thought that a proto-Semitic language could be reconstructed by comparing Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, Aramaic and Ethiopic, and this language was assumed to have the same status with regard to the Semitic languages that proto-Indo-European had with regard to the Indo-European languages, namely, that of a parental language with its offspring. The attempts to find a common structure in these languages that could then be assigned to the proto-language led, however, to widely differing

Arabic as a Semitic Language  13

results. Unlike the Indo-European languages, spread over a wide area and usually isolated from each other, the Semitic languages tended to be confined to the same geographic area (Syria/Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Arabian desert) and were often spoken in contiguous regions. This led to more or less permanent contacts between the speakers of these languages, so that borrowing between them was always a possibility. Borrowing typically disrupts historical processes of change and makes it difficult to reconstruct the original correspondences between the languages involved. The affinity between the Semitic languages is generally much more transparent than that between the Indo-European languages, and they share a number of common features that clearly mark them as Semitic. In themselves, none of the features that are usually presented as typical of a Semitic language is conclusive in determining whether a particular language belongs to the Semitic group, but in combination they constitute a reasonably reliable checklist: triradicalism, presence of emphatic/glottalised consonants, consonantal root structure, and a system of morphological templates, paratactic constructions, verbal system with a prefix and a suffix conjugation, as well as a large number of lexical correspondences. As long as the presence of common features in a group of languages is interpreted in terms of a typological classification, without implications regarding their genetic relationship, the subgrouping of the languages involved is not problematic. In such a classification, the issue of later borrowing or of independent developments that have led to identical results is left open. A genetic relationship, on the other hand, implies an historical descent from a common origin, a language that is regarded as the common ancestor of all the languages in the group. Since in this framework the ancestor language is presumed to have an historical reality, it must have been the language of an historical people. Semiticists working in the genealogical framework therefore started looking for a Semitic homeland. There has been a lot of controversy about this homeland of the ‘proto-Semites’. Many scholars situated it in the Arabian peninsula, while others mentioned Syria or North Africa. From such a homeland, successive waves of migration were then supposed to have brought various groups to their respective territories, for instance, the Amorites between 2000 and 1700 bce, and the Aramaeans between 1900 and 1400 bce. Of these waves, the Arab conquests in the seventh century ce were the latest and the last. Such a view of the events leading to the presentday division of the Semitic languages implies that the peoples mentioned in the historical records already spoke the languages associated later with their names and that, once arrived in their new area, these Semitic languages developed independently from each other, either under the influence of languages already being spoken there (substratal influence), or because of internal developments. These factors were held to be responsible for the innovations in each language and for the differences between the various languages.

14  The Arabic Language

The genealogical paradigm, whether it is framed in terms of the migration of peoples or in terms of the spreading of linguistic innovations, has been severely criticised by some scholars because of its incompatibility with the nature of the linguistic situation in the Near East. Since in this area there are no clear demarcations between the various linguistic groups, they were never completely isolated from each other like the Indo-European languages. Many of the linguistic communities were contiguous and entertained cultural and political contacts with each other, so that common innovations could spread over large areas, and extensive borrowing and interference could take place. Besides, as Blau (1978) has pointed out, several languages served for some time as the lingua franca in this area, for instance, Akkadian and Aramaic. Some of the common features shared by the languages of the region may have been introduced by the presence of such a lingua franca. Some scholars continue to feel that a genetic classification is possible provided that the right principles are used. Thus, for instance, Hetzron (1974, 1976) proposes basing the classification on the principles of archaic heterogeneity and shared morpholexical innovations. The former principle implies that a heterogeneous morphological system is more archaic than a homogeneous one; the latter principle states that morpholexical innovations are unlikely to be subject to borrowing. He illustrates his approach with two examples. The suffixes of the first- and secondperson singular of the perfect verb in Arabic are -tu/-ta, as in katabtu/katabta, ‘I/ you have written’. In Ethiopic they are -ku/-ka, but in Akkadian the equivalent suffix form of nouns and verbs (the so-called stative or permansive) has a set of personal suffixes -(ā)ku/-(ā)ta. Such a distribution may be explained as the result of a generalisation in Arabic and Ethiopic, which implies that the heterogeneous system of Akkadian is older. The tendency towards homogenisation was realised differently in Arabic (and Canaanite), on the one hand, and in Ethiopic (and South Arabian), on the other. Hebrew has kātabti/kātabta and thus shares this innovation with Arabic, setting it apart from the South Semitic languages. Hetzron’s second example has to do with the prefix vowel of the imperfect verb. In Akkadian, the prefixes of the third-person singular masculine, the thirdperson plural and the first-person plural have -i-, while all other persons have -a-. In Classical Arabic all persons have -a-, while in Ethiopic all persons have -ǝ- (< -i-). In this case, too, Hetzron regards the heterogeneous system of Akkadian as the older one, whereas the prefixes in the other languages are the result of a later generalisation. Actually, the situation in Arabic is somewhat more complicated, since in pre-Islamic Arabic some dialects had -i- in all persons, whereas others had -a- (cf. below, pp. 49f.). Possibly, there was an intermediate step in which -i- was generalised for all persons in verbs with a stem vowel -a-, and -a- was generalised for all persons in verbs with a stem vowel -u-/-i-. The pre-Islamic dialects differed with regard to the further generalisation, in which the correlation with the stem vowel was abandoned.

Arabic as a Semitic Language  15

On the basis of these and similar examples, Hetzron posits a group of Central Semitic languages, separating Arabic from its position in the standard model in which it is grouped together with South Arabian and Ethiopic as South Semitic languages. The main force of Hetzron’s arguments is the fact that he does not base his subgrouping of the Semitic languages on common innovations in phonology, syntax or lexicon – in these domains, borrowing is always a distinct possibility – but concentrates instead on morpholexical innovations, which are much less prone to borrowing. We may add that he excludes from his classification arguments based on common retention of features (‘negative innovation’), since this may occur independently in several languages and does not imply any sustained contact between the languages involved (see Figure 2.2). While Hetzron still accepts the family-tree model for the Semitic languages, others have questioned its usefulness. Ullendorff (1970) rejects out of hand the possibility of ever reaching a classificatory scheme reflecting genetic relationship. Garbini (1984) claims that it is possible to trace the historical development of the Semitic languages, but without any genetic hierarchy, since the pattern of linguistic development in the area is crucially different from that in the IndoEuropean area. In his view, the present distribution of the languages involved is not the result of sudden migrations of peoples, but rather of a gradual infiltration from different centres, which reached out towards the periphery of the area. Such an infiltration could transmit innovations in a wave-like fashion that most strongly affected the central area, whereas in the periphery older forms stood a better chance of maintaining themselves. In Garbini’s view, one area in particular played an essential role in the distribution of innovations, namely, the Syrian plain (rather than the coastal region or Palestine), which he regards as the core

Proto-Semitic

West Semitic South Semitic

East Semitic (Akkadian) Central Semitic

Arabo-Canaanite

Ethiopian

Epigraphic Modern South Arabian South Arabian

Aramaic

Arabic Canaanite

Figure 2.2  The genealogy of the Semitic languages (Hetzron 1974, 1976)

16  The Arabic Language

area of the Semitic languages. The main characteristic of the Syrian region in which these innovations are supposed to have taken place is the contact between sedentary settlements on the desert fringe and nomads from the desert. In some cases, the nomads settled and became part of the sedentary population, but in many other cases groups of settlers separated themselves and became isolated as desert-dwelling nomads. Garbini regards this constant alternation as the origin of the linguistic pattern of innovations spreading from the Syrian area into other areas. Exactly which innovations were brought from Syria into the peninsula depended on the period in which a particular group of people took to the desert. Garbini cites examples from Akkadian and Eblaite, showing how these languages were not involved in the migratory process and did not share in some of the later innovations in the Syrian area. The common features which Arabic shares with Aramaic and Amorite stem from the period in which the ancestors of the later Arabs still lived in the Syrian region. In his view, Arabic is the nomadic variety of the languages spoken in Syria in the first millennium bce, which he calls collectively Amorite. He regards the South Arabian and Ethiopian languages as the product of an earlier migration from the same area. According to this theory, those common features between Arabic and South Arabian that are not shared by the languages in the Syrian area are the result of later convergence: the Arabian Bedouin influenced the sedentary languages/dialects in the south, and inversely through the caravan trade the South Arabian languages/dialects became known in the north of the peninsula. The Modern South Arabian languages (Mehri, Soqoṭri) do not derive directly from the Epigraphic South Arabian language. They probably belong to strata that had never been reached by Arabic influence because they were spoken in remote regions. In some respects, their structure is, therefore, more archaic than that of Epigraphic South Arabian. We have seen above (p. 12) that Kienast (2001) also views the history of the Semitic languages as a succession of waves of immigrants. Whenever a group of nomads in such a wave settle down, their language develops further, and loses, for instance, the declensional endings. He explains the retention of declensional endings in Arabic as a result of the fact that their language was spoken by people who stayed away from the sedentary area in the Near East for a long time and, therefore, did not participate in the linguistic developments that took place there. Even more radically, Edzard (1998) questions the possibility, or even the desirability, of a historical–comparative approach, which is based on the notion of one proto-language that bifurcates repeatedly until it develops into the individual languages. His solution is to adopt a polygenetic model, in which there is an initial pool of linguistic variation. Contacts between the groups involved lead to convergence. Eventually, new language varieties emerge in which the variants are redistributed. In such a model, there is no room for the kind of reconstructions favoured by historical comparativists. At the most, the correspondences between the individual languages may be viewed as a convenient way of representing the

Arabic as a Semitic Language  17

relations between similar forms in individual languages, for instance, when it is observed that Arabic words with /ḍ/ correspond with words with /ṣ/ in Hebrew or Akkadian. Such formulas may be useful as long as they do not lead to claims about an historical development from a common ancestor In spite of the hazards of historical–comparative analysis, research in the twentieth century has expanded the scope of Semitic languages even further by including another group of languages, the so-called Hamitic languages. The name itself is derived from the old classificatory scheme of the Book of Genesis (10:1ff.), which divides all mankind among the descendants of the three sons of Noah. This scheme was used by later scholars to divide all languages into those of the descendants of Shem, those of the descendants of Cham and those of the descendants of Japheth (p. 5). The label of Hamitic languages was originally applied to all languages of Africa, but in the modern period Hamitic has come to be used collectively for five specific language groups in Africa: the Berber languages of North Africa and their ancestor, Old Libyan; Old Egyptian and its offshoot, Coptic; Hausa; the Cushitic languages; and the Chadic languages. When common links between these language groups and the Semitic languages were discovered, they became collectively known as the Hamito-Semitic languages. Since the 1970s, the current name for this group has become the Afro-Asiatic languages. In the reconstruction of Afro-Asiatic, too, Garbini applies his theory of the innovatory Syrian area. In his view, any attempt to trace the various groups of Semitic and Hamitic (Egyptian, Libyan/Berber, Cushitic and possibly Hausa) back to one ancestor is doomed to failure. It is true that even a cursory comparison of the various groups reveals the presence of related forms, but the fact that there are almost no firm phonetic correlations of the type found in the Indo-European languages shows that we are not dealing here with a language family with sibling languages descending from a common ancestor. In Garbini’s view, the Hamitic languages are African languages without genetic relationships to the Semitic languages. At one time or another, and to different degrees, they were Semiticised by groups of people coming from the Syrian area. Old Egyptian, for instance, would have become a Semitic language if the contacts had continued. The basis in this model, as in the one proposed by Edzard, is diversity; the unity of the later Semitic languages and the varying degrees of resemblance between Hamitic and Semitic languages are the result of later convergence. In spite of the problems involved in applying the family-tree model to the Semitic languages, comparative research has persisted in the application of the reconstructive paradigm to the Afro-Asiatic languages and to even higher groupings of languages. The interest in language relationships has led to the establishment of progressively higher-level hierarchies, such as the proto-language above the Indo-European and the Afro-Asiatic group. Various attempts have been made to connect the root structure and the phonological inventory of both groups. To some degree, these attempts were facilitated by two developments in Indo-

18  The Arabic Language

European studies: the laryngal theory and the theory of glottalised consonants in proto-Indo-European. Both theories brought Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic phonology closer to each other. Even more audacious conjectures seek to incorporate both Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages in such constructs as the Nostratic macro-family, including the Kartvelian languages (e.g., Georgian), Uralo-Altaic (e.g., Hungarian) and Dravidian (e.g., Tamil). It is hard to say what the value of such conjectures is, since the time-span involved allows for a great deal of speculation about the changes that make it possible to find lexical parallels. Besides, it is debatable whether it is permissible to apply the results of Indo-European linguistics to all linguistic relationships in the world. It could very well be the case that the type of relationship in which a mother language generates daughter languages, as is commonly held to be the case in the Indo-European languages, is an exception. 2.2  The position of Arabic Within the group of the Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew have always been the two most-studied languages. Although the discovery of Akkadian has considerably modified views on the structure and development of the Semitic languages, and in spite of the fact that the Assyrian/Babylonian material antedates the oldest Arabic materials by more than two millennia, in many respects Arabic still remains the model for the description of the Semitic language type. The reason is not only the familiarity of scholars of Semitic languages with the Arabic language and the relative wealth of data about its history, but also its apparent conservatism, in particular its retention of a declensional system. The genealogical position of Arabic within the group of the Semitic languages has long been a vexing problem for Semiticists. We have seen above that it was customary to place Arabic in one group with Epigraphic South Arabian, Modern South Arabian and the Ethiopian languages, collectively called the South-west (or South) Semitic languages. The main criterion for this classification was the formation of the broken or internal plural, in which the plural of nouns is formed by a restructuring of the singular without affixation. Such broken plurals are current only in South Semitic. In Geʿez we find, for instance, bet/abyat ‘house’, rǝʾs/arʾǝst ‘head’, ǝd/ǝdäw ‘hand’, kokäb/käwakǝbt ‘star’, and many more examples of broken plurals that resemble, but are certainly not identical with, Arabic patterns (Gragg 1997: 248). The value of the criterion of plural formation has been contested. According to some scholars (e.g., Al-Mansour 2011), the development of broken plurals in Arabic and South Semitic languages could have occurred independently. Others believe that vestiges of broken plurals are also found in North-west Semitic. In Hebrew, there are several isolated examples of plurals with a different basis from the corresponding singulars, which look like broken plurals, albeit with a plural affix, for

Arabic as a Semitic Language  19

instance, pǝsīlīm ‘idols’, which serves as the plural of pesel ‘idol’. Yet such plurals may be derived from other singulars, now lost (*pasīl); alternatively, they may be explained as the result of a stress shift. Some of the alleged examples of broken plurals in Hebrew are probably collectives, as in the case of rōkēb/rekeb ‘rider’. According to Corriente (1971a), the opposition singular–plural as morphological categories is a secondary development in the Semitic languages. Originally, these languages distinguished between two classes of words denoting large, important objects, on the one hand, and small, insignificant objects, on the other. The latter category also included such words as diminutives, abstract nouns and collectives; words in this category were marked with suffixes such as -t, -ā, -ay, -āʾu, which later became the suffixes for the feminine gender. When the Semitic languages started to develop the opposition between singular and plural, East Semitic and North-west Semitic languages selected one single morpheme to denote the plural (e.g., Hebrew -īm), whereas Arabic and the South Semitic languages distinguished between various kinds of plurality, most of them marked by one of the ‘feminine’ suffixes to denote plurality, as in Arabic ʾaṣdiqāʾu ‘friends’, broken plural of ṣadīq, or fuqarāʾu ‘poor’, broken plural of faqīr. In the case of human beings, the South Semitic languages, too, used a regular plural morpheme (in Arabic -ūna/-īna, feminine --ātun/-ātin). According to this theory, the broken plurals in the South Semitic languages were originally external (suffixed) forms that were used for feminine or collective nouns and became fixed as plurals when this category had been developed. Not all broken plurals in Arabic can be explained in this way, but those with a ‘feminine’ suffix may have constituted the starting point for the other patterns. Traces of internal plurals in the North-west Semitic languages may then be explained as old collectives or abstract nouns. If the origin of the internal plurals really dates back to a common Semitic period, they are not an innovation of the South Semitic languages but a common retention. It was the later development that created the distance between South and North-west Semitic languages in this respect. The morphological features (the broken plurals and a few others such as the development of a verbal measure fāʿala and a passive participle with a prefix m-) are accompanied by common phonetic developments in Arabic, South Arabian and Ethiopic, as against the other Semitic languages. In most Semitic languages there is an opposition between b/p, but in the South Semitic languages, including Arabic, f corresponds to p elsewhere (cf., for instance, Hebrew pāqad ‘to look after, visit’; Akkadian paqādu ‘to take care of ’ with Arabic faqada ‘to lose, look for’; Geʿez faqada ‘to want, require’). Likewise, in South Semitic ḍ corresponds to ṣ (cf. Akkadian ʾerṣetu, Hebrew ʾereṣ with Arabic ʾarḍ, South Arabian ʾrḍ, all meaning ‘earth’) and the old lateral *s has become š/ś (cf. p. 24). There are, however, also instances in which Arabic shares features with the North-west Semitic languages against South Arabian and Ethiopian languages. One feature has already been mentioned (p. 14), the development of the personal

20  The Arabic Language

suffixes in the past tense. Arabic and Hebrew generalised the suffixes of the firstand second-person singular to -t-, whereas South Arabian and Ethiopic chose -k-. A second feature that differentiates Arabic from South Arabian/Ethiopic concerns the formation of the imperfect. According to most historical/comparativist reconstructions, proto-Semitic had three verbal tenses, an imperfect *yiqattVl, a perfect *yíqtVl and a jussive *yitVl, as well as a suffix form (stative). In all Semitic languages, the suffix form developed into a verbal form with perfect aspect and eventually replaced the old perfect, which had become identical with the jussive because of a stress shift (*yíqtVl > yiqtVl). The proto-Semitic perfect originally had past reference, but lost it afterwards. In Ethiopic and South Arabian, the proto-Semitic imperfect was maintained as yǝqät(t)ǝl. This imperfect formed a new verbal system together with the new suffix conjugation and the jussive. In Arabic, Canaanite and Aramaic, the proto-Semitic imperfect was dropped and the perfect/jussive was adopted as the new form for the durative aspect, together with an indicative morpheme -u/-na, retained only in Arabic. This verbal form is usually called ‘imperfect’; it has non-past time reference. The original past time reference of the perfect is still visible in the use of the Hebrew imperfect with the so-called wāw consecutivum, which indicates a past tense. In Arabic, too, when the imperfect is used with the conditional particle ʾin or the negation lam, it refers to the past. The net result of these developments was a verbal system that groups Arabic together typologically with the North-west Semitic languages and sets it apart from the other languages of the South Semitic group. These are not the only features linking Arabic with the North-west Semitic languages. They are the only languages in which a definite article has developed, in North Arabian ((h)n-; cf. below, p. 29), in Arabic (ʾl-) and in Phoenician/Hebrew (h-). In all these languages, the article developed out of a demonstrative element that had lost its deictic force; at the same time, new demonstratives were developed from combinations of deictic elements (e.g., Phoenician z, pl. ʾl ‘this’; hʾ, pl. hmt ‘that’; Hebrew hazze, hallāze; Arabic hāḏā, ḏālika). An important morpholexical innovation is the presence of a third-person pronoun with the element h in Arabic (huwa/hiya) and the North-west Semitic languages, for example, Hebrew (hū/hī), instead of s as in the South Arabian personal suffixes s, sw/s (except in Sabaean hw, h/h). Probably this innovation took place, as predicted by Garbini’s account, from north to south, since it reached Sabaean but not the other South Arabian languages. Finally, it may be mentioned that in Arabic and in the Northwest Semitic languages the feminine ending -at developed a new form without the t: in Arabic the pausal form is -ah, in Hebrew most feminine words end in -ā. The common features shared by Arabic and the North-west Semitic languages prompted Hetzron (1974, 1976) to propose his new subgrouping of Central Semitic, in which Arabic was to go with Canaanite and Aramaic instead of South Arabian and Ethiopic (cf. above, p. 15). Since the new classification adequately explains the common features between Arabic and North-west Semitic, the question remains

Arabic as a Semitic Language  21

of how the common features between Arabic and the South Semitic languages are to be explained. One hypothesis regards the internal plurals in Arabic and South Semitic as an independent development (see above, p. 18); alternatively, the further development of internal plurals may be regarded as a phenomenon that affected some of the languages in the West Semitic group, later to become the South Semitic languages. This innovation did not spread to all the languages of the West Semitic group. When the group split, some of them went south, later to become the South-west Semitic languages, while Arabic remained behind and came into closer contact with the other West Semitic languages, Canaanite and Aramaic, together with which it developed a new verbal system, a definite article, a feminine ending and other features. A further subgrouping within the Central Semitic languages is set up by Hetzron on the basis of another feature, the suffix -na in the feminine plural of the verbs. In Arabic, we have katabū/katabna ‘they wrote [masculine/feminine]’ and yaktubūna/yaktubna ‘they write [masculine/feminine]’ as the third-person plural of the perfect and imperfect. This partially matches the endings in the Hebrew imperfect (in the perfect, masculine and feminine have merged) yiqṭǝlū/tiqṭolnāh (without the generalisation of y that is found in Arabic), but differs from Aramaic, which marks the feminine plural with -ān. Accordingly, Hetzron subdivides his Central Semitic group into Arabic and Hebrew, on the one hand, and Aramaic, on the other. A further refinement was proposed by Voigt (1987), who emphasises the difference between the Old and the Modern South Arabian languages. According to him, Epigraphic South Arabian should be classified as Central Semitic, whereas the Modern South Arabian languages are to be grouped together with the Ethiopian languages in the South Semitic group. As we have seen above, not all scholars share the view that classificatory models of the kind proposed by Hetzron and others are a satisfactory way of representing the development of the Semitic languages. An alternative way of looking at the distribution of common features between Arabic and the other Semitic languages ties in with Garbini’s theory. We have seen above that in Garbini’s view the Arabic type of Semitic language originated when groups of speakers detached themselves from the Syrian area that bordered on the desert and became isolated from the innovative area. The completion of this process of Bedouinisation took place at the earliest in the second half of the second millennium bce. The common features shared by Arabic and North-west Semitic must, therefore, represent innovations that had been introduced in the Syrian area before Bedouinisation took place. Indeed, it appears that there are no archaisms in Arabic that do not also occur in the North-west Semitic languages of the second millennium bce. As Arabic progressively spread southwards, it reached the domain of the South Arabian language, which had been brought there at a much earlier time. Some of the Arabs settled in the area and established linguistic contacts between the two languages (see below, p. 44). In the first millennium bce sedentarisation took place

22  The Arabic Language

in the Syrian region as well, when Arab nomads came from the desert and settled in the more fertile areas; this process led to the Arabicisation of the Nabataean empire (see below, p. 31). When the power of the South Arabian empires grew in the first millennium bce, the influence of the languages of this region on the language of the Arab Bedouin also increased. In Garbini’s view, this explains the common features between Arabic and the South Semitic languages. Because of the contacts with Syria and South Arabia, Arabic cannot be said to belong exclusively to either the North-west Semitic or the South Semitic languages. In the course of its history, it was affected by innovations in both groups. In the past, the tendency to approach the comparative study of the Semitic languages from the perspective of Arabic led to a reconstruction of protoSemitic that was remarkably close to the structure of Arabic, which was therefore regarded as archaic compared with the other Semitic languages. Arabic, for instance, has the interdentals /ṯ/ and /ḏ/, which correspond to dentals in Syriac and to sibilants in Akkadian, Hebrew and Ethiopic (cf., for instance, the numeral ‘three’ in Arabic, ṯalāṯa, with Akkadian šalāšum; Hebrew šalōš; Syriac tǝlāt; Geʿez šalās). South Arabian also had interdentals in its older stage, and in Old Akkadian and Ugaritic there are still traces of the interdentals. In the series of the velars (/ḫ/, /ġ/) and the pharyngals (/ḥ/, /ʿ/), only Arabic and Epigraphic South Arabian have the full set. In most other Semitic languages, the voiceless members of both pairs, /ḫ/ and /ḥ/, have merged into /ḥ/, and the voiced members, /ġ/ and /ʿ/, into /ʿ/ (e.g., cf. Arabic ġarb ‘sunset’/ʿayn ‘eye’, with Hebrew ʿereb ‘evening’/ʿayin ‘eye’; Arabic ʾaḫ ‘brother’/ʾaḥad ‘one’, with Hebrew ʾāḥ/ʾeḥād). In Ugaritic, both sets are distinguished in writing. In Akkadian, only /ḫ/ appears, whereas the other velars and pharyngals have merged into /ʾ/ (e.g., ʾerēbum ‘to enter’, ʾešrum ‘ten’, cf. Arabic ġarb/ʿašr), but there are indications that originally this language, too, contained all four phonemes. In morphology, Arabic has a full nominal declension, with three case endings: -u (nominative), -i (genitive), -a (accusative). Old Akkadian has the same declensional endings, but in the later stages of the language (Neo-Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian) the endings are often confused and finally disappear completely. In the older North-west Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic, the declensional endings are still found, but in the later languages of this group, such as Hebrew, they have disappeared. In Epigraphic South Arabian there is no declension, but certain orthographic peculiarities seem to point to the original existence of such a system. In Ethiopic there is one oblique ending -a, which probably goes back to an original accusative ending. There are also features in Arabic that as far as we know were never present in any of the other Semitic languages and must, therefore, be innovations that took place independently within Arabic. In morphology, the use of the ending -n (nunation) as a marker of indefiniteness is not matched by any of the other Semitic languages. The -m ending (mimation) in Akkadian nouns does not denote

Arabic as a Semitic Language  23

labial interdental dental alveolar pre-palatal post-palatal velar pharyngal laryngal

voiceless voiced nasal velarised lateral trill f t s t š k ḫ ḥ ʾ

b m d z n d j q ġ ʿ h

ḍ ṣ ṭ

l ḍ

r

Table 2.1  The Arabic consonantal system indefiniteness, and in South Arabian -m may have served as an absolutive marker, contrasting with -n as a marker of definiteness. We have seen above that the use of a definite article is a feature shared by Arabic, Canaanite and Aramaic. But Arabic stands alone in the choice of the element ʾl- for this article instead of h-, as in North Arabic. In the fāʿala form of the verb that Arabic shares with the South Semitic languages, it alone has developed an internal passive fūʿila. In the phonemic inventory of Arabic (see Table 2.1), the following six features may be mentioned, in addition to the presence of the sets of interdentals, velars and pharyngals that are often identified as part of the common stock of the Semitic languages. First, a characteristic feature of the Semitic languages is the presence of so-called emphatic consonants. In Arabic, these are articulated by a process of velarisation or pharyngalisation: the tip of the tongue is lowered, the root of the tongue is raised towards the soft palate, and in the process the timbre of the neighbouring vowels is shifted towards a central-back realisation (see below, Chapter 6, p. 86). The velarised consonants in Arabic correspond to glottalised consonants (consonants accompanied by a glottal stop) in the Ethiopian Semitic languages. This correspondence has led to some speculation as to the original character of the emphatic consonants in proto-Semitic. According to some scholars, it is easier to imagine a shift from glottalised to velarised consonants than vice versa, so that the velarised realisation in Arabic is to be regarded as a secondary development. Within the comparativist paradigm, it is usually assumed that originally the Semitic languages had five emphatic consonants, *ṭ, *ṣ, *ḳ, *ṯ̣ and *ḏ̣; Arabic has four such consonants, /ṭ/, /ṣ/, /ḍ/, and /ḏ̣/. Second, the phoneme corresponding in Arabic to proto-Semitic *ṯ̣ is /ḏ̣/; in other Semitic languages (except Ugaritic and Old South Arabian), this phoneme does not have an interdental character, for instance, in Akkadian, Hebrew and Ethiopic /ṣ/ (cf. Hebrew ṣǝbī ‘gazelle’, Arabic ḏ̣aby). The current transcription with

24  The Arabic Language

ẓ in Arabic is based on the modern pronunciation of this phoneme in loanwords from Classical Arabic in the dialects (e.g., Classical Arabic ʿaḏ̣īm, pronounced in Egyptian and Syrian Arabic as ʿaẓīm). Third, the phoneme corresponding in Classical Arabic to proto-Semitic *ḏ̣ is /ḍ/. There is some evidence in Arabic, based on explanations by grammarians and Arabic loanwords in other languages, that /ḍ/ was realised as a lateral fricative [ɮ] or a lateralised [d̴ɫ]. In Akkadian, the name of the Arabic god Ruḍāʾ was transcribed as Ruldāʾu or Rulṭāʾ, and early loans from Arabic in Spanish (e.g., alcalde ‘mayor’ < al-qāḍī) and in Malaysian languages (e.g., in Bahasa Indonesia, ridla as a spelling variant of ridha, ridza ‘God’s blessing’ < riḍā) also exhibit traces of this lateral character of the ḍād. Since it exists as an independent phoneme only in the South Semitic languages, it is difficult to say anything about its original realisation. In Akkadian and Hebrew, it has merged with /ṣ/ (cf. Hebrew ṣāḥaq ‘to laugh’, with Arabic ḍaḥika). In the modern realisation of Classical Arabic, /ḍ/ has become the voiced counterpart of /ṭ/ and in the modern dialects it has merged with /ḏ̣/. Fourth, the phoneme corresponding in Classical Arabic to proto-Semitic *ḳ was probably a non-emphatic voiced counterpart to /k/, that is, /g/; this is the phoneme that is nowadays realised in Standard Arabic as a voiceless /q/, but that in earlier stages of Classical Arabic was probably a voiced /g/, as in the modern Bedouin dialects (cf. p. 187). At any rate, /q/ was not emphatic in Classical Arabic, since it did not lead to assimilation of adjacent consonants (compare iṣṭabara < *iṣtabara ‘to be patient’, where the infix -t- is assimilated to ṣ, with iqtaraḍa ‘to raise a loan’ without assimilation of the t). Fifth, for proto-Semitic a series of three sibilants, *s, *š, and *s (probably a lateralised ś), is usually posited; the Modern South Arabian languages have these three sibilants, but in Arabic *s corresponds to /š/, and *š and *s have merged to /s/. In all other Semitic languages, *s and *š have remained distinct (e.g., cf. Hebrew sāʿad ‘to support’/ḥāmēš ‘five’, with Arabic sāʿada ‘to help’/ḫamsa ‘five’). Sixth, in Arabic the phoneme corresponding to proto-Semitic *g is affricated /j/ (e.g., cf. Hebrew gāmāl, with Arabic jamal ‘camel’); this phoneme forms a pre-palatal series with the new /š/. The debate about the exact position of Arabic within the Semitic languages is still going on. The only conclusion we can draw from the data presented here is that the language exhibits common features with both the South (South Arabian, Ethiopic) and the North (Canaanite, Aramaic) Semitic languages, and that it also contains innovations not found anywhere else. Because of the uncertainties concerning the chronology of the common features, there is little basis for a genealogical classification of the kind current in Indo-European linguistics, and it may be preferable to stay within the bounds of a descriptive and typological analysis of the relationships between Arabic and its Semitic neighbours.

Arabic as a Semitic Language  25

Further reading The classic manual of comparative Semitic linguistics is Brockelmann (1908–13). The Handbuch der Orientalistik in the volume dedicated to Semitic linguistics has sections on the Semitic language type (Spuler 1964b), the expansion of the Semitic languages (Spuler 1964c) and the history of Semitic linguistics (Fück 1964). These sections are useful as an historical introduction, but must be regarded as outdated. The most recent handbooks of the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are Hetzron (1997), Lipiński (1997), Kienast (2001) and Weninger (2011). A synthesis was published by Bergsträßer (1928) and Moscati (1964); see also Sáenz-Badillos’ (1993) introductory chapter to his history of the Hebrew language. More recent surveys from the perspective of Arabic linguistics are given by Voigt (2009) for the Semitic languages; by Belova (2009) for the South Semitic languages; by Hasselbach and Huehnergard (2008) for the North-west Semitic languages; and by Zaborski (2006a) for the Afro-Asiatic languages. A controversial, but highly stimulating, view on the relations between the Semitic languages and the value of the comparative paradigm is found in Garbini (1984). Along more or less the same lines, Edzard (1998) proposes a convergence model for the development of the Semitic languages. About the problems connected with the genealogical classification of the Semitic languages, see von Soden (1960), Hetzron (1974, 1976) and Diem (1980b). On the typology of the Semitic languages, see Ullendorff (1958). Analysis of individual problems connected with the comparison of the Semitic languages is in the following: root structure, Petráček (1982); internal (broken) plurals, Corriente (1971a), Ratcliffe (1998); declensional system, Rabin (1969). For an introduction to Afro-Asiatic linguistics, see Diakonoff (1965). A survey of the state of the art in Afro-Asiatic linguistics is in Petráček (1984). Garbini (1974) deals with the position of Semitic within the Afro-Asiatic languages. An etymological dictionary of Afro-Asiatic common roots was produced by Orel and Stolbova (1994). Because of the highly hypothetical status of recent research in proto-Nostratic, it is difficult to cite any relevant literature; Bomhard (1984) has introductory chapters on the aims and scope of proto-Nostratic comparisons. With regard to the position of Arabic within the group of the Semitic languages, see Diem (1980b), Petráček (1981), Zaborski (1991a), Voigt (2009), Al-Mansour (2011). Of special interest are the discussions about the Central Semitic group in Hetzron (1974, 1976) and Voigt (1987). Arguments against the special relationship between Arabic and North-west Semitic are given by Huehnergard (1991); Knauf (1988) argues that Arabic is more related to Aramaic than to Canaanite. On nunation and mimation see Diem (1975). Discussion with the emphasis on the parallels between Arabic and North-west Semitic is in Garbini (1984: 97–112). A classic account of the Arabic phonemic inventory in the light of comparative Semitic linguistics is found in Cantineau (1960); for the lateral realisation of /ḍ/ see Chapter 6, p. 87.

Chapter 3

The Earliest Stages of Arabic

3.1  The Arabs We do not know when the first nomads came to the Arabian peninsula, and we certainly do not know which language they spoke. It is usually assumed that the settlement of the peninsula took place in the second millennium bce. In the south, advanced civilisations were established in the period between the thirteenth and tenth centuries bce. They traded luxury goods such as incense across the Red Sea to the north and developed extensive commercial relations with the Near East. The languages used in the inscriptions of these civilisations belong to the group of South Semitic languages; they are related to Arabic, but did not partake in some of the innovations exhibited by Arabic (cf. above, pp. 21f.). The script of the South Arabian civilisations is related to some of the North Semitic scripts, such as Phoenician, and was probably imported from the Syro-Palestine region to the south. It is from the South Arabian script that the later North Arabian scripts are derived. The language of the South Arabian inscriptions is usually called Epigraphic (or Old) South Arabian, and is divided into several dialects or languages, the most important of which are Sabaean, Minaean and Qaṭabānian. These languages must have died out soon after the Islamic conquests. The present-day Modern South Arabian languages such as Soqoṭrī and Mehri, that are still spoken in a few linguistic pockets in South Arabia, are related to Epigraphic South Arabian, but do not derive from it directly (cf. below p. 44). The inhabitants of the South Arabian empires did not call themselves ‘Arabs’. Towards the end of the second century bce, some of the South Arabian inscriptions mention nomads called ʿrb (plural ʾʿrb), who are contrasted to the sedentary population of the south. The earliest attested use of this name stems, however, from a different region: in a cuneiform inscription dating from 853 bce, the Assyrian king Salmanassar III mentions as one of his adversaries Gindibu from the land of Arbi or Arbāya. The name ‘Arabs’ as a people’s name is used somewhat later, for the first time by Tiglatpilesar III (745–727 bce), and then more frequently by his successors, under the form Arabu, Aribi. For the Assyrians and the Babylonians, this term covered all kinds of nomadic tribes, some of them undoubtedly Aramaic-speaking. Probably, it served as a collective name for all people

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  27

coming from the desert who invaded the lands of the urban civilisations and who were alternately fought by the Assyrians or enlisted by them as allies against other enemies. In 715 bce, Sargon II attempted to end the opposition from the nomads by settling some tribes in the neighbourhood of Samaria; their names are mentioned in Sargon’s inscriptions as Tamudi, Ibadidi, Marsimani and Hayapa. Reliefs in the palace of King Assurbanipal in Niniveh show Arab camel-riders being fought and subdued by the Assyrians. The name ‘Arabs’ is also attested in the Hebrew Torah, for instance, in Jeremiah 25:24 (end of the seventh century bce), where mention is made of all the kings of the ʿArab and of the ʿEreb that live in the desert. The etymology of the name ‘Arabs’ is unknown. In the cuneiform inscriptions from Mari (modern Tell Hariri in Syria), mention is made of the Ḫapiru, and according to some scholars these people are identical with the Aribi; their name may be connected with the Sumerian word gab-bīr ‘desert’. According to another theory, the name ‘Arabs’ is related to the root ʿ-b-r in the sense ‘to cross [the desert]’, from which the name of the Hebrews is also derived. Yet another theory links the name with a Semitic root meaning ‘entering into a dependency upon someone’ (cf. Akkadian ʾerēbum ‘to enter’), referring to the Arabs’ role as allies (see Chapter 4, p. 42). Since we do not know which language was spoken by the various tribes indicated with the name Aribi and similar names, these early mentions of Arabs do not tell us much about their linguistic prehistory. The emergence of the Arabs in history is closely connected with the use of the camel. The abovementioned Gindibu had 1,000 camels at his disposal, and the reliefs show nomads attacking on camels. According to Bulliet’s (1990) study of the development of camel-breeding, the first domestication of this animal took place in the south of the Arabian peninsula, and from there it became known around 1200 bce in the north through the incense trade. It may be noted that this is around the time that, according to some scholars, Semitic-speaking groups from the fringes of the Syrian desert detached themselves from the sedentary civilisation and took off into the desert. According to Garbini (1984), the language that we call Arabic was developed in this process of nomadisation or Bedouinisation (cf. above, Chapter 2, pp. 15f.). When the nomads in the Syrian desert invented a new kind of saddle that enabled them to ride the hump of their camels, their range of movement became much larger, they could have herds and, most importantly, they could take control of the caravans from the south. This innovation must have taken place in the last centuries bce, and it marks the beginning of the period of real Bedouinisation. The new fashion of riding also enabled the nomads to maintain regular contact with the urban civilisations in Syria and Iraq. A further refinement was reached in the second and third centuries ce with the invention of the saddle-bow, which led to the development of a society of rider-warriors, represented by the type of Bedouin tribes that we know from the period directly before Islam.

28  The Arabic Language

When the land route for the trade between South Arabia and the Fertile Crescent became more important than the sea route, the nomads’ role in this trade became a factor to be reckoned with. All along the main route, settlements had been established by the South Arabians, but, when the power of the South Arabian civilisation waned, the nomadic tribes stepped in and began to control the flow of commerce themselves. The first stage of this new development was dominated by the caravan cities of Petra and Palmyra (Tadmur). The Nabataean kingdom of Petra was conquered by the Roman emperor Trajan in 106 ce. After the destruction of Petra, the Palmyrans of the oasis of Tadmur 200 km to the north-west of Damascus took over. The conquest of Palmyra by the Roman emperor Aurelian in 272 ce marked the end of the great caravan oases. After the third century, the competition of the three powers of Byzantium, Persia and Ḥimyar, the last of the South Arabian empires, dominated the course of events. Each of these powers had its own ally among the Arab nomads: the Banū Laḫm supported the Persians; the Banū Ġassān the Byzantines; and the kingdom of Kinda was in the service of the Ḥimyarites. In the fifth and sixth centuries, however, the political scene changed considerably, first after the fall of the Ḥimyaritic kingdom in 525 ce following an Ethiopian invasion, and then after the constant fighting between Persia and Byzantium, which weakened both. With the waning of the power of their patrons, the Arab allies lost their power too. This furthered the emergence of commercial centres inland, first, in Mecca, which had already become a cultural and religious centre for the nomadic tribes and now saw its chance to dominate the caravan trade. The Banū Qurayš, the dominant tribe of Mecca, became one of the most powerful tribes in the peninsula, and to some extent one could say that thanks to the mission of one of its members, the Prophet Muḥammad, it never lost this position throughout the entire history of the Islamic empire. 3.2  Ancient North Arabian For the earliest elements of the Arabic language we have to turn to inscriptions in other languages. In the South Arabian inscriptions, we find a few proper names of a non-South Arabian type (cf. GAP, I, 27), for example, zyd (Zayd), ʾslm (ʾAslam), or with the South Arabian mimation ending, for example, slymm (Sulaymum), ʿbydm (ʿUbaydum), sometimes even with the Arabic article, for example, ʾlḥrṯ (al-Ḥāriṯ). These may refer to North Arabian nomads, whom the South Arabian empires employed to protect the caravans along the incense road through the Arabian desert. Of more interest from the linguistic point of view are four groups of inscriptions, first discovered in the nineteenth century and written in a language that seems to be an early stage of the later Arabic language. These inscriptions use scripts derived from Epigraphic South Arabian. The language in which they are written has sometimes been called proto-Arabic or Early Arabic,

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  29

but will be referred to here as Ancient North Arabian, in order to distinguish it from the language of the Arabic inscriptions (proto-Arabic; see below) and the language of the early Islamic papyri (Early Arabic). Since most of the inscriptions are fragmentary and the vast majority of them contain nothing but proper names, the exact identification of the language involved is difficult. At any rate, the language of these inscriptions is closely related to what we know as Classical Arabic. The four groups of inscriptions are the following.

3.2.1  Ṯamūdic The Qurʾān mentions the people of Ṯamūd as an example of an earlier community that perished because it did not accept the message of its prophet, in this case the prophet Ṣāliḥ (e.g., Q 7/73ff.). The name Ṯamūd occurs in a number of historical contexts as well. We have seen above that the Tamudi were mentioned in one of the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Sargon II, who settled them near Samaria (715 bce). The name Ṯamūdic has been given to the tens of thousands of mostly short inscriptions in a script derived from the South Arabian script that have been discovered in a string of oases in west and central-north Arabia, along the caravan route to the south, as far as north Yemen. The inscriptions date from the sixth century bce to the fourth century ce; most of them were found in Dūmat al-Jandal and al-Ḥijr. One isolated group stems from the oasis of Taymāʾ. Most of the inscriptions are rather short, containing almost exclusively proper names of the type ‘A, son of B’. They do not tell us much about the structure of the language; it is not even clear whether they all belong to the same language. But in any case they all belong to the North Arabian group, characterised by the definite article h- (e.g., h-gml ‘the/this camel’).

3.2.2  Liḥyānitic The earliest examples of these inscriptions, likewise in a South Arabian type of script, probably date from the second half of the first millennium bce, from the oasis of Dadan, modern al-ʿUlā, 300 km north-west of Medina, on the incense route from Yemen to Syria. Originally, this oasis was a Minaean colony, but later it became a protectorate of Ptolemaic Egypt until the second half of the first century bce. Sometimes a distinction is made between Dadanitic and Liḥyānitic inscriptions on the basis of the royal titles that are used. The oldest are the Dadanitic (also called Dedanitic), which refer to the kings of Dadan (mlk ddn). The majority of the more than 500 inscriptions from the oasis refer to the kings of Liḥyān; they belong to the period between the fourth and first centuries bce. Some of the inscriptions consist of personal names only, often preceded by l-, possibly indicating the author of the inscription, or more likely the person for whom the inscription was made. There are, however, also larger texts (votive inscriptions, building inscriptions, etc.). The language of the inscriptions belongs

30  The Arabic Language

to the North Arabian group, with an article h- or hn- (e.g., h-gbl hn-ʾʿly ‘the highest mountain’ and h-gbl hn-ʾsfl ‘the lowest mountain’) (Robin 1992: 118).

3.2.3  Ṣafāʾitic The Ṣafāʾitic inscriptions, also written in a South Arabian type of script, received their name from the Ṣafāʾ area, south-east of Damascus. In this area and ­neighbouring regions, as far as the northern parts of Saudi Arabia, more than 15,000 inscriptions have been found. They date from the first century bce to the third century ce and mostly contain only proper names, almost always preceded by the preposition l-. A number of somewhat larger inscriptions refer to Bedouin camp sites, and to mourning for the dead. In some inscriptions, reference is made to political events in the area with the word snt ‘in the year that’. In this word, we also see the spelling of the feminine ending, -t; only in female proper names is the pausal ending -h sometimes used. Unlike the later Arabic script, this script does not indicate the long vowels; thus, dr stands for dār ‘camp site’. The diphthongs are very often not written either, so that mt usually stands for mwt ‘death’, and bt for byt ‘tent’. Possibly, this vacillation in spelling represents a development in the pronunciation of the diphthongs, ay > ē, aw > ō. The article is h-, possibly originally hn- with gemination of certain following consonants because of assimilation of the n-. In Ṣafāʾitic, the sound plural ends in -n, which may stand for -ūn and -īn, since the script does not have a special spelling for the long vowels. Thus, we have, for instance, h-ḍlln, that is, haḍ-ḍālilūn/īn ‘those who err’ (cf. Arabic aḍ-ḍāllūn/īn, with contraction of the two identical consonants). The causative stem is formed with ʾ-, as in the verb ʾšrq, imperfect yšrq ‘to go east’ (cf. Arabic ʾašraqa/yušriqu). There seem to be some lexical similarities with the North-west Semitic languages, such as in the word mdbr ‘desert’ (cf. Hebrew midbār).

3.2.4  Ḥasāʾitic To this group belong some forty inscriptions, most of which have been found in the Saudi Arabian province of al-Ḥasā on the Gulf, probably dating from the period between the fifth and the second centuries bce. They are written in a script that is almost identical with the South Arabian script. The inscriptions are very short and do not tell us much about the structure of the language, but it is clear that the article in these inscriptions, too, is hn- in proper names like hn-ʾlt, the name of the goddess ʾIlāt. If we take only the article as a discriminatory feature, all the inscriptions mentioned here belong to a h(n)- group, contrasting with the Classical Arabic ʾl-. Contrary to the situation in the South Arabian languages, which have a postposed article -n or -hn, the article in North Arabian is preposed, as in Arabic. With Arabic, the language of the inscriptions also shares the reduction of the sibilants to two

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  31

(s, š), whereas South Arabian has three sibilants (s, š and a lateralised ś). On the other hand, they usually have a causative prefix h- (South Arabian s-/h-; Arabic  ʾ-). The pronominal suffix of the third person is formed with -h- (South Arabian -s-, except Sabaean -h-; Arabic -h-). These are probably not the only traits that distinguish these languages from Arabic and South Arabian, but at the present stage of research no further conclusions can be drawn. 3.3  Nabataean and Palmyrene The inscriptions mentioned in the preceding paragraph were distinguished by their use of the article h(n)-. For the earliest testimonies of a type of Arabic that has the article ʾal-, we must turn to two other groups of inscriptions, Nabataean and Palmyrene. Both of them are written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the area, but they originated in an environment in which Arabic was the spoken language. In these inscriptions we find many traces of this spoken Arabic, which as far as we can ascertain is closely related to Classical Arabic.

3.3.1 Nabataean The Nabataean inscriptions stem from the Nabataean kingdom, with the capital Petra, which flourished until 106 ce. The inscriptions date from the first century bce to the first century ce; the youngest is from 355/356 ce. Although the texts are in a form of Aramaic script and language, the inhabitants of the Nabataean kingdom must have spoken a colloquial language that was related to later Classical Arabic, as we can see in the form of most proper names and in numerous loanwords. The article in these names and loanwords is ʾl-, although sometimes it is replaced by the Aramaic definite article -ā, for example, ʾlʿbd (al-ʿabd), alongside ʿbdʾ (ʿabdā). Most proper names end in -w, for example, yzydw (yazīd), ḥrtw (ḥāriṯ, with t for Classical Arabic ṯ). In theophoric names (names containing the name of a deity), one sometimes finds -y as an ending, for example, ʿbdʾlhy (ʿabdallāhi). The endings -w and -y are usually regarded as case endings for the nominative and the genitive. They occur only in proper names and are sometimes omitted. In general, there are many inconsistencies in their use (e.g., mlk nbṭw ‘the king of the Nabataeans’, šrkt tmwdw ‘the community of the Ṯamūd’, where one would have expected a genitive ending). This pattern of use has led to the conclusion that the endings are merely orthographic. In later Classical Arabic, there is one proper name in which the ending -w is still found as an orthographic device, ʿmrw (ʿamr), to distinguish it from the homographic ʿmr (ʿumar). In the discussion about the alleged loss of case endings in pre-Islamic Arabic dialects, the testimony of the Nabataean inscriptions has become a crucial element (cf. below, Chapter 4). According to some scholars, the Arabic substratum in these inscriptions belongs to the periphery of the pre-Islamic Arabic-speaking world. Presumably, the

32  The Arabic Language

variety of Arabic spoken here had undergone various changes due to the contact its speakers had with other languages.

3.3.2  Palmyrene The group of Palmyrene inscriptions stems from the oasis of Tadmur (Palmyra), which was destroyed in 273 ce by the Romans. This oasis must have been an Arab settlement, and at one time even the ruling dynasty was of Arab stock. Most of the inscriptions date from the second and third centuries ce, but much earlier inscriptions have also been found. Like the Nabataean inscriptions, the i­ nscriptions from Palmyra are written in the lingua franca of this region, Aramaic, in a variety of the Aramaic script. For the history of Arabic they are of less importance, since they do not contain many Arabic words, and most of them are proper names. Sometimes these are spelled with the same ending -w as in the Nabataean inscriptions. The testimony of both the inscriptions from Petra and those of Palmyra with regard to the history of Arabic is indirect, since in both areas Arabic was the colloquial language, whereas the language of prestige and written communication was Aramaic. Consequently, the Arabic elements in the inscriptions remain confined to proper names or loanwords, with occasional interference from the colloquial language in the written language. The information that we can glean from the inscriptions is limited, but we can deduce from them a set of orthographic principles that determined the spelling of Arabic names. According to Diem’s (1973a) analysis of the material, these principles formed the basis for the orthographic conventions of the earliest Arabic script. The influence of the Nabataean form of the Aramaic script is obvious first of all in the arrangement of the Classical Arabic alphabet, in which pairs of letters are distinguished by a diacritic dot or dots. This pairing goes back to the writing system of the Nabataean/Palmyrene inscriptions. Since the Aramaic script did not cover the entire phonemic inventory of Arabic, several letters had to do double duty. Thus, for instance, Aramaic dālet transcribed both d and ḏ, ṣadē transcribed both ḍ and ṣ, ʿayin transcribed both ʿ and ġ, and ṭēt transcribed both ḏ̣ and ṭ. This principle does not mean that the phonemes in question had merged in the colloquial Arabic of the period, but simply that they were not distinguished in the Nabataean script. In the case of the two phonemes ḍ and ḏ̣, which soon after the Islamic conquests must have merged in colloquial speech, the inscriptions show different reflexes, ḏ̣ being transcribed by ṭēt, just like ṭ, and ḍ by ṣadē, just like ṣ. In the writing system of Classical Arabic, the effect of this distribution is still visible, since the letters ṭāʾ/ḏ̣āʾ and ṣād/ḍād form pairs that are distinguished by a diacritic dot. Apparently, ḏ̣ was perceived as the interdental counterpart of ṭ, whereas ḍ represented a different category (cf. above, Chapter 2, p. 24). The most important convention that was borrowed from the Aramaic spelling of Arabic proper names concerns the spelling of the long vowels. Within the word

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  33

the long ā is spelled defectively and is indistinguishable from a short vowel, while at the end of the word it is sometimes written with y and sometimes with ʾ. This distinction was probably meant as a device to indicate the morphological structure of a word: the preposition ʿalā ‘on’, for instance, is spelled with y, because with suffixes it becomes ʿalay-ka. This device was taken over by the Arabic writing system, hence the large number of words in which final -ā is spelled with yāʾ. The defective spelling of ā within the word is still found in many words in the manuscripts of the Qurʾān, for example, sulayman, haḏā, allah; later this defective spelling was indicated with the so-called perpendicular ʾalif or dagger ʾalif above the word. In one group of words, ā within the word is spelled in the Nabataean inscriptions with w, for example, the word ṣlwh ‘prayer’, probably because in Aramaic the long ā in these words had developed to ō (Aramaic ṣlōṯā). This is the origin of the Qurʾānic spelling of ṣalāh, zakāh, etc. with w. We have mentioned above the Nabataean principle of spelling proper names with -w or -y at the end. In Classical Arabic, this convention is still found in the proper name, ʿamr, usually spelled as ʿmrw. The situation in the Nabataean inscriptions is as follows (cf. Diem 1981: 336): masculine singular proper names very often end in -w, that is, -ū, when they are isolated, for example, zydw (Zayd), klbw (Kalb), ʿmrw (ʿAmr). In compound names, the second member has either -y or -w, for example, ʿbdmlkw (ʿAbd Malik or ʿAbd Mālik), ʿbdʿmrw (ʿAbd ʿAmr), but ʿbdʾlhy (ʿAbd Allāh), whbʾlhy (Wahb Allāh). These endings occur independently of the syntactic context and are apparently quoted in isolation; this quotation form is supposed to be identical with the Arabic pausal form. This is not surprising since the Arabic names are intrusive elements in Aramaic, which has no case endings. The most likely explanation for the compound names ending in -w is that they are treated as single units following the same convention as the single names by ending in -w. If they are indeed names quoted in their isolated form, this means that the endings -w, -y could be regarded as the pausal forms of the names. In Classical Arabic, the pausal form of a name such as ʿamrun would be ʿamr, except in the accusative singular ʿamran, which has the pausal form ʿamrā. But the Nabataean evidence suggests that in this earlier period Arabic had pausal endings ʿamrū, ʿamrī, ʿamrā, of which only the third remained in Classical Arabic. Feminine names are usually spelled with the ending -t, sometimes with -h; if this, too, is a pausal ending, it could indicate a change in the pausal form of the feminine nouns, which in Classical Arabic has become -ah. 3.4  The beginnings of Arabic Thus far, we have looked at texts in languages related to Arabic (the North Arabian inscriptions) and texts in other languages, but with interference from spoken Arabic (the Nabataean and Palmyrene inscriptions). The value of the latter group for the history of Arabic is limited, since they are not written in Arabic, but in

34  The Arabic Language

Map 3.1  North Arabia and the Fertile Crescent before Islam (after Robin 1992: 12, 36) the official language of that period, Aramaic. It is only because they were written in an environment in which Arabic was the colloquial language of most people that they can tell us something about this spoken language. The same limitation applies to Arabic proper names and loanwords in South Arabian texts. Some early inscriptions in these scripts, however, are written in a language that contains so many Arabic features that one could perhaps regard them as early forms of Arabic (proto-Arabic) (see Map 3.1). In South Arabia, a group of inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faʾw (280 km north of Najrān), in Sabaean script, contains a language that is closely related to Arabic; they are collectively known as Qaḥṭānic or pseudo-Sabaean. The longest of these inscriptions is the tombstone of ʿIjl (first century bce). Here we find the ‘Arabic’ article, even with assimilation to some consonants as in Arabic: wlʾrḍ (wa-l-ʾarḍ) ‘and the earth’, as against ʾsmy (as-samāʾ) ‘the heaven’. A few inscriptions in Liḥyānitic script also appear to have an article in the form ʾl- and must, therefore, be regarded as Arabic, for example, an inscrip-

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  35

tion from al-Ḫurayba (Macdonald 2008: 468). Likewise, a few isolated inscriptions in Nabataean script have been assigned to Arabic (Macdonald 2008: 470–1): two short inscriptions from ʾUmm al-Jimāl (± 250 ce) and from al-Ḥijr (267 ce). They contain some instances of common nouns spelled with the ending -ū, for example, ʾlqbrw (al-qabrū) ‘the grave’, qbrw (qabrū) ‘a grave’. The most famous Arabic inscription in another script is undoubtedly that from an-Namāra (120 km south-east of Damascus, dating from 328 ce and discovered in 1901). There is a general consensus that this relatively long text in Nabataean script was written in a language that is essentially identical with the Classical Arabic that we know. The inscription was made in honour of Mrʾlqys br ʿmrw, that is, Marʾulqays bar ʿAmrū (with Aramaic bar for Arabic ibn ‘son’). The text of the inscription, tentative vocalisation and translation are given here according to the version of Bellamy (1985): 1. ty nfs mr ʾlqys br ʿmrw mlk ʾlʿrb [w]lqbh ḏw ʾsd w[m]ḏḥj 2. wmlk ʾlʾsdyn wbhrw wmlwkhm whrb mḥjw ʿkdy wjʾ 3. yzjh fy rtj njrn mdynt šmr wmlk mʿdw wnbl bnbh 4. ʾlšʿwb wwklhm frsw lrwm flm yblġ mlk mblġh 5. ʿkdy hlk snt 200 + 20 + 3 ywm 7 bkslwl ylsʿd ḏw wlwh 1. Tī nafsu Mriʾi l-Qaysi bar ʿAmrin maliki l-ʿArabi wa-laqabuhu Ḏū ʾAsadin wa-Maḏḥijin 2. wa-malaka l-ʾAsadiyyīna wa-buhirū wa-mulūkahum wa-harraba Maḏḥijw ʿakkaḏā wa-jāʾa 3. yazujjuh(ā) fī rutuji Najrāna madīnati Šammara wa-malaka Maʿaddw wa-nabala bi-nabahi 4. š-šuʿūbi wa-wakkalahum fa-raʾasū li-Rūma fa-lam yablaġ malikun mablaġahu 5. ʿakkaḏā halaka sanata 223 yawma 7 bi-kaslūl yā la-saʿdi ḏū wālawhu 1. This is the funerary monument of Imruʾu l-Qays, son of ʿAmr, king of the Arabs; and [?] his title of honour was Master of ʾAsad and Maḏḥij 2. And he subdued the ʾAsadīs, and they were overwhelmed together with their kings, and he put to flight Maḥij thereafter, and came 3. driving them into the gates of Najrān, the city of Šammar, and he subdued Maʿadd, and he dealt gently with the nobles 4. of the tribes, and appointed them viceroys, and they became the phylarchs for the Romans. And no king has equalled his achievements. 5. Thereafter he died in the year 223 on the 7th day of Kaslūl. Oh, the good fortune of those who were his friends! Part of the interpretation of this text is clear, but some of the crucial passages are still controversial, in particular the phrase wa-laqabuhu in line 1, which in the older literature was read kullihā, making Imruʾu l-Qays king of all the Arabs. Concerning the text of line 4, long debates have been dedicated to the part that

36  The Arabic Language

Bellamy reads as fa-raʾasū: most older interpreters read here fārisī in the sense of either ‘cavalry’ or ‘Persians’. Whatever the interpretation of details, the text is written in recognisably Classical Arabic, with only a few singularities. The female demonstrative tī is not unknown in Classical poetry, and the relative ḏī is reported by the grammarians as a pre-Islamic dialecticism (cf. below, p. 51). The word ʿkḏy (ʿakkaḏā?) is not attested in Classical Arabic; it is translated by Bellamy as ‘thereafter’ or ‘until then’. Lexically, we note the occurrence of the Nabataean loanword nfs in the sense of ‘funerary monument’. Rather more difficult to interpret is an even older text, dating from the first century ce and discovered in 1986 in ʿĒn ʿAvdat, 60 km south of Be’er Sheva in the Negev Desert, which possibly represents the oldest example of a text in Arabic. The three lines in Arabic are part of an Aramaic inscription in Nabataean script to the God Obodas, erected by Garmʾalahi, son of Taymʾalahi. Transliteration and translation are given here after Bellamy (1990): 1. fyfʿl lʾ fidʾ wlʾ ʾṯrʾ 2. fkn hnʾ ybġnʾ ʾlmwtw lʾ ʾbġh 3. fkn hnʾ ʾrd jrḥw lʾ yrdnʾ 1.  fa-yafʿalu lā fidan wa-lā ʾaṯara 2.  fa-kāna hunā yabġīnā l-mawtu lā ʾabġāhū 3.  fa-kāna hunā ʾarāda jurḥun lā yurdīnā 1.  For [Obodas] works without reward or favour 2.  and he, when death tried to claim us, did not let it claim [us] 3.  for when a wound [of ours] festered, he did not let us perish. Almost no element of this interpretation is uncontested. It seems that in this text the common nouns ʾlmwtw and jrḥw contain the Nabataean -w, which was later to be used almost only in proper names (as in the an-Namāra inscription). But others deny this and connect the w with the next word. The element kn is interpreted as a verb kāna, or as a conjunction ‘if ’, or as a positive counterpart to Classical lākin, that is, kin ‘thus’. Sharon (CIAP, I, 193) reads the third line wa-kun/ ken hunā ʾarid, jarḥū lā yaridnā ‘and if I come to the water in this place, let no calamity come upon me’, deriving the verb from the root warada ‘to go down to the water’. Whatever the correct interpretation, there can be no doubt that the inscription is in Arabic because of the use of the article ʾl-; and, pending further interpretation, the inscription stands as a fascinating testimony of the oldest form of Arabic. The most important conclusion to be drawn from the an-Namāra inscription is that the ending -w is no longer used for common nouns, as in the inscriptions from ʾUmm al-Jimāl and al-Ḥijr, and not even in all proper names. This would seem to indicate that the pausal ending had become zero, as in Classical Arabic, except in the accusative in -ā; the spelling of the proper names would

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  37

then be a relic of Nabataean/Aramaic spelling that was retained for some time for historical reasons and eventually disappeared in the orthographic system of Classical Arabic, except in the name ʿamr. The pre-Islamic inscriptions do not provide any conclusive evidence for or against the existence of declensional endings in the Arabic of this period. They follow the conventions of Nabataean spelling, among other things in the accusative pausal ending. One way or the other, the inscriptions cannot answer the question of whether the distinction of case endings was reintroduced from some kind of poetic language (cf. Chapter 4) or had been retained. The only example that has been adduced of a dual ending, in the an-Namāra inscription, ʾlʾsdyn, is controversial: some do indeed interpret it as malaka l-ʾasadayn ‘he became king of the two tribes ʾAsad’, but others read, with Bellamy, al-ʾasadiyyīna ‘he became king of the ʾAsadīs’. In both cases, the syntactic position requires an oblique case anyway, so that we cannot see whether the oblique case would have been used in the subject position as well, as in the new type of Arabic. With the ʿĒn ʿAvdat and the an-Namāra inscriptions, we have the first docu­­ ments in unequivocal Arabic, but they are still written in a different script. There are, however, also a few pre-Islamic inscriptions in Arabic in a script that may be called Arabic. The following inscriptions are known: 1. graffiti from Jabal Ramm, east of al-ʿAqaba (middle of the fourth century ce); according to Macdonald (2008: 469) these are written in a transitional script between Nabataean and Arabic; 2. the inscription in three languages (Arabic/Syriac/Greek) from Zabad near Aleppo (512 ce); 3. the inscription from Jabal ʾUsays, ± 100 km south-east of Damascus (528 ce); 4. the inscription from Ḥarrān in the northern Ḥōrān (568 ce); and 5. the inscription from ʾUmm al-Jimāl in the southern Ḥōrān from the sixth century ce. The inscription from Ḥarrān, for instance, reads: ʾnʾ šrḥyl br ṭlmw bnyt dʾ ʾlmrṭwl šnt 463 bʿd mfsd ḫybr bʿm (Robin 1992: 117), that is, in Classical Arabic ʾanā Šaraḥīl bin Ẓālim banaytu ḏā l-marṭūla sanata 463 baʿda mafsadi Ḫaybar bi-ʿāmin ‘I, Šaraḥīl, son of Ẓālim [or Ṭalmū], built this temple in the year 463 [i.e., 568 ce], one year after the destruction of Ḫaybar’. As these inscriptions are very short and their interpretation often controversial, their interest is not so much linguistic as epigraphic, since they show us the early development of the later Arabic script. The Arabic sources, as long as they do not attribute the invention of the Arabic script to Adam or Ishmael, tell us that the script had been introduced from abroad, either from the South Arabian region by the tribe Jurhum or from Mesopotamia. The latter theory was supported by the people in al-Ḥīra, who claimed that there was some connection with the Syriac script (Ibn an-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed. Riḍā Tajaddud, Beirut, 3rd edn, 1988, pp. 7–8). As a matter of fact, the

38  The Arabic Language

Figure 3.1  The development of Arabic script (from Hans Jensen, Sign, Symbol and Script, 3rd edn, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970, p. 322)

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  39

notation of the short vowels in Arabic script, as well as some other features, were probably borrowed from Syriac in the first century of Islam (cf. below, Chapter 4). In modern times, a theory of Syriac origin was proposed by Starcky (1966). He pointed out that in Nabataean script the letters seem to be suspended from a line, whereas in both Syriac and Arabic script the letters appear to stand on a line. He therefore assumed that in al-Ḥīra, the capital of the Laḫmid dynasty, a form of Syriac cursive script had developed into the Arabic alphabet (see Figure 3.1). The theory of Syriac origin has now been abandoned by most scholars. Luxenberg’s (2000) thesis about the Syriac/Aramaic origin of the Qurʾān, which revives this theory and maintains that the script’s defectiveness was the source of a number of misinterpretations of the text, has not gained general acceptance. It seems much more likely that the Arabic alphabet is derived from a type of cursive Nabataean. In the Aramaic script, from which Nabataean writing ultimately derives, there are no ligatures between the letters. But in later forms of the Nabataean epigraphic script, between the third and the fifth centuries ce transitional forms between Nabataean and Arabic script can be detected (Nehmé 2010). Besides, in the cursive forms of the Nabataean script, most of the features that characterise the Arabic script already appear. Even before 200 ce, Nabataean ostraca from the Negev exhibit a cursive script with extensive use of connections, which in epigraphic Nabataean script were not developed until after 400 ce. It is conceivable, therefore, that the elaboration of a cursive script that could also be used for texts in Arabic took place as early as the second century ce. The most important internal development in Arabic script is the systematic elaboration of connections between the letters within the word, and the system of different forms of the letters according to their position within the word. With the inscriptions in (pre-)Arabic script, we are slowly approaching the pre-Islamic period proper, called in Arabic the Jāhiliyya, the period in which the Bedouin did not yet know the revelation of the Qurʾān. This period will be dealt with in Chapter 4. The sum total of the evidence mentioned in the present chapter is not large. The number of inscriptions is considerable, but even within the lengthiest ones there is not enough material to enable us to trace the development of the Arabic language in the period preceding the historical period. Still, the stage of the language that we find in the Ṯamūdic, Liḥyānitic, Ṣafāʾitic and Ḥasāʾitic inscriptions, and the Arabic elements that emerge from the Aramaic inscriptions from Petra and Palmyra, give us at least some glimpse of this early development. At the very least, we know that before the earliest written testimonies there was some kind of development, and even though we do not know what the language of the Aribi and the inhabitants of Arbāya was, we know that for a long time nomads calling themselves by a name derived from the radicals ʿrb inhabited the desert. We also know that at least from the first century ce onwards some of them used a language that was closely related to Classical Arabic.

40  The Arabic Language

Further reading A classic work on the early history of the Arabs is Altheim and Stiehl (1964–9); the most comprehensive handbook is Retsö (2003); on the role of the nomads in Ancient Near Eastern history, see Höfner (1959); see also Klengel (1972) with a section on the occurrence of the Arabs in cuneiform inscriptions (1972: 88–103). The standard work on the relations between the Arabs and Byzantium before Islam is Shahid (1984). The history of the Bedouinisation of the peninsula is dealt with in various articles by Dostal (e.g., 1959); a fascinating study of the early development of camel domestication and the history of settlement in the peninsula is Bulliet (1990). On the origin of the name ‘Arabs’, see Dossin (1959) and Retsö (2006); on ancient Bedouin society, see Henninger (1959). A survey of the various groups of inscriptions mentioned here is given by W. Müller (1982), with further literature; the most recent survey is Macdonald (2008), who uses the term (Epigraphic) Old Arabic for the earlier forms of Arabic and North Arabian. On Ancient North Arabian, see Macdonald (2004) and Hayajneh (2011); a database of all inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (ODIANA) is being set up by Macdonald. A general survey of the languages in pre-Islamic Arabia is in Beeston (1981) and Robin (1992); a linguistic map of pre-Islamic Arabia is in Macdonald (2000). For the individual groups of inscriptions, the following sources may be consulted: Ṯamūdic: van den Branden (1950); Liḥyānitic: publication of most of the inscriptions by Jaussen and Savignac (1909, 1914), new inscriptions in Stiehl (1971–3); Ṣafāʾitic: Littmann (1943), and the sketch in W. Müller (1982), from which the examples in this chapter were taken; an online database of Ṣafāʾitic inscriptions has been set up by Macdonald at: http://krcfm.orient.ox.ac.uk/fmi/ iwp/cgi?-db=AALC_BDRS&-loadframes; Ḥasāʾitic: Jamme (1967). There is an extensive literature on the Nabataean and Palmyran inscriptions. A grammatical description of Nabataean Aramaic was given by Cantineau (1930–2); a more recent sketch was published by Healey (2007), and a selection of inscriptions by Healey (2009). On Palmyran, see Cantineau (1935); on bilingualism in Palmyra, see Kaizer (2002: 27–33). On the relevance of Nabataean orthography for the history of Arabic, see Diem (1973a). The relationship between the Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans and the Arabic of the Ḥijāzī merchants is dealt with by Knauf (2010); his terminology differs from that used here: instead of Ancient North Arabian he uses Ancient North Arabic, which he regards as the predecessor of the Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans, which he calls Old Arabic; the Arabic of the ʿĒn ʿAvdat and the an-Namāra inscription is labelled by him as Early Standard Arabic. The pre-Islamic inscriptions are dealt with in Grohmann’s (1971: 15–17) handbook of palaeography, as well as in several monographs and articles, for example, Bellamy (1988); for a survey, see Diem (1976); for the development of the script in these inscriptions and further bibliography, see Gruendler (1993: 12–14). A corpus of these inscriptions is being published by Sharon (1997–); thus

The Earliest Stages of Arabic  41

far, five volumes have appeared, containing among other inscriptions the famous one of ʿĒn ʿAvdat (I, 190–4). The reading and translation of the an-Namāra inscription by Bellamy (1985) was followed here; for more recent contributions to the debate, see Retsö (2003: 467–73), Kropp (2006) and Zwettler (2006). For the inscription of ʿĒn ʿAvdat, see Negev (1986), Bellamy (1990), Noja (1989, 1993), Ambros (1994) and Testen (1996). The later development of the Arabic script is treated by Abbott (1939), Grohmann (1967, 1971) and Endreß (1982). For the theory of Syriac origin, see Starcky (1966) and discussion of this theory in Sourdel-Thomine (1966). Gruendler (1993) has detailed charts of the individual letters in both epigraphic and cursive Nabataean and Arabic, and a number of tracings of the most important inscriptions from the pre-Islamic and the early Islamic period. The transitional Nabataean inscriptions are discussed by Nehmé (2010); on the connection between the two scripts see also Macdonald (2009).

Chapter 4

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period

4.1  The language of the Arabs The Qurʾān that was delivered to the Qurayš by the Prophet Muḥammad describes itself as being ʿarabiyyun ‘Arabic’ and mubīnun ‘clear’. The two attributes are intimately connected, as for instance in Q 43/2–3: ‘By the clear Book: We have made it an Arabic recitation in order that you may understand’ (wa-l-kitābi l-mubīni: ʾinnā jaʿalnāhu qurʾānan ʿarabiyyan laʿallakum taʿqilūna). All later generations have believed that its text was the best example of the ʿArabiyya, ‘the language of the Arabs’; in fact, that its style and language could not be imitated because of its clarity and correctness (ʾiʿjāz al-Qurʾān). In combination with the word lisān, the adjective ʿarabiyyun came to indicate a supra-tribal language that served as the binding factor for all those who lived in the Arabian peninsula, as opposed to the ʿAjam, the non-Arabs who lived outside it and spoke different languages. The Qurʾān does not use the word ʿArab, only the adjective ʿarabiyyun, but mentions the ʾAʿrāb. The latter term probably indicates those who lived in the desert outside the cities and resisted the message of the Prophet, as, for instance, in Q 9/97 al-ʾAʿrābu ʾašaddu kufran wa-nifāqan ‘the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy’. Retsö (2003) believes that the distinction between ʿArab and ʾAʿrāb goes back to the Assyrian and South Arabian inscriptions (see Chapter 3, pp. 26f.). In these inscriptions, the ʾʿrb are mentioned as allies and auxiliary troops of sedentary civilisations. In the Qurʾān, too, the ʾAʿrāb appear in a military context; they are chastised because they neglect their duty in warfare. The ʿrb, on the other hand, appear to constitute a special nomadic group, residing in southern Syria. After the third century ce they disappear from the sources; the an-Namāra inscription of 328 ce (see p. 35) is one of the last sources in which they appear, when Imruʾu l-Qays calls himself ‘king of the Arabs’. Retsö connects the disappearance of the ʿArab from the sources with the absence of this group from the Qurʾān, and their almost complete absence from pre-Islamic poetry and Ḥadīṯ. Yet the adjective ʿarabiyyun occurs as a characteristic of the revealed text, and this gives it special significance. It cannot refer to a group of people called ʿArab, but is used as an epithet of the language of the revelation. Perhaps this use is to be

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  43

connected with the distinction between East and West Arabia. Such a distinction is posited by Macdonald (2010b: 18), who investigated the distribution of inscriptions in the peninsula. He observes that in the eastern part of the peninsula inscriptions are rare and usually in foreign scripts, whereas in the western part inscriptions and graffiti in North Arabian script abound. One explanation for this disparity might be the one proffered by Knauf (2010: 239–40) that East Arabia was home to an emerging poetic Arabic tradition which was predominantly oral in nature. In this area, the kingdom of Kinda and the confederation of the Qays had created larger cultural and political entities, in which there was a fertile environment for the emergence and development of poetry. In the commercial centres in West Arabia, on the other hand, a variety of Arabic was used for commercial purposes that was more related to the Ancient North Arabian that is used in the numerous inscriptions in this part of the peninsula. From East Arabia, the poetic language is then assumed to have spread to other centres, first to the court of al-Ḥīra, the buffer state in the north between the Bedouin tribes and the Persian empire, and subsequently to the commercial centres in the peninsula, such as Mecca and Medina. Because of its prestigious and supra-tribal character, it is not surprising that this was the language in which the Qurʾān was revealed in Mecca. In this view, the adjective ʿarabiyyun is the name for the type of language that was used for poetic production in the eastern part of the peninsula. The term ʿArab received a new prestige when it began to be used as a self-designation for the tribal aristocracy of the early Islamic period. According to Retsö, it was used at first specifically for the early Islamic fighters, the muhājirūna and the ʾanṣār, and their Yemenite allies. By extension, the ʿArab were the sedentary Arabs in cities such as Mecca and Medina. They were the ones who became known as the ‘real’ Arabs, the ʿArab al-ʿāriba, whereas the name ʾAʿrāb ‘Bedouin’ carried a negative connotation because of its use in the Qurʾān. After the period of the conquests, a new re-evaluation took place, when the sedentary population began to regard the free-roaming Bedouin, whose language preserved the purity of pre-Islamic times, as the ideal type of Arab. The term kalām al-ʿArab ‘language of the Arabs’ came to denote the pure, unaffected language of the Bedouin. In line with this development the pre-history of the name was rewritten and the genealogy of the tribes was systematised. According to this genealogy the peninsula had been inhabited from time immemorial by the ‘lost Arabs’ (al-ʿArab al-bāʾida), that is, those tribes that are mentioned in the Qurʾān as having been punished for their disbelief, for instance, the tribes of ʿĀd, Ṯamūd and Jurhum. In this view, the later Arabs all descended from two ancestors, Qaḥṭān and ʿAdnān. Qaḥṭān was related to the ‘lost Arabs’, and his descendants were identified as the southern Arabs who were regarded as the ‘real Arabs’ (al-ʿArab al-ʿāriba). The descendants of ʿAdnān were the northern Arabs, who were said to have been Arabicised at a later period (al-ʿArab al-mutaʿarriba or al-mustaʿriba). In the post-

44  The Arabic Language

Islamic tradition, the descent of the northern Arabs was traced back through their ancestor ʿAdnān to ʾIsmāʿīl, the son of Abraham. Among the tribes descending from ʿAdnān were Huḏayl, Tamīm, Qays, Rabīʿa and the Qurayš of Mecca. Among the offspring of Qaḥṭān were the inhabitants of the South Arabian states, who were said to have descended from Ḥimyar, one of Qaḥṭān’s descendants. Some of the tribes in the northern part of the peninsula were of southern provenance, for instance, the ʾAws and Ḫazraj of Medina and the tribe Ṭayyiʾ. It is difficult to say to what degree this distinction between southern and northern Arabs goes back to any real memory of a difference between two groups, but it is clear that in Islamic times they were perceived as distinct; a distinction that continued to be felt strongly even as far as Islamic Spain, where enmity between representatives of the two groups under the names of Qays for the northern and Kalb for the southern group persisted. Linguistically speaking, however, the language of poets from both groups was accepted by the grammarians, and the poems of both groups were used indiscriminately as linguistic primary sources. The language of the southern Arabs was usually labelled luġa ʾahl al-Yaman; one of its best-known features was the use of the definite article ʾam-. A special case is that of the so-called Ḥimyaritic language, about which we have some information from al-Hamdānī’s (d. 334/946) description of the Arabian peninsula (Ṣifa jazīrat al-ʿArab, I, ed. Müller, Leiden, 1884–91, 134–6). Since for the Arabs Ḥimyar represented all things South Arabian, one might assume that the language called Ḥimyaritic was the continuation of the Epigraphic South Arabian language, but in actual fact it is not. From the features mentioned by al-Hamdānī and others – for example, the verbal ending -k- for the first and the second person, as in South Arabian, for example, waladku ‘I bore’, raʾayku ‘I saw’, and the article ʾam– Rabin (1951: 42–53) speculates that Ḥimyaritic was the name that the Arabs gave to the language of those ʿrb who are mentioned in the Epigraphic South Arabian sources and who had settled in this region. They were probably immigrants from the north, who spoke a North Arabian dialect, but whose speech was heavily influenced by the South Arabian language (cf. Chapter 3, p. 26). Since Ḥimyaritic was comprehensible to a speaker of Arabic, it cannot have been identical with any of the South Arabian languages, which are characterised by al-Hamdānī as being ġutm ‘incomprehensible’. It is possible that this language is also reflected in the inscriptions that are sometimes called Qaḥṭānic or ‘pseudo-Sabaean’ (cf. Chapter 3, p. 34). Some of the features mentioned as characteristic of the Ḥimyaritic language survive in the modern Yemenite dialects (cf. below, pp. 195f.). Apart from the reports about the Ḥimyarites, the dialects of all tribes were subsumed under the label kalām al-ʿArab, but the distinctions mentioned above created a difficulty for the later tradition. On the one hand, the idea of one language of the Arabs implied a basic linguistic unity in the peninsula. Moreover, the consensus of Muslims has always been that the language of the Qurʾān was the language of the Prophet and his compatriots, in other words that their everyday

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  45

speech was identical with the language of the Holy Book, which was the same as the language of the pre-Islamic poems. On the other hand, the grammarians set up a hierarchy of the speech of the various tribes. They held on to the tradition of the sons of Qaḥṭān being the pure Arabs, but at the same time believed that the language of the Ḥijāz, the region of Mecca, was superior to all other varieties. One way of reconciling both views was to assert that the Qurayš tribe of Mecca had taken from other dialects what was best in them. Thus, the hierarchy of Arabic dialects culminated in the language of the Ḥijāz, the region where the Prophet was born, and the language of the Qurayš, the tribe in which he was born. This view implies that there were linguistic differences between the tribes, otherwise no hierarchy would be possible. Indeed, although the general opinion was that in the Jāhiliyya Arabic (al-ʿArabiyya) was the language of all Arabs alike, the grammatical literature records regional differences between the tribes, the so-called luġāt. Our information about the linguistic situation in the Jāhiliyya is largely derived from the Arabic literature on the dialectal differences in pre-Islamic Arabia. Some of these materials were collected in monographs, for instance, on the luġāt in the Qurʾān, while other data are found in the lexica. For the grammarians, the dialectal variants, as long as they were attested in the Qurʾān or in poetry, or elicited from a trustworthy Bedouin informant, had to be accepted as correct Arabic. This did not mean, however, that anybody else was entitled to speak in this way, or that such dialectal variants could be used as productive items in the language. The validity of the testimonies about the geographical distribution of the dialectal differences is hard to assess. The grammarians tended to systematise the data of the northern Arabs into two larger regions, roughly covering the western and the eastern parts of the peninsula, with the language of the Ḥijāz as representative of West Arabic, often synonymous with that of the Banū Qurayš, or with the language of Mecca and Medina, on the one hand, and the language of the Tamīm as representative of East Arabic, on the other. To a certain extent, this division coincides with that between sedentary Arabs in the pre-Islamic cities and nomadic Bedouin tribes in the desert regions. It seems that the differences between Classical Arabic as we know it and East Arabic were smaller than those existing between Classical Arabic and the language of the Ḥijāz. This may partly explain the relative scarcity of data on East Arabic. The grammarians tended to concentrate on what deviated from the later norm of Classical Arabic, which was based largely on the language of the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic poetry. They were therefore more interested in Ḥijāzī Arabic than in East Arabic, because it contained more features that differed from the Classical Arabic norm. The text of the Qurʾān, in particular its orthography, bears traces of an adaptation to the local pronunciation of the poetic language in the Ḥijāz. The most obvious adaptation is that of the spelling of the hamza, the glottal stop. All

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sources agree that the Eastern dialects knew a glottal stop, which was absent in the Western dialects, including the dialect of Mecca. In the text of the Qurʾān as we have it, the hamza is always spelled with a small sign resembling an ʿayn, which is usually carried by one of the semi-consonants or glides, w, y or ʾalif. The semi-consonants probably represent the pronunciation of the word in the dialect of Mecca (see below, p. 49). This example shows that the realisation of Arabic across the peninsula varied, and that the local realisation in Mecca differed from the language of the Qurʾān as we have it. This led the German scholar Karl Vollers to go one step further in his theory about the relationship between the text of the Qurʾān and the colloquial speech of Mecca. In his book Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (Vernacular and Written Language in Ancient Arabia, 1906), Vollers claimed that the revelation had originally taken place in the colloquial language of the Prophet and the Meccans (Volkssprache). In his view, this colloquial language was the precursor of the modern Arabic dialects. During the period of the conquests, the text was transformed into a language that was identical with the poetic language of the Najd, called by Vollers Schriftsprache. The differences between the two ‘languages’ included the absence of the glottal stop in Meccan Arabic, as well as the elision of the indefinite ending -n (nunation) and the vocalic endings. The motive behind this transformation was, he asserted, the wish to raise the language of the Qurʾān to the level of that of the poems. Those who were responsible for the alleged translation were particularly strict in the matter of the hamza and the case endings, whereas they allowed some of the other features, sometimes in the official text, and more often in the variants of the text. Vollers believed that the literature on the variant readings of the Qurʾān preserved many traces of the underlying colloquial language. It is certainly true, as Vollers says, that the correct declension of the Qurʾān was a topos in early Islamic literature. But in itself the attention that was given to this phenomenon in post-Islamic times does not tell us much about the linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period. It can easily be explained by later linguistic developments in the period of the conquests: many people in the conquered territories did not know Arabic very well and made mistakes when reciting the Qurʾān. Therefore, those who cared about the correct transmission of the text were on their guard against mistakes in the use of declensional endings, and instructed people in the correct grammatical rules (see below, Chapter 5, p. 66). In its extreme form, Vollers’ theory has been abandoned nowadays and the concomitant presupposition of a large-scale conspiracy in early Islam concerning the linguistic transformation of the text is no longer held by anyone. The delivery of a revelational document in a ‘vulgar’ variety of the language is hardly likely in itself. The existence of a poetic register of the language is undisputed, and it is not very likely that for the revelation anything but this prestigious variety of the language would have been chosen. The alleged traces of West Arabic can

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  47

also be explained by the activities of the early copyists, who were familiar with the Meccan way of speaking and had to devise a way to record Eastern features such as the glottal stop in an orthographic system that had been invented for the Western way of speaking. In spite of this rejection of the ‘translation theory’, the main point of Vollers’ theory, the distinction between a Volkssprache and a Schriftsprache, has remained the leading principle for almost all subsequent attempts by Western Arabists to explain the development of the Arabic language. In modern terms, we could say that the central tenet of these theories is that in the pre-Islamic period there was already diglossia, that is, a linguistic situation in which the domains of speech are distributed between two varieties of the language (cf. below, Chapter 13). In that case, the division would be approximately the same as it is nowadays in the Arabic-speaking world: a high variety as literary language and a low variety as colloquial language. In theories that take this view, the literary language is usually called ‘poetic koine’ or poetico-Qurʾānic koine (see below, p. 53). A modern version of Vollers’ thesis is Owens’ view of the linguistic situation in the peninsula in the pre-Islamic period. He believes that both forms of Arabic, the ancestor of Classical Arabic and that of the spoken dialects, coexisted in pre-Islamic times. In his theory, spoken Arabic corresponded more to the original Semitic structure of the language, while the structure of poetic Arabic was innovatory, for instance, by its use of case endings (see below, pp. 139f.). In itself, it is not unreasonable to assume that there was an essential difference between poetic or literary language and colloquial language in pre-Islamic Mecca. After all, such a situation is found in other oral cultures as well. The question is, however, to what extent this difference corresponds to that between standard and colloquial language after the conquests. Contrary to the Arabic sources, the theory of a ‘literary’ language assumes that the case endings (ʾiʿrāb) were absent in everyday speech. In the next paragraphs we shall first look at the data from the literature on the dialectal variants (luġāt) of the Arab tribes. Then, we shall discuss reports about the language of the Bedouin after the conquests. 4.2  The pre-Islamic dialects Since our data are fragmentary, it is difficult to assess their value, let alone set up a dialect map of the pre-Islamic peninsula (see Map 4.1 for the distribution of our information on the pre-Islamic dialects). The following nine phonological features are frequently mentioned as major differences between the two groups of pre-Islamic dialects. First, in the Eastern dialects, final consonant clusters did not contain a vowel, whereas in the Western dialects they had an epenthetic vowel, for example (West/East), ḥusun/ḥusn ‘beauty’, faḫiḏ/fiḫḏ ‘thigh’, kalima/kilma ‘word’, ʿunuq/ ʿunq ‘neck’. This difference is probably connected with a difference in stress:

48  The Arabic Language

Map 4.1  Available data on the pre-Islamic dialects (after Rabin 1951: 14) it may be surmised that the Eastern dialects had a stronger expiratory stress, hence the absence of the unstressed vowel. A certain amount of mixing must have taken place because in Classical Arabic sometimes the one, sometimes the other, sometimes both variants have survived. Second, the Eastern dialects must have known some form of vowel harmony or assimilation, for example (West/East), baʿīr/biʿīr ‘camel’, minhum/minhim ‘from them’. This feature, too, may be connected with the presence of a strong expiratory stress in the Eastern dialects, which encourages assimilation. The Classical language retained the assimilation in those cases where the suffix was preceded by i, for example, fīhim ‘in them’ (where the Ḥijāz had fīhum without assimilation). Third, the long vowel ā underwent ʾimāla ‘inclination’, that is, a fronted pronunciation of the vowel towards [æː] or [ɛː], in the Eastern dialects, whereas the Western dialects were characterised by what the grammarians call tafḫīm. Usually, this term indicates the central back pronunciation of /ā/ as [ɑː] after an

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  49

emphatic (velarised) consonant, but here it probably indicates the pronunciation as a ‘pure’ ā [aː], or perhaps in some cases as a rounded [ɒː] or even as ō [ɔː], namely, in those words which are indicated in Qurʾānic spelling with a wāw, for example, ṣalāt, zakāt, ḥayāt, possibly also in other words, for example, salām. In the Nabataean inscriptions long ā is sometimes spelled with w, which may reflect an Aramaic pronunciation with ō (cf. above, p. 33). Fourth, the Western dialects may have known a phoneme /ē/: according to the grammarians verbs such as ḫāfa ‘to fear’, ṣāra ‘to become’ were pronounced with ʾimāla. But since the ʾimāla was otherwise unknown in the Ḥijāz and, moreover, never occurs in the neighbourhood of an emphatic or velar consonant, the grammarians’ remark may refer to the existence of an independent phoneme /ē/. It is unlikely that this ē continues a proto-Semitic ē; perhaps the sound meant by the grammarians had developed from a diphthong -ay- instead (cf. also above, on Ṣafāʾitic diphthongs, Chapter 3, p. 30). Fifth, the passive of the so-called hollow verbs with a medial w was formed differently in the East (qūla) and the West (qīla). Possibly, both forms are a development from an original /ü/ [y], which has disappeared from the phonemic inventory of all Arabic dialects; the Classical passive of these verbs is qīla. Sixth, the qāf was probably a voiceless [q] in the East, and a voiced [ɡ] in the West; the latter pronunciation became standard practice in early recitation manuals, and is the one described by Sībawayhi (Chapter 7, p. 120). We have seen above (Chapter 2, p. 24) that the Arabic phoneme /q/ possibly evolved from *ḳ, which was neutral with regard to voicing; the Eastern and the Western dialects developed this phoneme in different ways. The Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation of /q/ is voiceless, but in the modern Bedouin dialects it is still realised as a voiced [ɡ] (see below, p. 187). Seventh, the most remarkable feature of the Ḥijāzī dialect has already been mentioned above: the absence of the glottal stop (hamza), which was retained in the Eastern dialects (cf. Map 4.2 for the distribution of this feature). In the Western dialects, the loss of the hamza was sometimes compensated by the lengthening of a preceding vowel (e.g., biʾr ‘well’ > bīr, raʾs ‘head’ > rās, luʾluʾ ‘pearls’ > lūlū), or it resulted in contraction of vowels (saʾala ‘to ask’ > sāla) or a change into a corresponding glide (e.g., sāʾirun ‘walking’ > sāyirun; yaqraʾu ‘he reads’ > yaqrawu). Since Ḥijāzī orthography did not have a glottal stop, these words were spelled with w, y and ʾalif, corresponding to the way they were pronounced in Ḥijāzī Arabic. The sign for hamza is a later addition (cf. below, p. 64). Eighth, in the Ḥijāzī dialect, the prefix of the imperfect contained the vowel -a-; all other dialects formed this prefix with -i-. This phenomenon is called taltala and it is one of the pre-Islamic features that have been preserved in the contemporary dialects, which usually have -i-. Both vowels probably represent a generalisation, since it is usually assumed that in earlier forms of Semitic the prefix-vowels were distributed in such a way that i was used for the third-person singular masculine

50  The Arabic Language

Map 4.2  Disappearance of the hamza in the pre-­ Islamic dialects (after Rabin 1951: 132) and the first-person plural, and a for the first-person singular, the second-person, and the third-person singular feminine (cf. Hetzron 1976; and see above, Chapter 2, p. 14). In this case, Classical Arabic has ‘followed’ the Western pattern, since all prefixes in Classical Arabic have -a-. Ninth, the dialect of Tamīm was characterised by a phenomenon called kaškaša, which consisted in the palatalisation of the kāf in the second-person singular feminine suffix -ki, for example, ʾinnaši ḏāhiba ‘you [sg. fem.] are leaving’, instead of ʾinnaki ḏāhiba (Sībawayhi, Kitāb, II, ed. Bulaq, n.d., pp. 295–6). A related phenomenon was called kaskasa; according to Sībawayhi, this consisted in replacing -ki with -kis. There may be a connection with the pronunciation of /k/ and /q/ before front vowels as /č/ and /j/ in contemporary Arabian dialects (Chapter 11, p. 194). The preceding dialectal differences concerned phonetic or phonological differences between the dialects. There are some testimonies that refer to differences

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  51

at the morphological or syntactic level. The existence of an undeclined dual in Ḥijāzī Arabic is sometimes inferred from the Qurʾānic verse 20/63: ʾinna hāḏāni la-sāḥirānī ‘verily, these two are sorcerers’, in which the particle ʾinna seems to be construed with a nominative instead of the Classical accusative. This verse was a crux for the commentators. In the earliest period of Arabic grammar some of them even suggested that the nominative was a scribal error, which should be corrected by reading the accusative in the following noun. In connection with this, ʾAbū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ (d. 154/770) is reported to have transmitted the view of one of the Companions that ‘the codified text contains errors, but the Arabs will set it straight’ (ʾinna fī l-muṣḥaf laḥnan wa-sa-tuqīmuhu l-ʿArab) (al-Farrāʾ, Maʿānī l-Qurʾān II, ed. an-Najjār, Cairo, 1955–72, p. 183). An alternative was to change the particle ʾinna to ʾin. According to the grammarians, ʾinna ‘verily’ and ʾanna ‘that’ had an abbreviated form ʾin, ʾan (the so-called ʾin, ʾan muḫaffafa ‘lightened ʾin, ʾan’), with the following noun in the nominative. These forms seem to have been more current in the Ḥijāz than in the East. Some examples occur in the Qurʾān, for example, Q 36/32: wa-ʾin kullun la-mā jamīʿun ladaynā muḥḍarūna ‘verily, all will be brought together before Us’. To complicate matters, they can be followed by an accusative as well, for example, Q 11/111: wa-ʾin kullan la-mā yuwaffiyannahum rabbuka ʾaʿmālahum ‘verily, thy Lord will repay everyone their deeds’. Not surprisingly, the grammarians tried to correct such forms, either by changing the case ending of the following word, or by reading the full form ʾinna. An oft-cited difference between Ḥijāz and Tamīm is the construction of mā as a nominal negator. According to the grammarians, mā could be construed in the same way as the verb laysa ‘to be not’, with an accusative in the predicate, for example, mā huwa kabīran ‘he is not big’. This so-called mā ḥijāziyya did not occur in the Eastern dialects. There are indications that the negation ʾin, which occurs not infrequently in the Qurʾān, for example, Q 11/51: ʾin ʾajriya ʾillā ʿalā llaḏī faṭaranī ‘my reward is not due except from Him who created me’, is characteristic of Ḥijāzī speech. In some dialects, a relative pronoun ḏī or ḏū (the so-called ḏū ṭāʾiyya, i.e., of the tribe Ṭayyiʾ) is attested; this relative does not occur in the Qurʾān, but it probably occurs in the an-Namāra inscription (cf. above, p. 36), and it is found in some pre-Islamic poems, for example, in a line quoted in the Ḥamāsa, a ninth-century anthology of poetry: li-hāḏā l-marʾi ḏū jāʾa sāʾiyan ‘to this man who has come to levy tax’ (cf. Reckendorff 1921: 431). Apart from the possible, but unlikely, occurrence of an undeclined dual in one verse in the Qurʾān, all these points concern relatively minor differences. There is, however, one grammatical issue that touches upon the core of Arabic syntax, the construction of verbal and nominal sentences. In Classical Arabic, when the verb precedes the agent in the so-called verbal sentence (cf. below, Chapter 6, pp. 97–9; Chapter 7, pp. 112–14), there is no agreement in number between verb

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and agent. According to the grammarians, some dialects in the Jāhiliyya did allow agreement in this case. The stock example cited for this phenomenon is ʾakalūnī l-barāġīṯ ‘the fleas have bitten me’ (instead of ʾakalatnī l-barāġīṯ). The evidentiary verses stem from Ḥijāzī poets exclusively. This is the only example of a syntactic feature ascribed to a pre-Islamic dialect that has a parallel in the modern dialects of Arabic. These do not exhibit the Classical Arabic difference between verbal and nominal sentences, and always have agreement between verb and agent. Yet the canonical word order in the modern dialects is Subject–Verb–Object, rather than the Classical Arabic word order Verb–Subject–Object in ʾakalūnī l-barāġīṯ. It is not clear, therefore, whether this feature in Ḥijāzī Arabic should be interpreted as the first step towards a later development or represents an independent phenomenon. In the text of the Qurʾān as we have it, this feature does not occur. Whenever differences between Eastern and Western Arabic existed, the language of the Qurʾān usually reflects the Eastern usage. As regards the pronunciation of the glottal stop in the early Islamic period, it was felt to be more prestigious and more fitting for the recitation of the Holy Book, although there seems to have been considerable opposition on the part of the early reciters to such a pronunciation, which they branded as affected. It is equally obvious, however, from the list of differences that the dialects were not very far apart from each other. Most of the features mentioned above concern phonetic or phonological phenomena. Apart from the ʾakalūnī l-barāġīṯ syndrome, the sources mention a few syntactic differences, which we have not listed here, since their status is hard to determine. The various constructions with ʾillā ‘except, unless’, for instance, for which one dialect is said to have used the nominative and the other the accusative, almost certainly represent theorising on the part of the grammarians. There is one thing that transpires from such syntactic luġāt: if there is any reality to them, both dialect groups must have used case endings. The evidence for an undeclined dual mentioned above is too meagre to warrant any conclusion about a possible loss of case endings. In view of the central role of declension in the various theories about the linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period, this absence of evidence for loss of declension in the grammatical literature is crucial to our understanding of the historical development of Arabic. 4.3  Theories about the language of the Jaˉhiliyya For the Arabic grammarians, the dialects of all tribes belonged to what was basically one language. In spite of the various luġāt in the literature, they do not accept a major dichotomy between a ‘literary’ language and everyday speech. Western scholarship has often been sceptical of this conception of the development of Arabic. Although Vollers’ theory, with its distinction between a Volkssprache and a Schriftsprache in pre-Islamic Arabia, has been abandoned, most contemporary Arabists still disagree with the Arabs’ view on the fundamental

Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period  53

unity of the three varieties of everyday speech, the language of the Qurʾān and the language of the poetry. Even those linguists who do not fully subscribe to Owens’ views on the structure of pre-diasporic Arabic (see above, p. 47), assume that in the Jāhiliyya colloquial and ‘literary’ language had already diverged. In Western publications, the colloquial varieties of the tribes are usually called ‘pre-Islamic dialects’; the language of the Qurʾān and poetry is often designated ‘poetico-Qurʾānic koine’ or ‘poetic koine’ (in German publications Dichtersprache). The theory of the poetic koine emphasises the role of the poets, šuʿarāʾ, which means ‘those who have knowledge, who are aware’. According to Zwettler (1978: 109), they were specialists in an archaic form of the language and the only ones who were still able to handle the complicated declensional endings. In this view, the case system was beyond the reach of ordinary speakers and could be acquired only by professional poets and their transmitters (ruwāt, plural of rāwī) after intensive training. This view of the linguistic situation before Islam has its natural corollary in the theories about the emergence of the new type of Arabic in the period of the Islamic conquests. Most linguists believe that the changes that took place in the transition from Old Arabic to New Arabic, including the disappearance of the declensional endings, were the continuation of a process that had already begun in the pre-Islamic dialects. Since our information on these dialects is limited, we have to turn to other evidence in order to find out whether the later changes can indeed be traced back to pre-Islamic times; in particular, whether the Bedouin used declensional endings in their colloquial speech. One source of additional evidence is the pre-Islamic inscriptions. Yet we have seen above (Chapter 3) that they do not provide conclusive evidence for or against the existence of declensional endings. In the inscriptions, no declensional endings are used, either because the language they represent did not have such endings, or because this language distinguished between contextual forms with endings and pausal forms without endings, of which only the latter were used in writing. There is some evidence that the variety of Arabic that is reflected in the Nabataean inscriptions retained fossilised endings in some words. Theophorics, that is, proper names construed with the name of a deity, very often end in -y, for example, ʿbdʾlhy (ʿAbdallāh), and the elements ʾabū and ibnū in compound names are almost always spelled with -w in all syntactic contexts. The usual conclusion is that these are not really genitive or nominative case endings, and that in this variety of Arabic the case endings had been lost before the first century bce. On the other hand, we should bear in mind that most of the inscriptions stem from a border area where Arabs had been in contact with other peoples for centuries; it may well be the case that the language reflected in these inscriptions underwent changes that were similar to those that affected the language of all Arabs after the conquests, in particular the loss of the case endings. Since the tribes in the North Arabian desert were in touch with an Aramaic-speaking sedentary popula-

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tion, a type of New Arabic may have become current in the trade settlements of the North Arabian/Syrian desert long before Islam. A second possible source of evidence is the orthography of the Qurʾānic text. The language of the Qurʾān has an operational declensional system, for example, in the use of the masculine sound plural endings -ūna/-īna correlating with the syntactic function of the word, and in the use of the moods of the verb (indicative versus subjunctive/jussive). But the question still remains whether this state of affairs reflects the structure of the language of the Ḥijāz. As we have seen above, the orthography of the Qurʾān reflects the adaptation of the Ḥijāzī dialect to a different phonological system, for instance, in the spelling of the hamza. For the case endings, there is no such evidence. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the Qurʾānic orthography continues the orthographic conventions of the Aramaic/Nabataean script, which were also used in the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. This is clear in the entire system of the rendering of consonants (see above, Chapter 3, p. 32), but it also applies to the representation of endings. The most important principle is that in the consonantal skeleton text the word is always recorded in its isolated (pausal) form. The original pausal forms of the nunated endings -un, -in, -an were probably -ū, -ī, -ā, as we have seen in the inscriptions and in the representation of Arabic names in the Nabataean inscriptions. In the Arabic of the Qurʾān only the accusative nunation -an has a special pausal form, -ā; the other two cases have a zero ending in pause. Hence, the nunation is written only in the case of the accusative, spelled with ʾalif. The same principle applies to the orthography of the singular feminine noun, with -at or -ah, where the variation in spelling in the Qurʾānic manuscripts – sometimes with t and sometimes with h – reflects a change in the pausal ending of the feminine words that was already operative in the earlier period. In the later period, when vocalisation had been introduced in order to record both contextual and pausal endings, the pausal -ah of the feminine noun was combined with the pronunciation -t- of the contextual forms in the orthographic device of the tāʾ marbūṭa, a letter h with the two dots of the letter t. Another aspect of the Qurʾānic text mentioned in the discussion about the case endings is that of the rhyming conventions. In pre-Islamic poetry, a system prevails in which short final vowels -u, -i, -a are pronounced long and count as part of the rhyme. But in the Qurʾān, and sometimes in poetry, there is another system of rhyming in which the final short vowels are dropped and only the rhyming consonant counts. According to Birkeland (1940), this is a new development, reflecting a tendency to drop the declensional endings. The only ending that was spared apocopation is the pausal ending -an, pronounced -ā. In the view of Birkeland and others, for a long time this ending resisted elision, not because it was a case ending, but because it had a special syntactic status (e.g., as an adverbial ending). In some modern Central Arabian dialects, vestiges of this tanwīn in the accusative still exist (cf. below, p. 193). The problem with the rhyming patterns,

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however, is that it is not clear to what degree pausal phenomena can be used as evidence for the disappearance of case endings. After all, nobody denies that in context both poetry and the Qurʾān consistently use case endings in nouns as well as modal endings in verbs. The conclusion from pre-Islamic and Qurʾānic orthographical practice is that neither can give a definitive answer to the question about the presence or absence of case endings. This means that the question of whether the Ḥijāzī dialect belonged to the Old Arabic or to the New Arabic type cannot be resolved on this basis. Most Western scholars nevertheless continue to believe that the colloquial language of the Jāhiliyya contrasted with the so-called ‘poetic koine’ (Dichtersprache). In this view, the process of change that the Arabic language underwent in the period of the conquests was so radical that some of the changes must have been latently present in the pre-Islamic period. One typical argument for this view points out that the functional load of the declensional endings in Classical Arabic was already low, so that these endings could disappear without the risk of ambiguity. This is the view advanced by Corriente (1971b) in a discussion with Blau, in which Corriente maintains that Old Arabic did not have the synthetic character often attributed to it. He concedes that the daily speech of the Bedouin, perhaps even that of some city-dwellers, contained declensional endings, but points out that this was of little importance since the functional yield was almost zero. In this view, the functional yield of the declensional endings is determined by their indispensability. In other words, if it can be shown that in many cases the declensional endings can be omitted without the sentence losing its meaning, this demonstrates that declension is just an ‘idle tool’ (Corriente 1971b: 39), and that the morphemes expressing the declension are redundant. In his response to this criticism of the traditionally accepted synthetic character of Old Arabic, Blau (1972–3) states that redundancy is a normal phenomenon in any language. The shift from synthetic to analytic devices in the language involves the introduction of a whole new set of morphemes, for instance, the introduction of a genitive exponent in New Arabic to denote a possessive relationship between words (cf. below, pp. 144f.). There is no indication at all in any Old Arabic text that such a device was used. The use of the synthetic genitive in Old Arabic in the construct state is, of course, highly redundant because of the fact that the head noun of the construction loses its article, thereby marking the construction as a possessive one and rendering the genitive ending of the second member superfluous. Yet in Old Arabic this did not lead to the use of an analytic possessive device as in modern dialects. Something else must, therefore, have happened in the shift from Old to New Arabic, and this new development had nothing to do with the functional yield of the declensional endings, although their redundance may have facilitated their disappearance. It is sometimes thought that the function of synthetic case endings is to enable the speakers to utilise a free word order. But usually free word order is only a stylistic phenomenon. It is true that in

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Old Arabic some things were possible that would lead to ambiguity in New Arabic, for instance, the fronting of a direct object, or the right dislocation of a co-subject, as in the Qurʾānic verse Q 9/3: ʾinna llāha barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūluhu (see below, p. 57). But this flexibility in word order is a consequence of the presence of declensional endings rather than its cause. A similar reasoning ascribes the loss of the declensional endings to a phonetic phenomenon: since there was a tendency to elide word-final short vowels, so the argument goes, the declensional endings were dropped, at least in the singular. In this line of reasoning, the loss of the declension in the sound plural endings is then explained as a case of analogy. But a tendency to drop word-final short vowels, if it really existed, is part of an informal (allegro) style of discourse and belongs to the normal range of stylistic registers of a language. In a normal process of language acquisition, children learn the full range of styles and become acquainted with both the informal short and the formal long forms. By itself, a tendency to drop final vowels in fluent speech can never lead to their disappearance as case markers. Discourse phenomena, such as the slurring or dropping of unstressed vowels, may at best reinforce the development of innovations that find their origin elsewhere. A break in the normal transmission process, however, could conceivably lead to a structural change, in which an allegro register is selected, while the other discourse registers are abandoned From another angle, the phonetic explanation has been rejected because of the relative chronology. According to Diem (1991), in modern Arabic dialects forms with the pronominal suffix such as bint-ak, bint-ik ‘your [masculine/feminine] daughter’ may be explained as cases of vowel harmony from older *bint-a-ka, *binti-ki. The vowel between noun and suffix is a generalised case ending, which was selected on the basis of correspondence with the final vowel of the suffix. Therefore, the case endings must already have become inoperative at a time when the short-end vowels were still pronounced, otherwise a form such as bint-ak could not have arisen. Besides, the survival of fossilised case endings in some Bedouin dialects (cf. p. 193) is inexplicable if one assumes that the short vowel endings disappeared before the collapse of the case system. The debate about the colloquial varieties in the Jāhiliyya may be approached from yet another angle if we turn to the speech of the Bedouin in post-Islamic times. The Arabic grammarians believe that the Bedouin spoke ‘pure Arabic’ (faṣīḥ) and continued to do so after the conquests, at least for some time. In the words of Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 757/1356), the Bedouin spoke according to their linguistic intuition and did not need any grammarians to tell them how to use the declensional endings (see below, Chapter 10, p. 173). He clearly believed that in the first centuries of Islam, before Bedouin speech had become affected and corrupted by sedentary speech, it still contained correct declensional endings. The force of this argument partly depends on the value that we attach to reports about Bedouin purity of speech. According to these reports, it was fashionable among

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noble families to send their sons into the desert, not only to learn how to shoot and hunt, but also to practise speaking pure Arabic. Other reports come from professional grammarians who stayed for some time with a Bedouin tribe and studied their speech because it was more correct (faṣīḥ) than that of the towns and the cities. Of course, these reports may also be regarded as symptomatic of the generally nostalgic attitude towards the Bedouin past and the desert. Besides, the Bedouin could have preserved certain forms of poetry with a Classical type of ʾiʿrāb, just as they do nowadays in Central Arabia, while using a form of New Arabic in their everyday speech. Since the grammarians were looking for traces of ʿArabiyya and often used transmitters of poetry as informants, they got exactly what they were asking for, which was not necessarily the colloquial speech of the Bedouin tribes involved. If one takes this view, the linguistic purity of the Bedouin becomes a mere topos, along with stories about their chivalry, manliness and generosity. On the other hand, if we believe the reports by professional grammarians, we also have to believe that in the Jāhiliyya Bedouin more or less spoke the same language as that of their poems, which in its turn was the language in which God revealed His last message to the world. In the literature about the linguistic situation in the Jāhiliyya, much importance has been attached to reports about linguistic mistakes in early Islam. There is, indeed, a vast amount of anecdotes concerning the linguistic mistakes made by the mawālī, the non-Arabs who had converted to Islam. It is commonly believed that these anecdotes document a state of confusion and corruption of the Classical language. Yet such reports do not necessarily support the view that the system of declension had become redundant. If anything, the point in the anecdotes is precisely that the target language of the newly converted, the language of the Arabs which they wished to imitate, still contained declensional endings. In one story, someone makes a mistake in the Qurʾānic verse 9/3: ʾinna llāha barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūluhu ‘God keeps aloof from the polytheists, and so does His Prophet’, and recites ʾinna llāha barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūlihi with an incorrect genitive ending, thus uttering a blasphemous ‘God keeps aloof from the polytheists and from His Prophet’. In another example, a recent convert is reported to have said: tuwuffiya ʾabānā wa-taraka banūna ‘our father [accusative] has died and left sons [nominative]’ (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, Nuzhat al-ʾalibbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-ʾudabāʾ, ed. Amer, Stockholm, 1963, pp. 6–7). While the first example may have been fabricated, the second one clearly shows a tendency on the part of the non-Arab client to use hypercorrect endings (otherwise he would have said banīna in the accusative as well). In both Ibn al-ʾAnbārī’s and Ibn Ḫaldūn’s account of the history of the Arabic language, a link is made between the corruption of speech and the beginnings of the grammatical tradition (cf. below, Chapter 7). The first written examples of wrong case endings stem from the first half of the first century of the Hijra. In two Egyptian papyri, dating from year 22 of the

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Hijra, that have been examined by Diem (1984), we find the proper name ʾAbū Qīr in a genitive position and the hypercorrect expression niṣfu dīnāran ‘half a dinar’. Many more mistakes may be cited from later papyri (cf. below, Chapter 9, pp. 157f.). These papyri were written in a bilingual context, and, as the scribes may have been bilingual, such early mistakes cannot be taken as proof of the disappearance of the case endings before the period of the conquests. On the contrary, the occurrence of hypercorrect forms suggests that the target language still contained a case system. What, then, may we conclude about the presence or absence of diglossia in the pre-Islamic period? One point is certain: there are no traces of pseudo-corrections in the poems preserved from the pre-Islamic period. Such forms are usually a corollary of a sharp divergence between a literary norm and a colloquial variety (cf. below, pp. 153f.), and their absence would seem to point to a more widespread usage of the case endings than the limited one advocated by the proponents of the ‘poetic koine’. One could, of course, object that any errors would have been weeded out by later collectors of poetry and copyists anyway. But the general conclusion must be that even when some of the changes that Arabic underwent in the post-Islamic period may have been present in pre-Islamic speech, the fundamental structural differences between the Old Arabic of the pre-Islamic period and the New Arabic represented by the contemporary dialects still need an explanation. The emergence of this new type of Arabic in the period of the conquests is characterised not only by the disappearance of the declensional system, but also by a complex of other features (cf. the discussion in Chapter 8). Further reading One of the best introductions to the pre-Islamic dialects of West Arabia is still Rabin (1951), who has several maps to show the distribution of certain phenomena in the Jāhiliyya; also Kofler (1940–2), ʾAnīs ([1952] 1973), al-Jindī (1983) and Al-Sharkawi (2010); see also Rabin’s article (1955) on the origin of Classical Arabic, and his article in EI(2) ʿArabiyya (1960). On the ʿArab, see Retsö (2003; a summary in Retsö 2006); on the difference between ʿArab/ʾAʿrāb, see also Marbach (1992); on kaškaša and kaskasa, see Al-Azraqi (2007). Sībawayhi’s use of Bedouin informants is discussed by Levin (1994), but see below, Chapter 5, p. 71, on Gouttenoire’s (2010) critical analysis of the reports about Bedouin informants. On the genealogy of the Arabs and their provenance, see EI(2) (ʿArab, Djazīrat al-ʿArab); an interesting approach is Dagorn’s (1981) investigation into the popularity of the proper name ʾIsmāʿīl in early Islam as an index of the adoption of a new genealogy for the Arabs. The discussion about diglossia in the pre-Islamic period is a complicated one, and it is hardly possible to expect an impartial account, since most authors have taken a strong position in this debate. For an historical survey of the different

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points of view, see Zwettler (1978). The evidence of pre-Islamic inscriptions in the peninsula is discussed by Macdonald (2000, 2010b). The controversy concerning the functional yield of the declensional endings in Old Arabic is found in Corriente (1971b) and Blau (1972–3). Arguments against diglossia are given by Fück (1950), Blau (1977), Versteegh (1984: 1–15), and to a certain extent by Nöldeke (1904). For arguments for diglossia, see Vollers (1906), and also the arguments given by Wehr (1952) and Spitaler (1953) in their reviews of Fück (1950); see also Diem (1978, 1991) and Corriente (1971b, 1975). Owens’s (2006) position has been discussed in this chapter; see also Chapter 8, pp. 139f. The first occurrences of wrong case endings in papyri are discussed by Diem (1984: 268–73). For the textual history of the Qurʾān, see Nöldeke and Schwally (1961). The relevance of Qurʾānic orthography, the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions and the Aramaic/Nabataean inscriptions for the question of the case endings was discussed by Diem in a series of articles (1973a, 1976, 1979b, 1980a, 1981). For the evidence of the pausal forms in poetry and the Qurʾān, see Birkeland (1940). On the significance of the pronominal suffixes see Diem (1991) and Owens (2006: 230–65). The relationship between the posited poetic language in eastern Arabia and the Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans is analysed by Knauf (2010). The function of language and poetry in pre-Islamic society is discussed by Hoyland (2001: 211–28). The speech of the Bedouin in the Islamic empire and its relationship with the standard Classical language is dealt with by Fleisch (1964); and cf. also below, Chapter 5, pp. 71–3.

Chapter 5

The Development of Classical Arabic

5.1 Introduction At the beginning of the Islamic period, only two sources of literary Arabic were available, the Qurʾān and the pre-Islamic poems. It is not surprising, then, that these two sources were to play a crucial role in the standardisation and development of the Arabic language. It is not surprising, either, that the first scholarly activities in Islam concentrated on the text of the Qurʾān, which had to be transmitted and explained, both on the level of the text and on that of the contents. At the same time, when the direct ties with the desert were broken, the living practice of poetry was very soon replaced by scholarly interest in the pre-Islamic poems. The transmission of both ‘texts’ had taken place orally and informally, but in the rapidly expanding empire such a form of transmission could no longer be trusted. The language itself, too, underwent a process of standardisation. While in pre-Islamic times the Bedouin regarded themselves as members of one speech community, they had no single linguistic norm, and even in the language of poetry, which was supposed to be supra-tribal, a great deal of variation was accepted. After the conquests, when Arabic became the language of an empire, there was an urgent need to standardise the language for three reasons. First, the divergence between the language of the Bedouin and the various colloquial varieties that emerged became a real threat to communication in the empire. Second, the policy of the central government, first in Damascus and later in Baghdad, was aimed at controlling its subjects not only in economic and religious but also in linguistic matters. Obviously, if Arabic was to be used as the language of the central administration, it had to be standardised. Third, the changed situation called forth a rapid expansion of the lexicon, which had to be regulated in order to achieve some measure of uniformity. This chapter deals with three topics connected with the process of standardisation. The most important prerequisite for the written codification of the language was the invention of an orthography, or rather the adaptation of existing scribal practices to the new situation. Then a standardised norm for the language was elaborated, and the lexicon was inventoried and expanded. Subsequently, when

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these requirements had been met, a stylistic standard was developed. The existing Bedouin model was instrumental in the development of a stylistic standard for poetry, but the emergence of an Arabic prose style marked the real beginning of Classical Arabic as we know it. In the final section of this chapter, we shall deal with the official status of the Arabic language. 5.2  The development of orthography The first concern of Islamic scholars was to codify the texts with which they worked. Even though oral transmission continued to remain an essential component of Islamic culture, the risk of major discrepancies in the transmission became too large to ignore. The need for an authoritative text was imperative above all in the case of the Revealed Book. Clearly, the central government had a major stake in the acceptance of a uniform Book throughout the empire as the basis for all religious and political activities. The codification of the Qurʾān was a crucial moment in the development of a written standard for the Arabic language. On a practical level, the writing down of the text involved all kinds of decisions concerning the orthography of the Arabic script and the elaboration of a number of conventions to make writing less ambiguous and more manageable than it had been in the Jāhiliyya. We have seen above (Chapter 3) that writing was not unknown in the peninsula in the pre-Islamic period. But, for religious reasons, early Islamic sources emphasised, perhaps even exaggerated, the illiteracy of the Prophet and, by extension, of the entire Jāhilī society. The Prophet had been an ʾummī, someone who could not read nor write, and this was what made the revelation of the Qurʾān and his recitation of the text a miracle. There are clear indications that as early as the sixth century writing was fairly common in the urban centres of the peninsula, in Mecca and to a lesser degree in Medina. In the commercial society that was Mecca, businessmen must have had at their disposal various means of recording their transactions. There are references to treaties being written down and preserved in the Kaʿba in Mecca. Even the rāwīs, the transmitters of poetry, sometimes relied on written notes, although they recited the poems entrusted to them orally. In the Qurʾān, we find the reflection of a society in which writing for commercial purposes was well established. In the second sura we find, for instance, detailed stipulations on the settlement of debts that include the exact writing down of the terms (Q 2/282): O you believers, when you take a loan among you for a certain period of time, write it down and let a scribe write it down fairly between you, and let no scribe refuse to write as God has taught him and let him write and the debtor dictate (yā ʾayyuhā llaḏīna ʾāmanū ʾiḏā tadāyantum bi-daynin ʾilā ʾajalin musamman fa-ktubūhu wa-l-yaktub baynakum kātibun bi-l-ʿadli wa-lā yaʾba kātibun ʾan yaktuba kamā ʿallamahu llāhu fa-lyaktub wa-l-yumlili llaḏī ʿalayhi l-ḥaqqu).

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In the biography of the Prophet, there are many references to his using scribes for his correspondence with the Arab tribes and for the writing of treaties, for instance, the famous treaty with the settlements in North Arabia. This treaty, which was signed in the course of the expedition to Tabūk in year 9 of the Hijra, laid down for the first time the relations between Muslims and people of other religions. In the account preserved by the historians, the scribe and the witnesses are mentioned, as well as the fact that the Prophet signed it with his fingernail (cf. al-Wāqidī, Maġāzī, III, ed. Marsden Jones, London, 1966, 1,025ff.). This last detail is probably added to underscore the fact that the Prophet himself could not write. The Prophet may well have been illiterate, but there were scribes on whom he could rely, just as his fellow Meccans used scribes in the management of their affairs. In the beginning, the revelation consisted of short messages, which the Prophet brought to the believers and which could be committed to memory easily. But very soon, the messages grew longer and longer, and it became essential to have a written aid to memory, while the recitation of the text continued to take place orally. Tradition has preserved the names of several scribes to whom Muḥammad dictated the messages, chief among them being Zayd ibn Ṯābit (d. 45/665). The text of the Qurʾān itself documents this shift from recitation to collected text. The current term qurʾān in the early suras (possibly borrowed from Syriac qeryānā ‘recitation’) is replaced increasingly often in the later suras with the term kitāb ‘book’. Both Islamic tradition and scholars agree that there was no complete collection of the revelation during the Prophet’s lifetime, but there were fragments of all kinds of material, on which parts of the messages were recorded. The actual collection of all these fragments took place after the death of the Prophet. According to tradition, the third caliph, ʿUṯmān (r. 25/644–35/656), ordered the establishment of an authoritative codex of the Qurʾān. He entrusted this edition to Muḥammad’s scribe Zayd, who had already been involved in the recording of the text during the Prophet’s lifetime. When the work was finished, copies of the codex were sent to the important centres of the Islamic empire, where they were to replace all existing alternative readings. Acceptance of this text, usually called al-Muṣḥaf, was slow, and non-canonical variants continued to be transmitted; but eventually, by the end of the second century of the Hijra, the ʿUṯmānic text had become the basis for religious teaching and recitation almost everywhere. In the first grammatical treatise of Arabic, Sībawayhi’s (d. 177/793?) Kitāb, all deviations from the consonantal text of the codex are rejected and only some divergence in the vocalisation of the text is allowed. Around the variant readings (qirāʾāt), a massive literature arose that, at the same time, contributed to the linguistic study of the text and the language of the Qurʾān. Apart from the problems of unification encountered during the codification of the text, the main problem confronting Zayd ibn Ṯābit and his committee of text editors was the ambiguity of the Arabic script. The type of script that the

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Meccan traders had at their disposal was still a primitive one. Basically, there were two problems connected with this primitive form of the Arabic alphabet. In the first place, there were as yet no diacritic dots to distinguish between certain phonemes, and many of the letters of the alphabet indicated two or even more phonemes, in the case of sīn/šīn, ṣād/ḍād, bāʾ/tāʾ/ṯāʾ/nūn/yāʾ, fāʾ/qāf, dāl/ḏāl, rāʾ/zāy, ṭāʾ/ḏ̣āʾ. This was the heritage of the Nabataean script that had been the model for the earliest form of Arabic script and that did not contain all the Arabic phonemes. The second problem was connected with a general trait of all Semitic scripts (except Ethiopian), namely, the fact that these scripts do not indicate the short vowels. In the case of the Nabataean model, even many of the long vowels were written defectively (cf. above, pp. 32f.). The former problem may already have been solved in pre-Islamic times. There are some indications that, very early on, scribes had used diacritic dots to distinguish between homographs. They may have borrowed this device from a Syriac model, since in the Syriac script dots are used to distinguish between allophonic variants of phonemes. Alternatively, they may also have inherited this method from Nabataean script, which used dots to distinguish between characters that looked alike (Nehmé 2010). The notation of the short vowels was an altogether more complicated problem. During the first century of Islam, when people started to collect and record the fragments of the Qurʾānic revelation, the need for a uniform and unambiguous system for the short vowels made itself felt. Various grammarians, among them the legendary ‘inventor’ of grammar, ʾAbū l-ʾAswad ad-Duʾalī (d. 69/688?), are credited with the introduction of a system of (coloured) dots below and above the letters to indicate the three short vowels. In the version of the tradition that is reported by Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, ʾAbū l-ʾAswad gives a scribe the following instruction: When I open my lips, put one dot above the letter, and when I press them together put a dot next to the letter, and when I draw them apart put a dot beneath the letter, and when I make a humming sound after one of these vowels, put two dots. (fa-ʾiḏā fataḥtu šafatayya fa-nquṭ wāḥidatan fawqa l-ḥarf, wa-ʾiḏā ḍamamtuhumā fa-jʿal an-nuqṭa ʾilā jānibi l-ḥarf, wa-ʾiḏā kasartuhumā fa-jʿal an-nuqṭa min ʾasfalihi, fa-ʾiḏā ʾatbaʿtu šayʾan min hāḏihi l-ḥarakāt ġunnatan fa-nquṭ nuqṭatayn). (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, Nuzha, ed. Amer, Stockholm, 1963, pp. 6–7)

In this story, the origin of the dot notation of the three vowels and the nunation is ascribed to ʾAbū l-ʾAswad, and the names of the vowels (fatḥa, ḍamma, kasra) are connected with their articulation. We know from the Islamic sources that at first there was considerable opposition to the use of vowel dots in Qurʾānic manuscripts, and as a matter of fact this system is absent in the oldest manuscripts in Kūfic script, as well as in the inscriptions. In some manuscripts, the dots have been added by a later hand. The initial lack of a central standard is conspicuous. Déroche (2010) describes a Qurʾānic manuscript from the end of the seventh century, written by five different hands, with a remarkable lack of consistency in the use of diacritic dots, even within one hand.

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Two other innovations attributed to ʾAbū l-ʾAswad concern the notation of the hamza (glottal stop) and the šadda (gemination). Both signs are absent in the Nabataean script. We have seen in Chapter 4 (p. 49) that in the Ḥijāz the hamza was probably absent, but in the variety of the language in which the Qurʾān was revealed and the pre-Islamic poems were composed, the hamza was pronounced. Because of the prestige of the language of poetry and the Qurʾān, the Ḥijāzī scribes had to devise a way of recording the glottal stop. Since in their own speech the hamza had been replaced in many cases by a long vowel, they spelled words containing a hamza with a long vowel represented by a semi-consonant or glide, w, y or ʾalif. According to the tradition, ʾAbū l-ʾAswad improved this system by using a small letter ʿayn above the semi-consonant; this ʿayn indicated the presence of a guttural sound, namely, the glottal stop. The gemination of a consonant was noted by a diacritic dot. A substantial improvement in the system of short-vowel notation is usually attributed to the first lexicographer of the Arabic language, al-Ḫalīl ibn ʾAḥmad (d. 170/786 or 175/791). He replaced the system of dots with specific shapes for the three short vowels, a small wāw for the vowel u, a small ʾalif for the vowel a, and a (part of a) small yāʾ for the vowel i. He also changed the sign for the šadda, using a small sīn (short for šadīd ‘geminated’) instead. When a single consonant was intended, a small ḫāʾ (short for ḫafīf ‘light’) could be used. Originally, this system had been devised for writing down poetry, which also went through a period of codification, but gradually it spread to Qurʾānic manuscripts written in cursive script as well. It was considerably less ambiguous than the old system, in which the dots had to perform various functions. With al-Ḫalīl’s reform, the system of Arabic orthography was almost complete and, apart from a very few additional signs, it has remained essentially the same ever since (for one additional sign, the so-called Warš dot to indicate fronting of the vowel a, see Chapter 17, p. 315). The frequency of diacritic dots and vowel signs varies considerably, however, and alongside fully vowelled manuscripts one finds texts in which even the diacritic dots are left out. Even after the introduction of new orthographic devices, it took quite some time before they were universally and systematically adopted in writing. After the establishment of the orthography, a large variety of writing styles were developed, each with its own special domains. Apart from the epigraphic script (called Kūfic), which was also used in early Qurʾānic manuscripts, a cursive script was developed for use in the chancellery, after ʿAbd al-Malik’s reform (cf. below). The script itself became an essential component of Islamic art. Because of the general aversion to pictorial art, calligraphy was one of the most important means of decoration. This development of Arabic script will not be dealt with here. Having an orthography is one thing, but elaborating a standardised language for official – commercial and administrative – purposes is another. As far as we know, the Meccan traders did not have any archives, and we must assume that

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they did not have at their disposal an elaborate legal terminology or conventions for bookkeeping, either. In the first period of the establishment of the Islamic empire, the government, therefore, opted to use Greek-speaking clerks in Syria and Egypt, and Persian-speaking clerks in the East for purposes of administration and taxation. In the sources, the shift from Greek to Arabic in the tax register (dīwān) is traditionally connected with the name of Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik. According to this story, the caliph ordered the clerks to shift to Arabic in the year 81/700, allegedly because one of the Greek clerks was caught urinating in an inkwell (al-Balāḏurī, Futūḥ al-buldān, ed. Riḍwān, Cairo, 1959, pp. 196–7). Whatever the truth of that story, the shift is a sign of the growing self-confidence of the Arabs and their increased familiarity with a practical writing system. Even so, it took more than a caliph’s edict to effectively end the use of Greek by the scribes. Careful investigation of the papyri reveals that the transition to Arabic in the bureaucracy was much more gradual than is generally assumed (Sijpesteijn 2007). The political importance of the change of language is underscored by the distribution of tasks of the two languages. Stroumsa (2008) has shown that for some time under the ʾUmayyad administration Greek continued to be perceived as a language of power and authority and, hence, as the natural language to be used in public inscriptions, while Arabic was reserved for private inscriptions. The papyri in the Nessana archive from the Nabataean site Nitsana in the Negev Desert show that even internal documents were sometimes written exclusively in Greek, without an Arabic translation. The transition to exclusively Arabic documents is therefore evidence of the growing power of the caliphate. 5.3  The standardisation of the language Even before the language shift of the dīwān, Arabic was used as a written language: the earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Hijra, and at the end of the first century of the Hijra quite a number of papyrus texts must have been circulating. The language of these papyri is highly irregular from the point of view of the codified grammar of Classical Arabic, but the fact that they contain a large number of hypercorrections demonstrates that the scribes tried to emulate a linguistic ideal. In Chapter 9, on the so-called Middle Arabic texts, we shall deal with the linguistic features of the corpus of papyri. In this chapter, our main purpose is to sketch the process of standardisation that was soon under way. The Qurʾānic language, though virtually identical with the language of pre-Islamic poetry, has a typically religious flavour, manifesting itself in peculiarities of style and language that must have been absent in other registers. Likewise, the language of the poems was marked by poetic licence that did not occur in ordinary language. Although both sources constituted a model for correct Arabic, they could hardly serve as a model for ordinary prose. The arbiters of linguistic correctness, the Bedouin, were frequently called in to help in linguistic matters,

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but they were in no position to enforce a standard language, if only because of their own linguistic differences. We have seen above (Chapter 4) that in the period of the Jāhiliyya the language of the various tribes varied to a certain extent; and, even though it is reasonable to assume that there were no real problems of communication, there was no general standard either. On the other hand, the growing sedentary population with a more or less complete command of the language was very much in need of such a standard, but could hardly be expected to devote themselves to decisions about linguistic correctness. As a matter of fact, their slipshod use of the language for practical purposes, as in the texts that we find in the papyri, was one of the reasons for a growing concern on the part of those who regarded themselves as the true heirs of Bedouin civilisation, the pure Arabs. In the account of Muslim historians, ‘corruption of speech’ was the main motive behind the ‘invention’ of grammar, which is attributed to various people, among them ʾAbū l-ʾAswad. The historicity of this account is doubtful (see below, Chapter 7, p. 108); it probably reflects later views about the development of the grammatical standard (Talmon 1985). Yet it can hardly be denied that in the early decades of Islam there was an increasing call for specialists who could provide adequate teaching in Arabic. Grammarians must have played an important role in the standardisation of the language. The earliest scholarly efforts concerned the exegesis of the Revealed Book, but since students of the language of the Qurʾān could hardly ignore that other source of pre-Islamic Arabic, the poems, very soon the two main components of the corpus of texts that were to become canonical for the linguistic study of Arabic were combined in the writings of the ­grammarians. The first grammarian to give an account of the entire language in what was probably the first publication in book form in Arabic prose, Sībawayhi, was not of Arab stock himself, but a Persian from Shiraz (see Chapter 7). His example set the trend for all subsequent generations of grammarians. The grammarians believed that their main task was to provide an explanation for every single phenomenon in Arabic, rather than a mere description, let alone a set of precepts on how to speak Arabic correctly. Consequently, they distinguished between what was transmitted and what was theoretically possible in language. In principle, they accepted everything that was transmitted from a reliable source: the language of the Qurʾān, which was sacrosanct; everything that had been preserved from pre-Islamic poetry; and testimonies from trustworthy Bedouin informants. In this framework, even singularities or deviant forms were incorporated without, however, being accepted as productive forms that could constitute the basis for a theoretical linguistic reasoning. Such a distinction is characteristic of Islamic science as a whole, where ʿaql ‘logical reasoning’ is always carefully distinguished from naql ‘transmitted knowledge’. In this way, a separation was realised between the study of attested forms and the theories of the grammarians, and without being prescriptive the grammarians could still impose a canonical norm of the language.

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The codification of grammatical structure went hand in hand with the exploration of the lexicon and its necessary expansion. These two aspects of the process of standardisation are connected. Just as the grammarians were needed because of the perceived ‘corruption’ of the language, the first aim of the lexicographers seems to have been the preservation of the old Bedouin lexicon, which was at risk. There are several reasons for the lexicographers’ worries. In the first place, the sedentary civilisation of early Islam was markedly different from that of the desert tribes, who had been the guardians of the special vocabulary of the pre-Islamic poems. No city-dweller could be expected to know all the subtle nuances of a vocabulary connected with camels, animal wildlife and tents. There are several anecdotes about grammarians that stress this component of a grammarian’s activities. Thus, the grammarian ʾAbū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ (d. 154/770), when he started lecturing about language and poetry, was confronted by a real Bedouin, who interrogated him about the explanation of obscure words. When the grammarian passed the test, the Bedouin said ḫuḏū ʿanhu fa-ʾinnahu dābba munkara ‘transmit from him, because he is an extraordinary beast of burden!’ (i.e., a depository of knowledge) (az-Zajjājī, Majālis al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. Hārūn, Kuwait, 1962, p. 262). This anecdote shows how grammarians had to prove their worth by their knowledge of the Bedouin lexicon. For the ordinary speaker, who had grown up in an Islamic city and knew nothing about the Bedouin milieu, even ordinary Arabic words had become unfamiliar. From one of the earliest commentaries on the Qurʾān, we can get an idea about which words had fallen into disuse. Muqātil ibn Sulaymān’s (d. 150/767) Tafsīr contains a large number of paraphrases of Qurʾānic words that he felt to be in need of explanation, for example, ʾalīm ‘painful’ (replaced by wajīʿ), mubīn ‘clear’ (replaced by bayyin), nabaʾun ‘news’ (replaced by ḥadīṯun), nasīb ‘share’ (replaced by ḥaḏ̣ḏ̣), the verb ʾātā ‘to give’ (replaced by ʾaʿṭā) and the interrogative adverb ʾayyān ‘when?’ (replaced by matā). The second threat to the lexicon had to do with contact with other languages. When the Arabs became acquainted with the sedentary culture of the conquered territories, they encountered new things and notions for which Arabic words did not yet exist. The most obvious sources for terms to indicate the new notions were, of course, the languages spoken in the new Islamic empire. And this was precisely what some of the Arab scholars feared. They were convinced that the influx of words from other cultures would corrupt the Arabic language, which had been chosen by God for His last revelation to mankind. In the first century of the Hijra, this attitude had not yet made itself felt, as the comments by the earliest exegetes on the vocabulary of the Qurʾān demonstrate. In pre-Islamic times, the Arabs had taken over a considerable number of words from surrounding cultures. Most of them were borrowed either through the Jewish/Aramaic language of Syria, or through the Christian/Syriac language in Mesopotamia, where al-Ḥīra was the most important centre for cultural and

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linguistic contacts. Examples of early borrowings that occur both in pre-Islamic poetry and in the Qurʾān are the following: from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) through Syriac/Aramaic: zanjabīl ‘well in paradise’ < Syriac zangabīl < Pahlavi singabēr ‘ginger’ warda ‘rose’ < Aramaic wardā < Avestan varǝḏa. Some words must have been borrowed directly from Middle Persian, such as: istabraq ‘brocade’ < Pahlavi stabr ‘thick (of clothing)’ + suffix -ak jund ‘army’ < Pahlavi gund ‘army, troop’ kanz ‘treasure’ < Pahlavi ganǰ ‘treasure’ dirham ‘silver coin’ < Pahlavi draxm < Greek drachmè or from Greek/Latin through Syriac/Aramaic: burj ‘tower’ < Syriac būrgā < Greek púrgos zawj ‘pair, married couple’ < Syriac zūgā ‘yoke’, bar zūgā ‘husband, wife’ < Greek zeũgos ‘yoke’ dīnār ‘gold coin’ < Syriac dīnarā < Greek dēnárion < Latin denarius qaṣr ‘castle’ < Aramaic qaṣrā < Greek kástron < Latin castrum, castra ṣirāṭ ‘path’ < Aramaic isṭrātiyā < Greek stráta < Latin strata yāqūt ‘sapphire’ < Syriac yaqūnṭā < Greek huákinthos ‘hyacinth’ qirṭās ‘scroll of paper’ < Syriac qarṭīsā, karṭīsā < Greek chartēs. And, of course, there was a large number of words that came in straight from Syriac/Aramaic, such as: ṣalāt ‘prayer’ < Aramaic ṣlōṯā tīn ‘fig’ < Aramaic tīnā sifr ‘large book’ < Aramaic sifrā masjid ‘place of worship’ < Aramaic/Nabataean msgdʾ. A special category of loanwords is constituted by those words that came in by a southern route, from languages such as South Arabian or Ethiopic, for example: ṣanam ‘idol’ < South Arabian ṣnm, Ṣafāʾitic ṣnmt. The oldest commentaries on the Qurʾān, such as that by Mujāhid (d. 104/722), had no qualms in assigning words in the Qurʾān to a foreign origin. Mujāhid stated, for instance, that the word ṭūr ‘mountain’ came from Syriac, the word sijjīl ‘baked clay’ from Persian or Nabataean, and the word qisṭās ‘balance’ from Greek. In the cases mentioned here, he was not that far off, since ṭūr does indeed come from Syriac ṭūr, sijjīl from Pahlavi sang ‘stone’ + gīl ‘clay’, and qisṭās perhaps ultimately derives from Greek dikastēs ‘judge’, through Syriac dīqasṭūs. Some of the etymologies quoted by the commentators may be fanciful, but the important thing is that they looked upon the enrichment of the vocabulary as an advantage and as

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a sign of the superiority of the creative genius evidenced in the Qurʾān. By the end of the second century of the Hijra, however, some philologists had started to attack the notion that the Qurʾān could contain foreign loanwords, and attempted to connect the vocabulary of the Qurʾān with a Bedouin etymology. Thus, for instance, ʾAbū ʿUbayda (d. 210/825) says that: ‘the Qurʾān was revealed in clear Arabic language, and whosoever claims that the word ṭāhā is Nabataean makes a big mistake’ (nazala l-Qurʾānu bi-lisānin ʿarabiyyin mubīnin fa-man ḏ̣aʿama ʾanna ṭāhā bi-n-Nabaṭiyyati fa-qad ʾakbara) (Majāz, I, ed. Sezgin, Cairo, 1954, p. 17). Although most Arab lexicographers, such as as-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), continued to assign a foreign origin to many Arabic words, the idea of the purity of the Arabic language remained the prevalent attitude among some Islamic scholars, and attempts by Western scholars to find traces of other languages in the Qurʾān were, and still are, vehemently rejected. The real problem arises in the case of Qurʾānic words that have developed a new technical meaning not supported by the semantics of the Arabic root. In such cases, the exegetes go out of their way to find a connection. Thus, for instance, for the expression yawm al-qiyāma ‘the day of resurrection’, the standard explanation in the commentaries is that it is connected with the root q-w-m ‘to stand up’, but most likely the Christian Syriac term qiyāmeṯā as a translation of the Greek anástasis ‘resurrection’ prompted the semantic extension of the Arabic word. Similar examples are those of zakāt ‘alms’, masjid ‘mosque’, ṣuḥuf ‘scriptures’, sabt ‘Saturday’, sūra ‘portion of the Qurʾān’, and such central notions in the Qurʾānic message as kitāb ‘book’, sāʿa ‘hour’, etc. The term ṣuḥuf ‘scriptures’, plural of ṣaḥīfa, is connected by the Arabic commentators with a root ṣ-ḥ-f, which occurs only as a denominative in the second measure, ṣaḥḥafa, with the meaning of ‘making a mistake in reading’. In pre-Islamic poetry, ṣaḥīfa (plural ṣaḥāʾif) is used in the sense of ‘page of writing’. The Qurʾānic use of the word in the sense of ‘scriptures’ (e.g., Q 20/133: aṣ-ṣuḥuf al-ʾūlā ‘the first scriptures’) is difficult to explain from the meaning of the root, which is why Western commentaries often connect it with an Epigraphic South Arabian word ṣḥft or with the common Ethiopic root s’-ḥ-f ‘to write’. In line with the idea of the purity of the language, the semantic extension of an existing word was regarded as the most appropriate device for the expansion of the lexicon. The model for this procedure was believed to have been given by the language of the Qurʾān itself. Since the grammarians analysed many religious terms, such as ṣalāt ‘prayer’, zakāt ‘alms’ and the term ʾislām itself, as old Bedouin words which had received a specialised meaning in the religious context, semantic extension became an accepted method of creating new terminology. They were doubtless right in the sense that part of the religious vocabulary of the Qurʾān is the result of an internal development without external influence. A case in point is the word ʾislām, which meant in general ‘to surrender oneself ’, but came to mean ‘to surrender oneself to God, to convert to the new religion brought by the

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Prophet’. Besides, even when the new meanings of existing words were calqued on cognate words in other languages, their occurrence in the Qurʾān canonised the new meaning. The large-scale influx of new notions and ideas in the early Islamic period could not be handled by giving new meanings to existing words alone. In spite of the purists’ opposition, many words from other languages were simply taken over, either in their original form or with some slight adaptation to Arabic phonology or morphology. Loanwords from Persian abound in the domains of pharmacology, mineralogy and botany, for instance, in the names of plants: banafsaj ‘violet’, ʾasfarāj ‘asparagus’, bāḏinjān ‘eggplant’, bābūnij ‘camomile’, banj ‘henbane’, fustuq ‘pistachio’, ḫašḫāš ‘poppy’, narjis ‘narcissus’. In the earliest translations of Greek logical, medical and philosophical writings, some of the technical terms are simply transliterations of a Greek word for which the translators were unable to find an Arabic equivalent. Thus we have, for instance, hayūlā ‘substance’ (< Greek húlē), bulġum ‘phlegm’ (< Greek phlégma) and ʾuṣṭuquss ‘element’ (< Greek stoicheĩon). The next best solution was to create a new word on the basis of an existing root by the application of one of the numerous morphological patterns of Arabic. In the beginning, each translator created in this way his own set of terms. The ensuing confusion was more or less ended with the establishment of the Bayt al-Ḥikma ‘House of Wisdom’, founded by Caliph al-Maʾmūn in 215/830. This was probably not a school or academy in the modern sense of the word, but rather a book repository where scholars cooperated in the translation of Greek manuscripts (Gutas 1998) and, one assumes, consulted each other on matters relating to terminology. The Greek term katēgoroúmenon ‘predicate’, for instance, had been variably translated as maḥmūl, maqūl, ṣifa or naʿt, until it was standardised as maḥmūl. The Greek term apóphansis ‘proposition’ had been translated by as many as five different terms (ḥukm, ḫabar, qawl jāzim, qawl qāṭiʿ, qaḍiyya), until qaḍiyya became the usual term. The use of patterns to create neologisms from existing roots was particularly useful in the translation of Greek medical terminology. A few examples may suffice to illustrate this method of inventing new vocabulary items. In his terminology for the different parts of the eye, Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq translated Greek words in -eidēs ‘-like’ with abstract adjectives, for example, qarniyya (Greek keratoeidēs) ‘cornea’, zujājiyya (Greek hualoeidēs) ‘corpus vitreum’, ʿinabiyya (Greek rhagoeidēs) ‘uvea’, šabakiyya (Greek amphiblēstroeidēs) ‘retina’. The pattern fuʿāl was used to systematise the names of illnesses, for example, zukām ‘catarrh’, ṣudāʿ ‘headache’, ṣufār ‘jaundice’, duwār ‘dizziness’, ṭuḥāl ‘infection of the spleen’ and even ḫumār ‘hangover’. A prerequisite for the creative use of the existing lexicon was its codification. The first complete dictionary of the Arabic language was composed by Sībawayhi’s teacher, al-Ḫalīl ibn ʾAḥmad, who had also been involved in the reform of the Arabic script (cf. above, p. 64) and who is generally acclaimed as the inventor of

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Arabic metrical theory. The professed aim of the Kitāb al-ʿayn, which goes under his name, was the inclusion of all Arabic roots. In the introduction, a sketch is given of the phonetic structure of Arabic, and the dictionary fully uses the available corpus of Arabic by including quotations from the Qurʾān and from the numerous pre-Islamic poems, which had both undergone a process of codification and written transmission at the hands of grammarians (see Chapter 7). In the Kitāb al-ʿayn, the emphasis had been on those words that were in common use in Arabic writing (mustaʿmalāt), but later compilers aimed at complete coverage of all Arabic words, both common and rare. This sometimes led to the inclusion of ghost-words that had never existed as such, or the recording of several meanings for a word on the basis of just one particular context. A rich source of lexical items is constituted by the vocabulary of rajaz poetry in the slightly informal iambic trimeter, which often had an improvised character. The poets in this genre stretched the potential of Arabic word-building to its limits. Ullmann (1966) has shown that the many words in the dictionaries that are quoted from rajaz poetry are very often neologisms on the basis of existing roots, rather than separate roots. Triliteral words may be expanded more or less at will with prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Thus, for instance, from the existing word ʾadlamu ‘very black’ the verb idlahamma ‘to be/become very black’ was created, from kadaḥa ‘to make an effort’ and jalaba ‘to bring’ came the verbs kardaḥa and ijlaʿabba with the same meaning. New verbs were made with the infixes -ran-, -lan-, -ʿan- or -ḥan-, for example, islanṭaḥa ‘to be wide’ from saṭaḥa ‘to expand’, iqʿanṣara ‘to shrink, dwindle’, with a verbal adjective qinṣaʿrun, from qaṣura ‘to be short’, and many more examples. New nouns were made with the suffix -m, for example, baldamun, balandamun with the same meaning as balīdun ‘stupid’, šajʿamun with the same meaning as šujāʿun ‘courageous’. The point is that the lexicographers took such invented words, which never gained any currency, for existing roots, which were then duly entered in the dictionary. The early beginnings of grammar and lexicography began at a time when Bedouin informants were still around and could be consulted. The stories about grammarians travelling deep into the desert to find Bedouin informants are probably exaggerated, and it is more likely that they received their information from Bedouin dwelling at the fringes of the cities, who had become professionals in handing down linguistic data (Gouttenoire 2010). Yet there can be no doubt that the grammarians and lexicographers regarded the Bedouin as the true speakers (fuṣaḥāʾ) of Arabic. As late as the fourth/tenth century, the lexicographer al-ʾAzharī (d. 370/980) extolled the purity of their language. He had been kidnapped by Bedouin and forced to stay with them for a considerable period of time. On the basis of this ‘fieldwork’ he wrote his dictionary Tahḏīb al-luġa (The Reparation of Speech), in the introduction to which he says: ‘They speak according to their desert nature and their ingrained instincts. In their speech you hardly ever hear a linguistic error or a terrible mistake’ (yatakallamūna bi-ṭibāʿihim

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al-badawiyyati wa-qarāʾiḥihim allatī ʿtādūhā wa-lā yakādu yaqaʿu fī manṭiqihim laḥnun ʾaw ḫaṭaʾun fāḥiš) (Tahḏīb, I, ed. Hārūn, Cairo, 1964–7, p. 7). Other grammarians, too, claimed to have collected materials from the nomad tribes, and it is often reported that caliphs or other dignitaries sent their sons into the desert in order to learn flawless Arabic. In the course of the centuries, the Bedouin tribes increasingly came into the sphere of influence of the sedentary civilisation, and their speech became contaminated by sedentary speech. In his description of the Arabian peninsula, al-Hamdānī (d. 334/945) sets up a hierarchy of the Arab tribes according to the perfection of their speech. He explains that those Arabs who live in or near a town have very mediocre Arabic and cannot be trusted; this applies even to the Arabs who live near the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina (Rabin 1951: 43–4). The grammarian Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002) includes in his Ḫaṣāʾiṣ a chapter about the errors made by Bedouin, and he states that in his time it is almost impossible to find a Bedouin speaking pure Arabic (li-ʾannā lā nakādu narā badawiyyan faṣīḥan) (Ḫaṣāʾiṣ, II, ed. an-Najjār, Cairo, 1952–6, p. 5). At the same time, Ibn Jinnī advises his students always to check their linguistic facts with Bedouin informants. Even in the early period of Arabic grammar, our sources record examples of Bedouin who sold their expertise in matters of language to the highest bidder, as in the case of the famous masʾala zunbūriyya. In this controversy between Sībawayhi and a rival grammarian, a question was raised about the expression kuntu ʾaḏ̣unnu ʾanna l-ʿaqraba ʾašaddu lasʿatan min az-zunbūri fa-ʾiḏā huwa ʾiyyāhā (‘I thought that the scorpion had a stronger bite than the hornet, but it was the other way round’). Sībawayhi gave the correct answer – the last clause has to be fa-ʾiḏā huwa hiya – but was defeated by the judgement of a Bedouin arbiter, who had been bribed by his adversary (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, ʾInṣāf, ed. Weil, Leiden, 1913, pp. 292–5). Modern critics of the attitude of the grammarians towards the alleged perfection of Bedouin speech often point out that the idealisation of their speech may have been part of a general trend to extol the virtues of desert life, and that even nowadays one sometimes hears stories about Bedouin speaking perfect Classical Arabic. Usually this means that they use words that have become obsolete elsewhere, or it refers to their poetical tradition, which often uses a classicising style of language. We are not concerned here with the question of whether the Bedouin had still preserved declensional endings in the third/ninth century (for which see above, Chapter 4). What is important for our present discussion is the fact that in the fourth/tenth century linguistic experts could apparently still find informants whom they trusted. From the fourth century onwards, however, this tradition disappeared. In the story about Sībawayhi and the Bedouin informant, there is already an element of corruption, and later the general image of the Bedouin became that of a thieving and lying creature whose culture was inferior to the sophisticated sedentary civilisation. For the practice of grammar, this meant that the process of standardisation had come to a standstill. Since there were no

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longer living informants to provide fresh information, the corpus of the language was closed, and ‘fieldwork’ could no longer produce reliable results. References to the kalām al-ʿArab ‘language of the Bedouin’ still abounded in the books of the grammarians, but these were no longer connected with any living speech. 5.4  The development of an Arabic literary style The history of literary style in Arabic went hand in hand with the standardisation of the language. The development of such a style did not have to start from scratch. The same two sources that had been available for the standardisation of the language, the Qurʾān and the pre-Islamic poems, became the initial models for a literary style. As in other cultures, the structured composition of poetry in Arabic preceded the emergence of a literary prose style. But here, too, the desert type of poetry did not satisfy all the needs of a new, elegant sedentary civilisation. New forms of poetry developed under the ʾUmayyad dynasty, at whose court love poems became a new fashion (e.g., the poems of ʿUmar ibn ʾAbī Rabīʿa, d. 43/712). Inevitably, this led to a more flexible use of language and to the development of new, often strophic, types of poetry that were not as heavily dependent on the Bedouin model. In such forms of poetry, there was easier access for popular expressions reflecting the new environment of Arabic culture. Some deviations in morphology, syntax and lexicon became gradually accepted (cf. Fück 1950: 73ff.), for example, the use of contracted forms such as nasīhi (< nasiyahu), baqī (< baqiya), or the confusion of the first verbal measure (faʿala) and the fourth (ʾafʿala). In rajaz, poets could experiment with the creation of new words and word forms to a much higher degree than was permitted in official poetry. In general, the muwalladūn, the new Arabs, who had never seen the desert, could not be expected to be such excellent connoisseurs of Arabic as were the pre-Islamic poets. Although for a long time the Bedouin model continued to serve as a strict canon, in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb the poems of the muwalladūn are not excluded as evidence: the 1,000-plus quotations from poetry in the Kitāb include both Jāhilī poets and those from the urban milieu of the ʾUmayyad period, such as ʿUmar ibn ʾAbī Rabīʿa, who is quoted nine times; he even quotes from rajaz poets, such as Ruʾba ibn al-ʿAjjāj (d. 145/708), who is quoted no less than twenty-eight times. Gradually, a distinction came into being between the official brand of poetry that clung to the old models, and took pleasure in using obsolete vocabulary and avoiding any adaptation to the new modes of speaking, on the one hand, and a new, ‘faster’ kind of poetry, often improvised, often in strophic form, and very often containing vulgarisms, on the other. In the course of time, these two kinds of poetry grew further apart. Official poetry became more and more erudite, until it could no longer be understood without explanation. The poet al-MutanabbI (d. 355/965), for instance, published his poems together with a learned commentary. The more popular form of poetry, on the other hand, went through a different

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development. In its most developed form, the strophic muwaššaḥ and the zajal, it included the use of colloquial forms in a refrain. This kind of poetry became especially popular in the Islamic West (cf. below, pp. 315f.). Because of its idiosyncrasies, poetry is of lesser importance in the standardisation of language than prose. We have seen above that for commercial and administrative purposes Arabic was used from the beginning of the Islamic empire. Such written documents had no literary pretensions whatsoever, although their scribes did try to maintain a Classical norm, which means that already at this time there was a standard (on the language of the papyri, see below, Chapter 9). But there were other forms of speech, some of them with roots in the Jāhiliyya. In the first place, Arabic culture had a reputation of long standing for its ability to put speech to rhetorical use. The Bedouin admired verbal prowess, and the tradition of delivering public speeches was continued in early Islam. The earliest preserved speeches already exhibit the use of various literary devices and conventions, in particular that of parallelism. A famous example is the speech given by al-Ḥajjāj (d. 95/714) on the occasion of his inauguration as governor of Kufa: The Commander of the Believers has emptied his quiver and tested its arrows. He found me to be of the firmest wood and of the strongest shaft and shot me at you. As long as you gallop in rebellion and recline in the beds of error and follow the stray path, by God, I shall skin you like a new stick and bind your leaves like a thorn bush and whip you like wandering camels. (ʾinna ʾamīra l-muʾminīna kabba kinānatahu ṯumma ʿajama ʿīdānahā fa-wajadanī ʾamarrahā ʿīdan wa-ʾaṣlabahā ʿamūdan fa-wajjahanī ʾilaykum fa-ʾinnakum ṭālamā ʾawḍaʿtum fī l-fitani wa-ḍṭajaʿtum fī marāqidi ḍ-ḍalāli wa-sanantum sunana l-ġayyi ʾammā wa-llāhi la-ʾalḥawannakum laḥwa l-ʿaṣā wa-la-ʾaʿṣibannakum ʿaṣba s-salamati wa-la-ʾaḍribannakum ḍarba ġarāʾibi l-ʾibil). (al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Bayān wa-t-tabyīn, II, ed. as-Sandūbī, Beirut, n.d., p. 349)

A second genre of texts with roots in the pre-Islamic period is the art of storytelling. From early times onwards, storytellers (quṣṣāṣ) had played an important role in the life of the tribe by transmitting stories about the exploits of the tribes (ʾayyām al-ʿArab), and this tradition was continued in a modified form in early Islam when storytellers travelled around recounting the events in the life of the Prophet, the early Islamic expeditions and the conquests of foreign countries. These stories were meant for the general public and they were no doubt told in a lively style, full of fictitious conversations and without any literary embellishments. The topics dealt with by the professional storytellers were also studied by scholars. They had in common with the storytellers a certain aversion to writing down their reports: only the Qurʾān could be a written book. They did use written notes for recording their own memories and those of their informants, but these were intended for private use, or for circulation among their students only. The earliest efforts to put down in writing systematically the traditions about Muḥammad and the early period of the conquests did not start until the end of the first century of the Hijra, at a time when the last people who had actually met

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the Prophet were old men and women who were bound to die soon. This period witnessed feverish activity on the part of scholars to collect all they could from the last living witnesses. The best-documented genre in early Islam is the epistolary one. The earliest examples of epistolary texts are found in the accounts of the correspondence between the Prophet and the tribal chieftains. During the period of the conquests, there must have been a constant stream of letters between the central authorities in Medina and the commanders in the field. The contents of these letters were mostly military or commercial, but no doubt some epistolary conventions existed even then. It is impossible to determine to what degree the texts of those letters that have been preserved by later historians are authentic. Some historians refer to actual documents, for instance, the treaty between the Prophet and the community of Dūmat al-Jandal, which al-Wāqidī (Maġāzī, III, p. 1,030) claims to have seen personally. But in general we have no guarantee about the a­ uthenticity of the exact wording, although historians may well have preserved the gist of the contents. The same conclusion applies to such texts as the letters of the early caliphs (rāšidūn) or the arbitration pact of Ṣiffīn (37/657) between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya. Since most of the scribes (kuttāb) in the early period were Syrians or Persians, or perhaps even Christian Arabs from the tribes outside the peninsula, some foreign examples and conventions may have found their way into Arabic literary products at this period. The reform of Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65/685–86/705), who as we have seen was responsible for the shift of language in the dīwān, must have been the starting point for a new fashion in writing Arabic for official purposes. Since the secretaries were responsible for the composition of official documents and letters, their role in the development of a chancellery style was essential. Under ʿAbd al-Malik’s successor Hišām (r. 105/724–125/743), the foundation was laid for the administrative system that was later taken over and perfected by the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. From the beginning of the ʾUmayyad dynasty, the sponsorship of the caliphs was an important factor in the production of texts, both literary and administrative. According to some sources as early as Muʿāwiya’s (r. 41/661–60/680) reign, the caliph had some kind of library in which he deposited written versions of ḥadīṯs, some of which had been collected at his request. His grandson Ḫālid ibn Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya had a keen interest in alchemy and may have commissioned the first translations from Greek into Arabic. Certainly, there are enough reports about the later ʾUmayyads requesting translations of Greek or Syriac books, mostly on medicine, to warrant the conclusion that a depository (ḫizāna) of books belonged to the normal appurtenances of the caliphal court. Although the ʿAbbāsids did their best to suppress any favourable report about the ʾUmayyads, it is fairly certain that the ʾUmayyad caliphs actively supported the activities of scholars such as az-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) in the field of ḥadīṯ-collecting (Schoeler 1996: 46–8).

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The development of a written Arabic style went hand in hand with the collection of a corpus of literary prose consisting of translations from Persian, including the Kitāb fī s-siyāsa al-ʿāmmiyya mufaṣṣalan (Treatise on General Administration, with Full Particulars) that is sometimes attributed to Hišām’s secretary ʾAbū l-ʿAlāʾ Sālim. The epistolary style was perfected by his successor ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Yaḥyā (d. after 132/750), secretary of Marwān II (r. 127/744–132/750), who used this style in treatises, some of which have been preserved, such as his Risāla ʾilā l-kuttāb (Letter to the Scribes). He used an ornate style, with an extensive eulogy at the beginning of the treatise, ample use of parallelism, in a quantitative rhythm, sometimes in rhymed prose (sajʿ), sometimes in a loose parallel structure of patterns. On the other hand, his style does not include the use of intricate rhetorical figures or rare vocabulary. The first sermons and epistles, such as those by al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728), adopted the form of the epistolary genre by addressing them to the caliph, but adapted the epistolary style to the topic at hand. Because of their religious content, these texts borrow much more from the Qurʾān than ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd did. For the Book of God Almighty is life amid all death and light amid all darkness and knowledge amid all ignorance. God has left for his servants after the Book and the Messenger no other proof and He has said ‘so that those who perished, perished after a clear sign, and so that those who lived, lived after a clear sign, for God is all-hearing and all-knowing’ [Q 8/42]. Reflect, Commander of the Believers on the word of God Almighty ‘for each of you who wishes to go forward or go backwards; his soul is a pawn for what it has earned’ [Q 74/37–8; the text has fa-man instead of the canonical reading li-man]. (fa-kitābu llāhi taʿālā ḥayātun ʿinda kulli mawtin wa-nūrun ʿinda kulli ḏ̣ulmatin wa-ʿilmun ʿinda kulli jahlin, fa-mā taraka llāhu li-l-ʿibādi baʿda l-kitābi wa-r-rasūli ḥujjatan wa-qāla ʿazza wa-jalla ‘li-yahlika man halaka ʿan bayyinatin, wa-yaḥyā man ḥayya ʿan bayyinatin wa-ʾinna llāha la-samīʿun ʿalīm’ fa-fakkir ʾamīra l-muʾminīna fī qawli llāhi taʿālā ‘fa-man šāʾa minkum ʾan yataqaddama ʾaw yataʾaḫḫara kullu nafsin bi-mā kasabat rahīna’). (Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, Risāla fī l-qadar, ed. ʿAmāra, Rasāʾil fī l-ʿadl wa-t-tawḥīd, Beirut, 1987, p. 113)

The tradition of caliphal sponsorship of book-writing that was initiated by the ʾUmayyad caliphs was continued under the ʿAbbāsid dynasty. At the request of some of the caliphs, books were composed, mostly by foreigners, that were to acquaint the intellectual elite with the achievements of other cultures. Scholars such as the Persian Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ±142/759), a near-contemporary of ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, produced literary translations from Pahlavi. His most famous translation was that of the Indian fables of Kalīla wa-Dimna, but he also composed new original treatises, such as the Kitāb al-ʾadab al-kabīr and the Risāla fī ṣ-ṣaḥāba. These treatises were mostly concerned with court etiquette and the behavioural code in the relations between rulers and ruled. Because of the scarcity of preserved texts from the ʾUmayyad period, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact model for the style of early ʿAbbāsid writings. The language of the Qurʾān gained in influence during the ʿAbbāsid period, but it

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cannot be regarded as a direct model for the prose style. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s work abounds with antithetic statements and parallelisms formulated in a syntactically complicated language, full of participles and verbal nouns, which, however, always remains lucid and easy to follow, as in the following fragment: Know that the receiver of praise is as someone who praises himself. It is fitting that a man’s love of praise should induce him to reject it, since the one who rejects it is praised, but the one who accepts it is blamed. (wa-ʿlam ʾanna qābila l-madḥi ka-mādiḥi nafsihi, wa-l-marʾu jadīrun ʾan yakūna ḥubbuhu l-madḥa huwa llaḏī yaḥmiluhu ʿalā raddihi, fa-ʾinna r-rādda lahu maḥmūdun, wa-l-qābila lahu maʿībun). (Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kitāb al-ʾadab al-kabīr, ed. Beirut, 1964, p. 69)

The ʾUmayyad trend of commissioning translations of scientific writings reached its apogee under the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. The Arabic translations of (Syriac versions of) Greek writings that were produced before al-Maʾmūn’s establishment of the Bayt al-Ḥikma, were written in a clumsy style that betrays its Greek origin in every line. One example from a translation of Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man should suffice (an attempt has been made to imitate the style in English!): When spring comes, it is necessary to add to the drinking, and it must be broken with water, and you must cut down bit by bit on food, and you must choose of it that which is less nourishing and fresher and you must adopt instead of the use of much bread the use of much barley meal. (wa-ʾiḏā jāʾa r-rabīʿ fa-yanbaġī ʾan yuzād fī š-šarāb wa-yuksar bi-l-māʾ wa-tanquṣ min aṭ-ṭaʿām qalīlan qalīlan wa-taḫtār minhu mā huwa ʾaqall ġaḏāʾan wa-ʾarṭab wa-tastaʿmil makāna l-istikṯār min al-ḫubz al-istikṯār min as-sawīq). (Kitāb Buqrāṭ fī ṭabīʿat al-ʾinsān, ed. Mattock and Lyons, Cambridge, 1968, pp. 27–8)

The casual reference to the Greek custom of mixing wine with water is as inappropriate in an Islamic context as the style of the entire text. In the writings of the greatest of all translators, Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq (d. 260/873), there is no trace of such translated language. He explicitly rejects the literal translations of his predecessors and uses a terse, businesslike style that makes full use of the syntactic possibilities of Arabic and shuns the ornate epistolary style. His preference for complicated infinitival and participial constructions may reflect the structure of the Greek original: I wrote for him a book in Syriac, in which I took the direction he had indicated to me when he requested me to write it [lit.: in his requesting its composition from me]. (fa-katabtu lahu kitāban bi-s-Suryāniyya naḥawtu fīhi n-naḥwa llaḏī qaṣada ʾilayhi fī masʾalatihi ʾiyyāya waḍʿahu). (Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq, Risāla Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq ʾilā ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā fī ḏikr mā turjima min kutub Jālīnūs bi-ʿilmihi wa-baʿḍ mā lam yutarjam, ed. Bergsträßer, Leipzig, 1925, p. 1)

Both Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s treatises and the translations of Greek logical, medical and philosophical writings were publications in the real sense of the word. They were public books, not restricted to the court, but intended to be read by individuals. With respect to Islamic writing, that is, writing on legal matters (fiqh), tradi-

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tions of the Prophet (ḥadīṯ), history, Islamic campaigns (maġāzī) and Qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr), things were different. When the ʿAbbāsid caliphs requested scholars to write down their information in the form of actual books for the benefit of the heirs to the throne, who needed such information for their education, they did so partially in reaction to the ʾUmayyads. The ʾUmayyad caliphs supported the scholarly work of individual ḥadīṯ collectors, but the ʿAbbāsid propaganda emphasised the ʾUmayyads’ worldly interests and minimised their role in the collection of Islamic writing. One of the earliest court scholars was Ibn ʾIsḥāq (d. 150/767). He had collected materials about the history of the Arabs and Islam in order to use them in his instruction. At the special request of Caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 136/754–158/775), he presented them in a structured form at court and deposited them as a fixed text in the caliphal library (al-Ḫaṭīb al-Baġdādī, Taʾrīḫ Baġdād, I, ed. Beirut, pp. 220f.). Although there are no copies of this or similar limited publications, Ibn ʾIsḥāq’s activities mark the beginning of historical writing, and to a large degree determined its literary form and style. We may assume that the accounts of what happened during the Prophet’s life and the early conquests were written in the kind of narrative prose that we find in all early (and even later) historians, all of which grew out of the simple contextless ʾaḫbār of the storytellers. The emphasis is on the liveliness of the story, which does not depend on literary decoration and uses simple words in a preponderantly paratactic construction, preferably in dialogue form. The following story about the reaction of the Muslims when they saw the beautiful garb of a Christian captive illustrates this style and shows the division of the report into two parts, a chain of informants (ʾisnād) and the actual contents (matn): Ibn ʾIsḥāq said: ‘ʿĀṣim ibn ʿUmar ibn Qatāda told me on the authority of ʾAnas ibn Mālik’. He said: ‘I saw the cloak of ʾUkaydir when it was brought to the Messenger of God – may God bless him and protect him!’ – and the Muslims started to touch it with their hands and they admired it. The Messenger of God – may God bless him and protect him! – said: ‘Do you admire this? In the name of Him in whose hands my soul is, the kerchiefs of Saʿd ibn Muʿāḏ in paradise are more beautiful than this!’ (qāla Ibn Mālik: fa-ḥaddaṯanī ʿĀṣim ibn ʿUmar ibn Qatāda ʿan ʾAnas ibn Mālik, qāla: raʾaytu qabāʾa ʾUkaydir ḥīna qudima bihi ʿalā rasūli llāh – ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam – fa-jaʿala l-Muslimūna yalmisūnahu bi-ʾaydīhim wa-yataʿajjabūna minhu, fa-qāla rasūlu llāh – ṣallā llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam – ʾa-taʿjibūna min hāḏā? fa-wa-llaḏī nafsī bi-yadihi, la-manādīlu Saʿd ibn Muʿāḏ fī l-jannati ʾaḥsanu min hāḏā!). (Ibn Hišām, as-Sīra an-Nabawiyya, IV, ed. as-Saqā, al-ʾIbyārī and Šalabī, Cairo, 1936, pp. 169–70)

By their nature, texts of this type did not have the same kind of literary pretensions as, for instance, poetry. Doubtless, later historians such as aṭ-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) did not always content themselves with simply copying the stories which they transmitted from their predecessors, but they attempted to structure and stylise them. Compared with poetry, however, there was so much freedom in this kind of

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prose and so few restrictions with regard to the form that the Arab literary critics could not be expected to devote much time to them, except perhaps to deplore the many ‘mistakes’ against grammar that crept in. The literary critic Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar (d. 337/958) in his Naqd an-naṯr (Criticism of Prose) distinguishes between two styles, the one low (saḫīf), the other elevated (jazl), and he gives precise instructions on when to use the one and when the other. What Qudāma labels ‘elevated style’ is the kind of Arabic prose we find in official correspondence, which is written in a florid style with a heavy emphasis on the form. In this kind of writing, we find the rhymed sequences that became so characteristic of Arabic style. Even non-literary works traditionally begin with an introduction in which this kind of prose is used. Take, for instance, the first sentence of the introduction to az-Zamaḫšarī’s (d. 538/1144) Mufaṣṣal, which contrasts strikingly with his normal, pedagogical language: Praise be to God for making me one of the scholars of Arabic, and for predisposing me to protect the Arabs and [to maintain] the solidarity [with them], and for preserving me from straying from the throngs of their helpers, so that I would become conspicuous, and from joining the ranks of the Šuʿūbiyya, so that I would be isolated, and for making me immune for their ways, which bring them no gain but to be hurt by the revilers’ tongues and to be torn apart by the attackers’ teeth. (Allāha ʾaḥmadu ʿalā ʾan jaʿalanī min ʿulamāʾi l-ʿarabiyyati wa-jabalanī ʿalā l-ġaḍabi li-l-ʿArabi wa-l-ʿaṣabiyyati wa-ʾabā lī ʾan ʾanfarida ʿan ṣamīmi ʾanṣārihim wa-ʾamtāza wa-ʾanḍawiya ʾilā lafīfi š-šuʿūbiyyati wa-ʾanḥāza wa-ʿaṣamanī min maḏhabihim allaḏī lam yujdi ʿalayhim ʾillā r-rašqa bi-ʾalsinati l-lāʿinīna wa-l-mašqa bi-ʾasinnati ṭ-ṭāʿinīna). (Mufaṣṣal, ed. Broch, Christianiae, 1889, p. 2)

With such exuberance of style, it is small wonder that many Arab scholars believed that the Arabic language was untranslatable, as Ibn Fāris asserts (aṣ-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-luġa, ed. Chouémi, Beirut, p. 13). In the debate among literary critics on the question of whether ‘expression’ (lafḏ̣) or ‘meaning’ (maʿnā) is more important in a literary work, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) argued that a literary work should be evaluated according to its expression, its form, since the meaning expressed by the writer is universal and accessible to everyone, whereas the form is something that only an accomplished writer can handle. Such an attitude could, and did, easily lead to a formulaic style. Form came to be seen as the most important dimension of style, whereas content was of secondary importance. In the literary genre of the maqāmāt, this tendency reached its apogee, and the production of writers such as al-Ḥarīrī (d. 516/1122) contains pieces that are pure exercises in form. There is another kind of writing in Arabic, corresponding to what Qudāma calls the ‘lower style’. It is found in private letters and in non-literary writing, such as geographical works, historiography, biographical dictionaries, handbooks of Islamic law and theology, and even in grammatical treatises. In such writings, we find a relaxation of the strict standards, the introduction of colloquialisms and

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a businesslike style. Some of these authors went even further and used a kind of prose language that had freed itself from the bonds of Classical Arabic and came a long way down to the vernacular of their time. But even when these authors used vernacular constructions or lexical items, they never stopped writing within the framework of Classical Arabic. From the point of view of historical linguistics, texts like the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ (d. 584/1188), or Ibn ʾAbī ʾUṣaybiʿa’s (d. 668/1270) biographical dictionary belong to the category of ‘Middle Arabic’ (cf. below, pp. 157–60). There is a vast difference between this genre, in which intellectuals strove after a simple style, and the large quantity of documents written in ‘faulty’ language that are normally subsumed under the same label of ‘Middle Arabic’. The coexistence of, and the conflict between, a high and a low variety of the language in Islamic culture made its presence felt from the time of the earliest papyri. Through the Middle Arabic texts, this diglossia was introduced in the domain of literary and semi-literary products. We shall see below (Chapter 13) that this conflict has never disappeared since. In Modern Arabic literature, just like in that of the Classical age, authors have to choose the level of speech in which they wish to write. But the main constraint for all written production in Arabic is the position of Classical Arabic as the language of prestige. Whether in an ‘elevated’ or in a ‘lower’ style, the ultimate model remains the standard language, and even when authors deliberately set out to write in the vernacular, in the end they can never escape the framework of the written language. 5.5  The official status of Arabic Throughout the classical period of Islam, Arabic remained the language of prestige that was used for all religious, cultural, administrative and scholarly purposes. In none of these functions was it ever seriously threatened in the first centuries of Islam. There appears to have been some discussion in the early period about the admissibility of praying or reciting the Qurʾān in other languages than Arabic. Especially in the Islamic East, early Ḥanafī fuqahāʾ, basing themselves on the opinion of the eponymous founder of their school, ʾAbū Ḥanīfa (d. 80/699), allowed the use of translations of the Qurʾān in ritual prayer and recitation, sometimes with the proviso that this applied only to those who did not master Arabic (Zadeh 2012: 53–91). For most jurists, however, the meaning and form of the Qurʾān were inextricably linked, and it was the combination of both that lent the Qurʾān its miraculous, inimitable nature. They based themselves on reported sayings of the first caliphs, who expressly forbade the use of Persian in prayer, for instance, in a report about the second caliph, ʿUmar. When he heard someone praying in Persian while performing the ṭawāf around the Kaʿba, he brandished his stick and shouted ‘Find yourself a way to speak Arabic!’ (ibtaġi ʾilā l-ʿarabiyyati sabīlan) (ʾAbū Ṭāhir, ʾAḥbār an-naḥwiyyīn, ed. al-Bannā, Cairo, 1981, p. 25). ʿAbd

The Development of Classical Arabic  81

al-Malik’s decree to change the language of the dīwān (cf. above, p. 65) suggests a determined effort to downgrade languages other than Arabic. Notwithstanding this official policy, most speakers of Arabic had to accept the fact that other languages were frequently used in daily interaction: cities like Basra and Kufa were highly multilingual, and outside the cities people in the countryside remained monolingual in their indigenous language for some time. Yet they took it for granted that in the domains of administration and religion there could be no alternative to the Arabic language. This explains the disappearance of languages like Coptic, Greek or Syriac from these domains. With very few exceptions, the Arab grammarians showed no inclination to study other languages, and speakers of these languages only very seldom found anything to boast of in their own language, preferring to speak and write in Arabic instead. During the first centuries of the Hijra, speakers of Persian tended to regard their own language as inferior to Arabic. We have already seen that the author of the first linguistic description of Arabic, Sībawayhi, was a speaker of Persian, but the only traces in his Kitāb of any interest in the Persian language are two chapters about Persian loanwords in Arabic (Kitāb, II, ed. Bulaq, n.d., pp. 342–3), in which he explains the phonetic changes of these loanwords when they become Arabicised (muʿarrab). The Persian sound ‘between the k and the j’ (al-ḥarf allaḏī bayna l-kāf wa-l-jīm, i.e., č), for instance, becomes j, as in čorbak ‘lie, deceit’ > jurbuz ‘deceitful person’, and the sound ‘between the b and the f’ (al-ḫarf allaḏī bayna l-bāʾ wa-l-fāʾ, i.e., p), becomes f, as in pirind > firind ‘excellent sword’. Another famous grammarian, al-Fārisī (d. 377/987), on being asked by his pupil Ibn Jinnī about his mother tongue, Persian, stated unequivocally that there could be no comparison between the two languages, since Arabic was far superior to Persian (Ḫaṣāʾiṣ, I, p. 243). Eventually, a counter-movement of Persian ethnic feeling (šuʿūbiyya) arose which opposed the monopoly of the Arabs. Adherents of this movement did not challenge the official position of Arabic, but they did argue that other languages, in particular Persian, were just as suited to the religious message as Arabic, perhaps even superior to it. One of their arguments concerned something Arabic grammarians were proud of, namely, the presence of a host of synonyms in Arabic, which according to the Šuʿūbīs made the language needlessly complicated and imprecise. From the ninth century onwards, Persian became used increasingly as a literary language, first of all in eastern Iran, where Arabic culture had never gained a foothold. Especially in the eastern provinces of the Islamic empire, interlinear translations of the text had become common by the middle of the tenth century (Zadeh 2012: 267). This was no doubt preceded by a period in which oral instruction in religion regularly took place in Persian, which served as the vehicle for the first instruction of new converts who were still in the process of learning Arabic. The proliferation of written Persian translations and an extensive exegetical literature in that language were connected with the emergence of New Persian as a

82  The Arabic Language

court language and eventually as the main language of the Iranian dynasties. At the court of the more or less independent dynasties in the East, New Persian or Farsi was used in poetry. Under the dynasty of the Samānids (tenth century), it replaced Arabic as the language of culture. After the fall of Baghdad (657/1258) during the Mongol invasion, Arabic lost its position as the prestigious language in the entire Islamic East to Persian, except in matters of religion. In Iran itself, the Safavid dynasty under Shah ʾIsmāʿīl (906/1501) adopted Farsi and the Shiʿite form of Islam as the national language and religion. In all other regions, Arabic kept its position for a long time. A case in point is Mamluk Egypt. The Arabs had always looked down on the Turks, whom they regarded as good soldiers and therefore useful as protectors of Islam, but without any gift for culture. Their Arabic, if they spoke it at all, was deficient. Yet Mamluk trainees received intensive instruction in Arabic, and most Mamluks must at least have understood the language. In the biographical sources about the Mamluks (e.g., aṣ-Ṣafadī’s al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt), mention is made of many Mamluk scholars who occupied themselves with the religious and grammatical literature in Arabic, and even when in the fourteenth century they started to produce scholarly writings in Qipčaq and Oġuz Turkic, Arabic remained in use in Egypt as the main literary language (Haarmann 1988). When in the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks conquered Anatolia, Turkish became the official language of their empire, with Persian as the literary language; but even then, Arabic remained important, in the first place as a source of loanwords in Turkic languages (cf. below, Chapter 17, pp. 324–6), and in the second place as the language of religion. It lost, however, its place as the administrative language of the empire to Turkish. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the Renaissance (Nahḍa) of Arabic (cf. below, Chapter 12), attempts were made to reintroduce Arabic as the language of administration, but with the advent of the colonial period these attempts turned out to be short-lived, and it was not until the independence of the Arab countries as political entities in the twentieth century that it once again became the language in which matters of state and administration could be expressed. Further reading A classic work on the development of Classical Arabic is Fück (1950); in a series of thirteen essays he discusses more or less chronologically the development of Classical Arabic style and lexicon, not by closely reasoned argumentation, but with the help of selected items from the sources. Fück strongly believed in the survival of the declensional endings in Bedouin speech for centuries after the Islamic conquests (cf. above, Chapter 4). For more recent opinions about this controversy, see Fleisch (1964), Zwettler (1978), Versteegh (1984: 10–13) and Owens (2006).

The Development of Classical Arabic  83

On literacy in the Jāhiliyya see Macdonald (2010) and Stein (2010). The development of Arabic orthography is dealt with by Abbott (1939, 1972); a study on the development of the diacritic dots can be found in Revell (1975); a short survey of the traditional Arabic accounts of the invention of the orthographic system is in Semaan (1968). The classic handbook for Arabic palaeography is Grohmann (1967, 1971); the most recent one is Déroche (2005); for a shorter account, see Sijpesteijn (2008); a glossary of all terms related to manuscripts and script was compiled by Gacek (2001, 2008), who also produced an alphabetical vademecum with a large amount of specimens of writing (2009). The use of Greek and Arabic in the Nessana archive is studied by Stroumsa (2008); on the transition from Greek to Arabic in the papyri see Sijpesteijn (2007). A synthetic account of the development of orthography is by Endreß (1982). On the earliest examples of Qurʾānic writing, see Grohmann (1958); on the earliest manuscripts of the Qurʾān, see Robin (2006); the development of Ḥijāzī scripts for the Qurʾān is dealt with by Déroche (2010); on the development of chancellery writing, see Abbott (1941). The later history of the Arabic script has not been treated here; for further references, see Schimmel (1982). On the use of Arabic script for other languages see Chapter 17, pp. 314f. The history of the development of Arabic orthography is closely related to the textual history of the Qurʾān, for which Nöldeke and Schwally (1961) remains the standard handbook. On the shift from recitation to book, see Nagel (1983) and Schoeler (1992); on the reception of the Qurʾānic codex by the grammarians, see Beck (1946); on the variant readings see Nasser (2012). Both grammar writing and lexicography played a crucial role in the standardisation of the Arabic language; for further literature about the two disciplines, see below, Chapter 7. The role of ʾAbū l-ʾAswad is discussed by Talmon (1985). Schall (1982) gives a general introduction to the study of the history of the Arabic lexicon. For the question of foreign words in the Qurʾān, see Fraenkel (1886) and Jeffery (1938). Syriac/Aramaic words in the Qurʾān are a central issue in Luxenberg’s (2000) theory of Aramaic as the lingua franca of Mecca; for an appraisal, see Rippin (2008). For the commentators’ attitude towards foreign words, see Versteegh (1993a: 88–91). The examples from Muqātil’s Tafsīr are taken from Versteegh (1990). The controversy about foreign words in the Qurʾān and in Arabic is dealt with by Kopf (1956). The foreign vocabulary in Ibn Hišām’s Sīra is listed by Hebbo (1970), who discusses more than 200 loanwords, of which more than 50 per cent derive from Aramaic/Syriac, while approximately 40 per cent derive from Persian and 10 per cent from Greek. On Persian borrowings in Arabic, see Asbaghi (1988). Bielawski (1956) compares the various methods used to expand the lexicon in the old and the modern period (cf. also below, Chapter 12) and provides many examples of loanwords. The examples of translations of logical terms are taken from Zimmermann (1972); an older, but still valuable, source for Arabic philosophical terminology is Afnan (1964). A dictionary of the Arabic equivalents that

84  The Arabic Language

were used for Greek words by the translators is being compiled by Endreß and Gutas (1992–); the language of the translation literature is dealt with by Vagelpohl (2009); for the activities of the Bayt al-Ḥikma, see Gutas (1998). On the language of rajaz poetry and the special lexicon used by these poets, see Ullmann (1966), from which the examples quoted above were taken. For the development of a prose style in Arabic literature, see the programmatic article by Leder and Kilpatrick (1992), and the surveys in CHAL by Latham (1983) and Serjeant (1983); for the special genre of sermons or speeches (ḫuṭba), see Qutbuddin (2008); for the development of the epistolary genre, see Gully (2008); for the role of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the development of prose style, see Latham (1990). The development of Islamic writing and the dichotomy between oral and written in early Islam is the subject of a series of publications by Schoeler (1985, 1989a, 1989b, 1992, 1996). Information about the development of a library system in Islam is in Eche (1967). The activities of az-Zuhrī and Ibn ʾIsḥāq are dealt with by Motzki (1991) and Schoeler (1996). For history writing and the development from ʾaḫbār to annalistic writing, see Rosenthal (1968). The issue of the authenticity of historical documents used by historians is discussed at length by Noth (1973). The debate about form (lafḏ̣) or meaning (maʿnā) is analysed by Heinrichs (1969: 69–82). For the language of writers such as ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ and Ibn ʾAbī ʾUṣaybiʿa, see below, Chapter 9, pp. 157–60. The implications of ʿAbd al-Malik’s decree are discussed by Sprengling (1939). On the linguistic arguments of the Šuʿūbiyya movement, see Richter-Bernburg (1974). The relationship between Arabic and Turkic in Mamluk Egypt is analysed by Haarmann (1988); on the influence of Arabic in Turkish, see below, Chapter 17, pp. 324–6. On the emergence of New Persian as a literary language, see Lazard (1975) and Zadeh (2012); on Arabic influence in Persian, see below, Chapter 17, pp. 321–4.

Chapter 6

The Structure of Arabic

6.1 Introduction In his treatise on the Arabic language, the grammarian Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1005) passionately defends the uniqueness of this language, which, he claims, surpasses all other languages in excellence. His main argument is, obviously, that God has chosen this language for His last revelation, which means that it must be superior to all other languages. But, in addition, he sums up a number of traits that make Arabic a special language (aṣ-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-luġa, ed. Chouémi, Beirut, 1964, pp. 12ff., 42f.). The richness of the Arabic lexicon is far beyond that of other languages. The latter have, for instance, only one word for ‘lion’ or ‘sword’, whereas Arabic has dozens of synonyms for them. In addition to this lexical abundance, Arabic has special phonological rules to make the language easier to produce (‘lighter on the tongue’): it does not have consonant clusters, and through assimilation (iddiġām) adjacent consonants become more similar to each other. One of the things on which the Arabs pride themselves is the presence of declensional vowels (ʾiʿrāb). Ibn Fāris concedes that some people claim that the Greek philosophers, too, had a declensional system, but according to him, this is nonsense (kalām lā yuʿarraju ʿalā miṯlihi): those who make this claim have simply borrowed grammatical knowledge from the Arabs and attributed it to the Greeks. In itself, a strong belief in the superiority of one’s own language is a well-known ‘language myth’ (Ferguson 1959c), but in the Arabic context it is fuelled by a belief in the superiority of the religion. From a more sober perspective, Comrie’s (2008) comparison of Arabic with other languages of the world brings out a number of features that are indeed relatively rare; although having a declensional system is not one of them. His comparison is based on the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS), an inventory of linguistic features in a database of more than 2,500 languages, with an average of 400 languages per feature. In phonology, Comrie mentions the presence of a class of pharyngals and, as a negative feature, the absence of /p/ in Arabic, which is present in most of the world’s languages. Of special interest to general linguists are two other features of Arabic: emphasis and the stress system. Morphological features mentioned by Comrie include the non-concatenative morphology, including the formation of the so-called ‘broken

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plurals’, and the verbal aspect. Special syntactic features include the constituent order and concomitant agreement rules, as well as the gender polarity in the numerals; the construct state; negation; and the presence of so-called ‘pseudoverbs’ in the dialects. Comrie also refers to a sociolinguistic characteristic of Arabic: the diglossia situation in the Arab world, which was one of the prime examples of Ferguson’s original proposal of this notion (see Chapter 13). In an earlier article, Comrie (1991) had wondered about the lack of references to Arabic and its structure in general linguistic publications. Since the publication of that article, the situation has changed considerably. Examples from Arabic are regularly cited in the literature, sometimes in combination with examples from Hebrew, which in some respects (e.g., the construct state) has a similar structure. In the present chapter, it is not our intention to give a sketch of the structure of Arabic (information on which can be easily found elsewhere), but to highlight some of the special features of Arabic, under the headings of phonetics/ phonology (section 6.2), word structure (section 6.3), morphology (section 6.4) and syntax (section 6.5). 6.2 Phonetics/phonology The phoneme inventory of Classical Arabic (see above, Chapter 2, p. 23) contains a number of features that are relatively rare among the world’s languages, in particular the pharyngals and the so-called emphasis. Pharyngals are shared with Arabic by less than 4 per cent of the languages in the WALS (p. 83). The term ‘emphasis’ was probably invented by European Orientalists in the eighteenth century, who believed that these sounds were characterised by a stronger pronunciation than their non-emphatic counterparts. In the Arabic linguistic terminology, this term corresponds most closely to ʾiṭbāq, that is, ‘pressing [the tongue to the palate]’. In modern phonetic terms, emphasis may be described as a secondary articulation produced by the retraction of the tongue root towards the soft palate, accompanied by constriction of the pharynx. It is still a matter of controversy as to whether this articulation should be regarded as velarisation or pharyngalisation, or perhaps uvularisation. Acoustically, there is hardly any difference between these secondary articulations, and there seems to be no language in the world in which they constitute a phonemic contrast. Probably, the exact realisation of emphasis in modern dialects differs and dialects alternate between pharyngalisation and velarisation. Classical Arabic has four emphatic consonants: /ṭ/, /ḍ/, /ṣ/, /ḏ̣/ (sometimes realised as /ẓ/). In addition, Classical Arabic has an emphatic /ḷ/, which occurs only in the word Aḷḷāh [ɑɫɫɑːh], when it is not preceded by the vowel /i/. Secondary emphatic phonemes occur in Arabic dialects, such as /ṛ/, /ṃ/, /ḅ/, /ḷ/. In some analyses the pharyngals /ḥ/ and /ʿ/ and the uvular /q/ are counted among the emphatics because they share the feature of constriction of the pharynx

The Structure of Arabic  87

with the oral emphatics. There are clear differences, however, in the way they affect the vowel quality of the immediate neighbourhood: the vowel /a/ before or after oral emphatics is usually realised as [ɑ], but before or after uvular /q/ or pharyngals, it is realised as [a]. The difference between these two categories is also manifest in the phenomenon of emphasis spread in the modern dialects, that is, the emphatic pronunciation of adjacent consonants and vowels, and also in the rounding of the lips that often accompanies emphaticisation. All modern Arabic dialects have a certain degree of emphasis spread, but they differ in the degree and the directionality. In some dialects only preceding or only following sounds are affected, while in other dialects the entire word becomes emphatic, as long as there is no blocking, for instance, by the presence of a front vowel /i/. Some examples from Cairene Arabic may illustrate this: rightward spread in ḍarab [d̴ɑɑb̴] ‘he hit’, leftward spread in maraḍ [ɑɑd̴] ‘illness’, and spread to an adjacent word in walad ṭawīl [walɑd̴ ɑwiːl] ‘a tall boy’. But in ṭāwila [ɑːwilɐ] ‘table’ the emphasis spread is blocked by the /i/ in the next syllable (see Watson 2002: 268–86). There is one emphatic phoneme in Classical Arabic that Arabic grammarians have found to be so characteristic of Arabic that they sometimes called their language after it, luġat aḍ-ḍād ‘language of the ḍād’. If this sound was indeed realised laterally, as suggested by its description by the Arabic grammarians (see Chapter 7, p. 121), Arabic is one of the very few languages with lateralised affricates. Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996: 209) mention a voiced (alveolar?) lateral affricate in the Amerindian language Navajo, which they note as [dl]. But in addition, the Arabic phoneme is emphatic, that is, [d̴l]̴ , a sound which does not seem to exist in any of the world’s languages. Typically, such marked features tend to disappear in the pidginised and peripheral varieties of Arabic. Thus, for instance, Maltese and Cypriot Maronite Arabic have lost the opposition between emphatic and non-emphatic consonants, and between velars and pharyngals. In the Arabic creole Nubi (see Chapter 16), this reduction has gone even farther: not only the opposition emphatic/non-emphatic has disappeared, but the entire class of velars and pharyngals, as well as the uvular /q/, have merged with other phonemes. The phonology (and phonetics) of Maghreb dialects have drawn some attention because of their reduced vowel inventory. In many Maghrebi dialects only two out of three Classical Arabic short vowels remain, and in some dialects (Djidjelli, Jewish Arabic of Algiers, Jewish Arabic of Tripoli) there is only one short vowel, along with two or three long vowels. Such a small amount of vowels is relatively rare in the world’s languages (WALS pp. 14–15). One topic that is completely absent in Arabic linguistic treatises, is that of stress. In Classical Arabic, stress is not phonemic: there are no two words that are distinguished solely by a difference in stress. It is, therefore, understandable that the Arabic grammarians did not feel the need to discuss stress as a feature

88  The Arabic Language

of Arabic. Stress must probably have existed as a prosodic feature in speech, but it is difficult to say where it fell in the word. Usually, it is assumed that in Arabic stress always fell on the first heavy syllable (Cvv or CvC) from the end, barring ́ ‘weak’, the final, and never before the antepenultimate: ḥúblā ‘pregnant’, ḍaʿīfun ́ qátala ‘he killed’, ḍāribun ‘hitting’, but madrásatun ‘school’ and madrasátuhu ‘his school’ (the so-called Dreisilbengesetz ‘law of three syllables’). This is the practice that is generally followed in Western manuals of Arabic, although some grammars claim that stress may go back as many as six syllables in the word, for example, mádrasatuhumā ‘their [dual] school’. In the modern realisation of Classical Arabic in the Arab world, stress rules vary according to the rules of the local vernacular. In the Arabic dialects different stress rules operate. In Syro-Lebanese (Palestinian) Arabic the last syllable of the word is stressed if it is superheavy (i.e., CvvC or CvCC); otherwise, the penultimate syllable is stressed, unless it is light (Cv), in which case the antepenultimate receives the stress. Egyptian (Cairene) Arabic has quite similar rules, but there is one striking difference: a light penultimate is stressed if the antepenultimate is heavy. Hence, the contrast between mádrasa (Syro-Lebanese Arabic) and madrása (Cairene Arabic). In the Nile valley and in some areas in the Delta, the stress is the same as in Eastern Arabic. The actual rules are rather more complicated and there are exceptions for some morphological forms (see Kager 2009; for Cairene Arabic, Woidich 2006: 27–9). In Moroccan Arabic, and in the Maghrebi dialects in general, a stress shift has operated historically which moved the stress to the end of the word (see p. 213), possibly due to interference from Berber languages, for example, kátaba > ktǝb ‘he wrote’. This stress shift, in combination with the elision of unstressed short vowels, is responsible for a great deal of the phonetic changes in Maghrebi Arabic compared with the Eastern Arabic dialects. In general, one may assume that in the modern dialects stress is stronger than in Classical Arabic, at least in the form that we know. We have seen above (Chapter 3, pp. 47f.) that in pre-Islamic Arabic there may have been some difference in this respect between West and East Arabian dialects, which manifested itself in cases of elision/epenthesis. In the modern dialects, the strong expiratory stress has led to a proliferation of cases of elision of unstressed short vowels. The treatment of the resulting consonant clusters differs in the individual dialects. Thus, for instance, the Classical Arabic verb form yaḍribūna ‘they hit’ becomes in most sedentary dialects *yiḍrbu; the consonant cluster -ḍrb- is resolved by epenthesis, but the location of the epenthetic vowel differs. In Egyptian Arabic, the cluster CCC becomes CCvC, resulting in yiḍríbu (with secondary stress on the epenthetic vowel), whereas in Iraqi Arabic it becomes CvCC, resulting in yuḏ̣urbūn. In Moroccan Arabic the same sequence becomes ikǝtbu; other Maghrebi dialects have chosen different solutions to avoid the consonant cluster (see above p. 214).

The Structure of Arabic  89

6.3  Word structure The most characteristic feature of all Semitic languages is the peculiar relationship between form and meaning. According to the traditional view, the lexical meaning is represented by root consonants (radicals), and the morphological meaning is added to these radicals in the form of a vowel pattern, sometimes with auxiliary consonants. In modern morphological theories, this is called rootand-pattern morphology. In this type of morphology the syllable structure of the word is specified by a template that is applied to the CV skeleton. This is somewhat similar to the way in which Arabic grammarians represented the structure of a word with the help of the f-ʿ-l notation (Chapter 7). Root-and-pattern, or template, morphology is also referred to as non-concatenation (or in French interdigitation). This term underscores the fact that the vocalic melody is applied discontinuously to a consonantal root. The root-and-pattern analysis presupposes the linguistic reality of the root structure. Proponents of the root-based approach cite as evidence the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which states that similar adjacent elements are not permitted. This principle works from left to right at the level of the CV skeleton, and forbids the occurrence of roots like *d-d-r or *m-m-d. Homorganic consonants (i.e., consonants from the same articulatory class) in adjacent position are not allowed either, so that a root like *b-m-f is forbidden as well, because it contains two adjacent bilabials (Rosenthall 2008). It has been known for a long time that such co-occurrence constraints exist in Arabic, as well as in other Semitic languages (Greenberg 1950). The fact that phonological restrictions like the OCP operate at the level of the root implies that root consonants are treated differently from additional consonants. The linguistic reality of the root system is also demonstrated by psycholinguistic research in speech errors and child language. In making a speech error speakers are known to switch root consonants, for example, matkab instead of maktab, but apparently they never switch a root consonant with an affix, so that errors like *tamkab do not seem to occur. Similar evidence comes from patients with aphasia (Idrissi et al. 2008). Studies in first language acquisition show that from an early age children are able to produce new forms on the basis of their knowledge of patterns and roots (Ravid 2003). A different approach to the Arabic lexicon takes the stem as the point of departure of the morphological derivation. The stem-based approach assumes that the information in consonantal roots is insufficient and that the vowels are needed to explain the derivational forms. Take the forms of the prefix-conjugation (traditionally called ‘imperfect’) of the verb ‘to write’ in Table 6.1. In the stem-based approach, these are analysed as consisting of a stem CCvC, to which various affixes are added. In the case of the stem -ktub- the vowel -u- is lexically specified. Gafos (2002, 2003) points out that there is a phonological reason for the stem to have

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this form rather than, for instance, CvCC, because verbal forms receive consonantinitial suffixes, as in ya-ktub-na. With a hypothetical stem -kutb-, this would result in a non-allowed consonant cluster *ya-kutb-na. In nouns this constraint does not apply because nouns have vowel-initial suffixes, for example, dars-un ‘lesson’. Singular

Dual

Plural

3m

ya-ktub-u

ya-ktub-āni

ya-ktub-ūna

2m

ta-ktub-u

ta-ktub-āni

ta-ktub-ūna

3f

2f 1

ta-ktub-u

ta-ktub-īna ʾa-ktub-u

ya-ktub-āni ta-ktub-āni

ya-ktub-na ta-ktub-na na-ktub-u

Table 6.1  Prefix conjugation of yaktubu/kataba ‘to write’ Singular

Dual

Plural

3m

katab-a

katab-ā

katab-ū

2m

katab-ta

katab-tumā

katab-tum

3f

2f 1

kataba-t katab-ti

katab-tu

kataba-tā

katab-tumā

katab-na

katab-tunna katab-nā

Table 6.2  Suffix conjugation of yaktubu/kataba ‘to write’ In the suffix conjugation of this verb (traditionally called ‘perfect’), the stem is -katab- (see Table 6.2). The vocalic difference between the two stems -ktub- and -katab- is believed to be the result of apophony. Apophony (also called ablaut) is the alternation of vowels for morphological purposes, a process well known from the Germanic languages, for example, in English sing–sang–sung. The correlation of the vowels of the prefix and the suffix stem may be accounted for by a small number of rules. When the perfect vowel is a, the imperfect has either u or i (e.g., kataba/yaktubu ‘to write’; ḍaraba/yaḍribu ‘to hit’), when the perfect is i, the imperfect vowel is a (e.g., šariba/yašrabu ‘to drink’), and when it is u, it remains u (e.g., baʿuda/yabʿudu ‘to be far’). This means that a high vowel alternates with a low vowel, and a low vowel with a high vowel. Verbs with an a/a alternation may be explained by the phonetic context, because this pattern usually occurs with pharyngal consonants (e.g., faʿala/yafʿalu ‘to do’). When the vowel alternation is accounted for by apophony rules, it does not have to be specified for each verb in the lexicon, which helps to make the description more economical.

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Whether roots are the ultimate building blocks of Arabic morphology or just a by-product of the stem derivation, both Arabic grammarians and modern linguists use them as a useful tool to describe the Arabic lexicon. In the majority of words, the number of root consonants is three, but there is a small number of biconsonantal nominal roots, most of them belonging to the basic lexicon, for example, yad ‘hand’, dam ‘blood’, ibn ‘son’, etc. Some verbs exhibit a certain number of variants, which might be interpreted as originating from biconsonantal roots. In some cases, the variants may be derived from an original noun that no longer exists, for example, kāna ‘to be’, sakana ‘to settle’, kanna ‘to shelter’. In other cases, the variation is caused by weak consonants and/or reduplication, for example, ḥamma/ḥamiya/ḥamā ‘to be hot’. This has led some comparative linguists to speculate that originally all words in Semitic were biradical, the third consonant acting as a kind of suffix or prefix, which functions as a ‘root determinative’ (Ehret 1989). This theory is supported by the fact that, both within Arabic and across the Semitic languages, there are triradical words with related meanings that differ only in one (usually weak) consonant, for example, in Arabic f-r-r ‘to flee’, f-r-q ‘to tear apart’, f-r-z ‘to separate’, f-r-d ‘to be alone’, f-r-ṣ ‘to slit, pierce’. Similarly, in Hebrew we have p-r-d ‘to separate’, p-r-m ‘to tear’, p-r-q ‘to pull apart’, p-r-r ‘to dissolve’. On the basis of such word groups, a proto-Semitic root p-r with the general meaning ‘to divide’ might be posited. The added consonants are assumed to have served to specify the semantic range of the derived words. Zaborski (2006b) points out that these phenomena do not prove that the original Semitic lexicon was biconsonantal. In many cases, the existing variation may be explained by phonological processes or dialectal variation. Thus, for instance, the verbal pair ḥabala/ʿabala ‘to bind with a cord’, may have originated as the result of the voicing of the first radical in the imperfect: yaḥbulu > yaʿbulu. Dialectal variation may be another cause, for example, in zalaqa/zalaʾa ‘to slide’ with alternation of /q/ and /ʾ/. There may even be cases of fusion with a preposition bi-, for example, šajā/šajaba ‘to distress, grieve’ (compare this with the verb jāb ‘to bring’ in some of the modern dialects, which is derived from jāʾa bi- ‘to come with’). Recently, Bohas (1993, 1995, 1997) has proposed an even more radical version of the theory of biradicalism and to a certain degree has revindicated the ideas of Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), who believed that all roots containing the same radicals share in the same semantic content (Chapter 7, p. 123). Bohas starts by referring to roots that differ only in one glide (w, y) and that have the same semantic load, either within Arabic (e.g., baḫḫa, bāḫa, baḫā, all meaning ‘to calm down’) or across Semitic languages. A similar phenomenon is observable with other sonants (n, r, l, m, etc.) and pharyngals, for example, jazza ‘to cut, shear’, jazara ‘to slaughter, cut off’, jazala ‘to cut a stick in two pieces’, jazama ‘to cut off, trim’, jazaʿa ‘to cut, cross a river’. He concludes that all triradical verbal roots ultimately go back to biradical types with a similar semantic load. He then extends this principle to

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radicals from the same articulatory class, which may, moreover, be permutated. These constitute matrices, for instance, the matrix consisting of a uvulo-velar and a dental with the general meaning of ‘cutting’, to which, in addition to the roots mentioned above, the following verbs belong: jaḏḏa ‘to cut’, jaḏara ‘to eradicate’, jaḏama ‘to cut off a hand’; qadda ‘to cut lengthwise’, qatala ‘to kill’, qaṣara ‘to shorten’, qaṭaʿa ‘to cut’, and so on. Because of the flexibility of the semantic criteria and the even greater tolerance of the phonetic parameters, it is difficult to see in what way Bohas’ theory could be verified, but even in a weaker form it may tell us much about the organisation of the Arabic lexicon and explain a number of phenomena that up until now have had to be regarded as coincidental. 6.4 Morphology Both nouns and verbs may undergo further derivations. We have seen above that most approaches to Arabic morphology assume a root-and-pattern morphology, in which derivations take place by applying a pattern to a root, for instance, when the root k-t-b is combined with the pattern maCCaC (in the traditional notation, mafʿal) to produce the word maktab ‘place of writing; office’. Larcher (2006) calls into question the standard practice of deriving all words from a consonantal root. He refers to words like maktaba ‘library’ and maṭār ‘airport’, which cannot be derived directly from the consonantal roots k-t-b ‘to write’ and ṭ-y-r ‘to fly’, but must be derived from the nouns kitāb ‘book’ and ṭayyāra ‘airplane’. Likewise, the verbal measure IX ifʿalla is always connected with adjectives of the form ʾafʿalu denoting colour or physical defect, for example, iṣfarra ‘to be yellow’ and iḥdabba ‘to have a hunchback’ from ʾaṣfaru ‘yellow’ and ʾaḥdabu ‘hunchbacked’. This shows that they are not directly derived from an abstract consonantal root, but from an adjective. The same observation applies to denominal verbs of measure II, such as ʿarraba ‘to Arabicise’ (from ʿarabī ‘Arabic’) or raḫḫama ‘to pave with marble’ (from ruḫām). This direct derivation of verbs from nouns, rather than from a root, shows that, at least in some cases, the semantic unity of the consonantal root is an emergent quality rather than an original feature of an abstract root. Masculine Singular

Dual

Feminine Plural

Singular

Dual

Plural

nominative jamīl-un

jamīl-āni

jamīl-ūna

jamīl-at-un jamīl-at-un jamīl-āt-un

accusative

jamīl-ayni

jamīl-īna

jamīl-at-an jamīl-at-an jamīl-āt-in

genitive

jamīl-in

jamīl-an

jamīl-ayni

jamīl-īna

jamīl-at-in jamīl-at-in jamīl-āt-in

Table 6.3  Nominal endings of jamīl ‘beautiful’

The Structure of Arabic  93

In nouns, most derivational processes take place through root-and-pattern morphology. There is only a small number of suffixes, among them the sound plural and dual suffixes, the nunation and the feminine ending (Table 6.3), and the so-called nisba suffix -iyyun (e.g., from jism ‘body’ jism-iyyun ‘corporeal’) The main non-suffixed derivations of the noun are the broken plural and the diminutive. Broken plurals do not occur in all Semitic languages; in fact, this grammatical device is sometimes regarded as one of the distinctive traits of the South Semitic languages (but see above, Chapter 2, pp. 18f.). With respect to the broken plurals in Arabic, standard grammars identify as many as thirty-one different patterns. This variation can be reduced considerably by generalisation. McCarthy (2008) points out that many nouns have a plural pattern of the form CvCvv …, a so-called iambic pattern, which is found with such diverse singulars as nafs/nufū-s ‘soul’; rajul/rijā-l ‘man’; jazīra/jazā-ʾir ‘island’ … (note that a long vowel counts as two short vowels). This plural pattern accounts for as many as 90 per cent of all nouns. According to McCarthy, the diminutive with its fixed pattern fuʿayl (e.g., from kitāb ‘book’ the diminutive kutayb ‘booklet’) represents the same iambic pattern, only this time with the combination vowel + y instead of a long vowel. Syntactically, the broken plurals function as feminine singulars, which shows that semantically they are collectives (see above, Chapter 2, p. 19, and below, p.  103). In Table 6.3 the declensional endings of the noun in Classical Arabic have been tabulated. Within the declensional system a special place is taken by the so-called diptotic nouns, which have only two case endings. Explanations in the indigenous tradition operate with a number of factors, whose combination causes a loss of declension (see Chapter 7, pp. 115f.). According to Baerman (2005), the original Semitic declension had two endings: -u for the direct case (nominative), and -a for the indirect case (accusative); this is paralleled by the endings of the sound plural, -ūna/-īna. In this view, the genitive ending -i is related to the nisba suffix -iyyun and represents a later development. The original state was preserved by proper names, which are predominantly diptotic. Others believe that from the beginning there were always two different declensions. The verbal system of Arabic has a two-way distinction of a prefix and a suffix conjugation, traditionally called in Western grammars the imperfect and the perfect (see above, Tables 6.1 and 6.2). The opposition between these two verbal forms has been variously interpreted as past/non-past, perfective/imperfective, or completed/uncompleted (Eisele 1999). Some, like Aartun (1963), believe that the basis of the verbal system is temporal. Others propose a mixed aspectual– temporal opposition, because the suffix conjugation usually denotes both past tense and perfect aspect. Still others claim that the main opposition is aspectual. The main characteristic of the Arabic suffix conjugation seems, indeed, to be that it cannot denote a state, but always has punctual reference. In Western

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grammars of Arabic forms like ʿalimtu and jalastu are sometimes translated as ‘I knew’ and ‘I sat’, which is incorrect. These forms denote a punctual action, in this case an inchoative one: ‘I came to know’ and ‘I sat down’. The only way for a verb in the suffix conjugation to denote a state is in combination with the particle qad, which transforms it into a present state, qad ʿalimtu ‘(I have come to know and therefore) I know (now)’ and qad jalastu ‘’I have sat down and therefore) I sit (now)’. Although Arabic grammarians and exegetes interpreted the verbal system as one based on tense (see below, Chapter 7, p. 117), they were well aware of the punctual meaning of the suffix conjugation, as is clear from their reactions to an apparent counterexample (1) in the Qurʾān: (1) ʾaw jāʾū-kum ḥaṣirat or come.PERF.3mp-2mp to.be.oppressed.PERF.3fs ṣudūru-hum breast.PL-3mp ‘or they came to you with a heavy heart’ (Q 4/90) In this verse the verb seems to express something that looks like a state. The exegetes tried to solve this problem in different ways: some of them inserted a virtual particle qad; others stated that a new sentence starts after jāʾūkum (‘or they came to you and their hearts became oppressed’); and only a few grammarians believed that this use was correct (Ibn al-ʾAnbāri, al-ʾInṣāf fī masāʾil al-ḫilāf, ed. Weil, Leiden, 1913, pp. 113–16). The verbs in the prefix conjugation typically denote a continuous or a repeated action, usually with present or future reference. Those who claim that the basic opposition in the verbal system is an aspectual one point out that for the prefix conjugation to denote the continuous or iterative aspect in the past it needs a past marker (kuntu ʾaktubu ‘I was writing; I used to write’). In the modern dialects the opposition between a prefix and a suffix conjugation has been maintained (except in the pidginised and creolised varieties of Arabic, see Chapter 15). But in addition, the dialects have developed a system of aspectual prefixes (see Chapter 8, pp. 145f.), usually with one marker to express continuous/habitual aspect and one to denote future/volitional aspect. A further difference with the verbal system of Classical Arabic is the position of the active participle, whose role in the verbal system has been strengthened in comparison with Classical Arabic. In Classical Arabic, the grammarians distinguished between expressions like (2) and (3): (2) ʾanā kātib-u 1s write.PART-NOM ‘I am the writer of the book’

l-kitāb-i ART-book-GEN

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(3) ʾanā kātib-un kitāb-an 1s write.PART-NOM.INDET book-ACC.INDET ‘I am writing a book’ In (2) the participle is interpreted as denoting perfect aspect (‘I have written the book’), in (3) it is said to have future connotation (‘I am going to write a book’). In the modern dialects the participle is fully integrated in the verbal system. In most dialects, its aspectual value depends on the lexical aspect of the verbs involved. In Egyptian Arabic, for instance, with inchoative verbs (including verbs of motion), the participle usually marks continuous aspect, as in (4), but may also be used for a resultative perfect, as in (5): (4) ḥaḍritik ṛayḥ-a fēn 2fs go.PART-f where ‘Where are you going?’ (Woidich 2006: 286) (5) ana wāṣil hina mbāriḥ bass 1s arrive.PART here yesterday just ‘I have arrived here only yesterday’ (Woidich 2006: 288) Stative verbs always denote continuous aspect, as in (6): (6)

ana ḫāyif il-ʿarabiyya tuʾaf 1s fear.PART ART-car stop.IMPERF3fs min-ni from-1s ‘I fear the car will break down on me’ (Woidich 2006: 285)

In some of the Gulf Arabic dialects the participle may be used with perfect value, but never seems to denote continuous aspect. The same use is found in Uzbekistan Arabic, but here the development towards a finite verbal form has been completed (see Chapter 15, p. 287), because the participle is regularly used with both subject and object marking, as in (7): (7) ṭert-i qotl-in-akā-ha chicken-1s kill-LINK-2ms-3fs ‘You have killed my chicken’ (Vinnikov 1956: 187) Verbal derivation further involves the internal passive fuʿila (see above, Chapter  8, p. 135) and the so-called verbal measures, extensions of the simple verb conveying such meanings as reflexive-intransitive, causative, etc. In many cases, the meaning of the derived verb is lexically specified. Traditionally, verbal measures are indicated with Roman numerals (Table 6.4), from I to X. The relation between them turns around the valency of the verb. Measure III (fāʿala), for

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instance, often involves the raising of the indirect object of the base verb to the position of direct object, so that the verb becomes transitive, as in katabtu la-hu ‘I wrote to him’ versus kātabtu-hu ‘I notified him in writing’; qumtu la-hu ‘I stood up against him’ versus qāwamtu-hu ‘I resisted him, I rebelled against him’. Likewise, measure IV raises the valency of the base verb with one, as in ḥasuna ‘to be good’ versus ʾaḥsana ‘to make good; to do well’; kataba ‘to write’ versus ʾaktaba ‘to make someone write something’; ʿalima ‘to know something’ versus ʾaʿlama ‘to make someone know something, to notify someone about something’. No.

Form

General value

Example

I

faʿala

base verb

II

faʿʿala

intensive factitive

kataba ‘to write’ kasara ‘to break [transitive]’ ʿalima ‘to know’ qāma ‘to get up’ jamaʿa ‘to collect’ ġafara ‘to forgive’ baʿuda ‘to be/become far’

kassara ‘to shatter’ ʿallama ‘to instruct’

III

fāʿala

relational

IV

ʾafʿala

causative

kātaba ‘to write to so.’ qāwama ‘to stand up against so.’ bāʿada ‘to remove’

tafāʿala

reciprocal of III reflexive-intransitive of III

V

ʾaktaba ‘to make so. write’

tafaʿʿala reciprocal of II reflexive-intransitive of II

taḥaddaṯa ‘to converse’ takassara ‘to be shattered’

VII

infaʿala

reflexive-intransitive of I

inkasara ‘to break [intransitive]’

IX

ifʿalla

colours and defects

iḥmarra ‘to be red’

VI

VIII iftaʿala

X

reflexive-intransitive of I

istaf ʿala reflexive-intransitive of IV requestive estimative

Table 6.4  The verbal measures

takātaba ‘to correspond’ tabāʿada ‘to be removed’

ijtamaʿa ‘to assemble’

istaktaba ‘to dictate’ istaġfara ‘to ask for forgiveness’ istaḥsana ‘to approve’

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Some measures transform a transitive into a middle (reflexive-intransitive) one. This is the case of measure VIII iftaʿala in relation with the base verb, for example, jamaʿa ‘to collect’ versus ijtamaʿa ‘to assemble’, and of measure V tafaʿʿala in relation with measure II faʿʿala, for example, ṭawwara ‘to develop [intransitive]’ versus taṭawwara ‘to develop [intransitive]’. A similar relationship exists between measure X istafʿala and measure IV ʾafʿala. The augment -s- in istafʿala goes back to an earlier form of measure IV, safʿala, which has survived in a few archaic verbs in Classical Arabic, for example, salqā ‘to throw down’ (cf. ʾalqā ‘id.’). The relationship between II/III and V/VI may also involve non-reciprocity versus reciprocity, as in ḥaddaṯa ‘to tell someone’ versus taḥaddaṯa ‘to have a conversation’; kātaba ‘to notify someone in writing’ versus takātaba ‘to correspond’. In addition to their role in the assignment of valency, verbal measures may denote various other meanings, which makes it difficult to predict the exact meaning of a specific verb in a specific measure. Measure V tafaʿʿala, for instance, sometimes has the connotation of simulation or adaptation, as in taʿarraba ‘to Arabicise’ or taṭabbaba ‘to be a quack’, tanabbā ‘to be a pseudo-prophet’. Again, this is lexically specified and could hardly be called a productive use. Some grammars mention even more measures, up to XV, than the current ten (Wright [1859–62] 1964: I, 46–7); they all involve reduplication or the insertion of a glide or an augment -n-: XI ifʿālla, for example, ibyāḍḍa ‘to be white’ (variant of IX ibyaḍḍa) XII ifʿawʿalā, for example, iḥdawdaba ‘to be humpbacked’ (variant of IX iḥdabba) XIII ifʿawwala, for example, iʿlawwada ‘to be heavy’ (variant of I ʿalida ‘to be hard’) XIV ifʿanlala, for example, iḥlankaka ‘to be jet black’ (variant of I ḥalika ‘id.’) XV ifʿanlā, for example, iḥbanṭā, ‘to be swollen’ (variant of I ḥabiṭa ‘id.’) The meaning of most of these verbs is lexically specified. Some of them resemble the ad hoc formations we have encountered in rajaz poetry (see above, p. 71), which are likely to be nothing more than ghost words in the dictionaries. In the modern dialects the system of measures has been drastically reduced: the causative (measure IV) has disappeared from most dialects (except some of the Bedouin dialects; see p. 193). The t- (measure V) and n- (measure VII) forms are often modified into new passive formations instead of the internal passive of Classical Arabic (see Chapter 8, p. 135). 6.5 Syntax Perhaps the most striking syntactic feature in Arabic is the asymmetrical agreement pattern of the sentence. According to traditional Western analysis, Classical Arabic has two types of sentences: nominal and verbal sentences. When the

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sentence does not contain a verb, it is called a nominal sentence. This sentence type has two constituents, a subject and a nominal predicate, as in (8): (8)

zayd-un ṭabīb-un Zayd-NOM doctor-NOM ‘Zayd is a doctor’

A nominal sentence does not contain a verb, since Arabic is one of the languages that do not express a copula, at least not in the present tense; in the past tense this sentence contains a copula, as in (9): (9)

kāna zayd-un COP.PAST.3ms Zayd-NOM ‘Zayd was a doctor’.

ṭabīb-an doctor-ACC

The second type of sentence is called a verbal sentence. It always contains a verb, which appears either before or after the subject, and may be followed by an object. Examples of this structure are (10a, b): (10a) ḍaraba hit.PERF.3ms (10b) zayd-un Zayd-NOM ‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’

zayd-un Zayd-NOM ḍaraba hit.PERF.3ms

ʿamr-an ʿAmr-ACC ʿamr-an ʿAmr-ACC

Under this analysis, (10a) and (10b) are regarded as stylistic alternatives of the same verbal sentence. At first sight, their agreement pattern appears to be identical, since both verb and subject are singular. Yet, when the subject becomes plural, there is only agreement in number when the subject precedes the verb, as in (11): (11) ar-rijāl-u ḍarabū ART-man.PL-NOM hit.IMPERF.3mp ‘The men hit’ In (11), both verb and noun are in the plural. But in (12) the verb is singular and the noun is plural: (12) ḍaraba hit.PERF.3ms ‘The men hit’

r-rijāl-u ART-man.PL-NOM

In both word orders, there is gender agreement between verb and subject, as in (13a, b):

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(13a) al-fatayāt-u ART-girl.PL-NOM (13b) ḍarabat hit.PERF.3fs ‘The girls hit’

ḍarabna hit.PERF.3fp al-fatayāt-u ART-girl.PL-NOM

Syntacticians have formulated several explanations for this asymmetry in agreement (Bahloul 2006: 47; Aoun et al. 2010: 73–95). One explanation asserts that in the Verb–Subject order, the verb is preceded by a pronominal element, an expletive pronoun, which triggers singular agreement, as in (14): (14) ʾinna-hu FOC-3ms ‘The men hit’

ḍaraba hit.PERF.3ms

r-rijāl-u ART-man.PL-NOM

The second explanation claims that the partial and the full agreement differ fundamentally. In partial agreement (as in (12) number is expressed by the overt subject and does not need to be spelled out in the verb. In full agreement (as in (11)), it is expressed by an incorporated pronoun. This boils down to the observation that number only has to be expressed once in those cases when the subject follows the verb. Yet another explanation distinguishes between those features that are inherent in the noun, such as gender, and those features, such as number, that are connected to higher level functional categories. In full agreement the relation between the preceding subject and the verb is that between a specifier and its head, which means that all features of the subject can be checked; while in partial agreement the verb governs the subject and has only access to the inherent gender feature, but not to the number feature. In Chapter 7 (pp. 112–14) we shall see that when faced with the same syntactic problem the Arabic grammarians chose a different approach, which to some extent resembles the second explanation given above. The difference between full and partial agreement does not exist in the modern Arabic dialects, in which the predominant word order is Subject–Verb–Object, with full agreement. We have seen above (Chapter 4, pp. 51f.) that in pre-Islamic Arabic a variant existed with full agreement between verb and subject, but with the word order Verb–Subject–Object, the so-called ʾakalūnī l-barāġīṯ construction, which is repeated here in (15): (15) ʾakalū-nī eat.PERF.3mp-1s

l-barāġīṯ ART-flea.PL

A construction in Arabic that has drawn the attention of general syntacticians is that of the construct state (also called ‘annexation’; Arabic ʾiḍāfa, see Chapter 7, p. 111). Its basic structure is that of (16):

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(16) kitāb-u l-walad-i book-NOM ART-boy-GEN ‘the boy’s book’ The number of nouns in the second position may be expanded virtually indefinitely. The structure of the construct state is interesting for a couple of reasons. Its (in)determination depends on the status of the last noun, as we can see when comparing (16) with (17): (17) kitāb-u book-NOM ‘a boy’s book’

walad-in boy-GEN.INDET

Another feature of the construct state is its participation in constructions with a verbal noun (maṣdar) in which the annexed nouns function as subject or object. If there is only one noun, it may have the role of subject or object, as in (18): (18) ḍarb-u zayd-in hitting-NOM Zayd-GEN ‘Zayd’s hitting’ or ‘Zayd’s being hit’ But if there are two nouns, the first is annexed and functions as subject, whereas the second is in the accusative and functions as object, as in (19): (19) ḍarb-u zayd-in ʿamr-an hitting-NOM Zayd-GEN ʿAmr-ACC ‘Zayd’s hitting ʿAmr; the hitting of ʿAmr by Zayd’ An even more interesting construction of the maṣdar seems to have been possible in Classical Arabic, in which the object after a maṣdar receives a genitive case ending and is followed by the subject in the nominative. Reckendorff (1921: 174) mentions this as an exceedingly rare construction and refers to Nöldeke (1897: 74–5), who has the following example (20): (20) ġadāt-a nikāḥ-i-hā maṭar-un morning-ACC marrying-GEN-3fs Maṭar-NOM ‘on the morning that Maṭar married her’ In this construction, if it was actually used, the verbal character of the maṣdar has been put to the logical conclusion, so that the verbal noun with its subject constitutes a verbal sentence. Finally, it should be mentioned that the first noun in the construct state may also be an adjective. In traditional grammars of Arabic this is called ‘improper annexation’, for example, ḥasan al-wajhi ‘handsome of face’, šadīd al-ḥarārati ‘very

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warm’ (lit., ‘intense of warmth’), kaṯīr al-baqari ‘with many cows’ (lit., ‘numerous of cattle’). Negation is also mentioned by Comrie as a trait that distinguishes Arabic from many other languages. Classical Arabic is special in that it has tensed negations: lam is used for past negation (lam yaḍrib ‘he didn’t hit’), lan for future negation (lan yaḍriba ‘he won’t hit’); in addition there is a default negation lā, usually with present connotation (lā yaḍribu ‘he doesn’t hit’), a tenseless negation mā (mā ḍaraba/mā yaḍribu ‘he didn’t/doesn’t hit’), and a nominal negational verb laysa (laysa ṭawīlan ‘he isn’t tall’). Tensed negations are relatively rare in the world’s languages. In the WALS (pp. 454–5) only a few instances of such negations are mentioned. The presence of tensed negations in Arabic has significant implications for the analysis of syntactic structure, which needs to have separate projections for agreement and tense in order to account for the representation of tense in the negation rather than on the verb. In the dialects most of the Classical Arabic negations have been replaced by a combination of the negative marker mā with the noun šayʾ ‘thing’; together these act as a circumfix, as in (21) from Egyptian Arabic: (21) ma-b-yiktib-š NEG-CONT-write.IMPERF3ms-NEG ‘He doesn’t write’ In some dialects, the second part of the negation is left out, as in (22) from Syrian Arabic: (22) mā- ʿam-yǝktob NEG-CONT-write.IMPERF3ms ‘He doesn’t write’ Such two-part negations occur in some of the world’s languages, for instance, in the Romance languages, but they are rather infrequent (in the WALS sample for negation, covering more than a thousand languages, only sixty-six have a double negation, p. 455). The negative marker even replaces laysa in nominal negation, as in Egyptian Arabic ma-ni-š ‘I am not’ and ma-hu-š/ma-hi-š ‘he/she is not’ (from which the negation muš ~ miš is derived). Under the term ‘pseudo-verbs’, Comrie (1982) has brought together a number of phenomena. In most Arabic dialects there is a category of words of non-verbal origin that, to some extent, behave as verbs, for instance, because they can have a direct object or because they are negated as verbs. Existentials are one class of such words, for example, Egyptian Arabic fi ‘there is/are’, which is negated like a verb ma-fi-š ‘there is/are not’. A second category is that of modal expressions like Syrian Arabic bǝdd ‘to want’ (from Classical Arabic bi-wudd ‘in the wish of …’). This pseudo-verb can take a subject and an object, as in (23):

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(23) bǝdd-o yā-kon want-3ms OBJ-2p ‘He wants you [pl.]’ (Cowell 1964: 545) A third category is constituted by expressions of possession. These are often indicated with a reflex of the Classical Arabic prepositions ʿinda or li- in combination with pronominal suffixes; in Classical Arabic, too, these constructions were used to indicate possession, as in (24): (24) la-hu kitāb-un for-3ms book-NOM ‘He has a book’ In this construction, the possessed item is the subject of a nominal sentence. But in some dialects it has become a verb-like expression. Thus, in Maltese expressions with għand- are used to express possession; they may have a subject and an object, and may be negated in the same way as verbs, as in (25): (25) int m’-għand-ek-x ħafna paċenzja 2s NEG-POSS-2s-NEG much patience ‘You don’t have much patience’ (Peterson 2009: 188) The exact syntactic analysis of the two nouns in (25) is still a matter of debate, and so is the nature of the word class to which these pseudo-verbs belong. According to Peterson (2009), who investigated the status of pseudo-verbs in Maltese, they constitute a word class of their own. At the very least, these three categories of pseudo-verbs are interesting because of the fact that they illustrate a cross-over from the word class of nouns to that of the verbs. The morphology and syntax of Arabic numerals have baffled even the Arabic grammarians. Surprisingly, however, one of the most striking traits of numerals is passed by them almost in silence, the so-called polarity of the numerals between three and ten, as in ṯalāṯatu rijālin ‘three men’ as against ṯalāṯu fatayātin ‘three girls’, where the feminine form of the numeral is used with masculine nouns, and the masculine form with feminine nouns. According to the grammarians, the long form of the numeral (ṯalāṯa, ʾarbaʿa, etc.) is the original form, but with feminine nouns the tāʾ marbūṭa is deleted in order to avoid heaviness. The polarity agreement exists in other Semitic languages as well, and most attempts at explanation look at this phenomenon from the perspective of comparative Semitic linguistics. The most current explanation connects this phenomenon with the expression of collectivity in Arabic, which uses the feminine ending -at for the noun of unity: dajjāj-un ‘poultry’ as against dajjāj-at-un ‘a chicken’. This means that the feminine ending could be regarded as a marker of countability, or, according to some scholars, originally even as a plural marker. In the cardinal numerals

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the original form would then be the long form, with the -at ending as marker of the plural. When connected with a feminine noun with the ending -at, the marking in the numeral becomes redundant, hence the polarity agreement. One could even hypothesise that the feminine agreement of adjectives and verbs with broken plurals belongs to the same sphere: if the broken plural is a collective (see above, p. 93), the -at ending in the adjective and the verb agreeing with them would then denote plurality. In most modern dialects, the polarity system has disappeared. In the numerals between 2 and 10, the short form is used with all plurals. Plurals beginning with a vowel receive an additional t-, for example, arbaʿ t-iyām ‘four days’ (Damascus Arabic). In numerals between 12 and 19 only the long form is used, for example, arbaṭaʿšar (Damascus Arabic); in most dialects this -t- has become emphatic, one of the fourteen features that Ferguson assigns to the Arabic koine (see p. 138). Further reading There is a whole range of grammars of Classical Arabic in the Western philological tradition, although a complete, modern reference grammar of the Classical language is still sorely missed. A classic is Howell (1883–1911); it is on this grammar that Caspari (1887; this is the fifth edition, revised by A. Müller) is based, which in its turn formed the basis for the best available grammar, Wright (1859–62), usually consulted in the revised third edition by Robertson Smith and de Goeje (1896–8, numerous re-editions). In French, the standard grammar is Blachère and Gaudefroy-Demombynes (1952). Shorter (teaching) grammars are in German, such as Brockelmann, revised by Fleischhammer (1965), and in French by Blachère (1961); the most recent grammar of this type is Fischer (1972). A sketch of the Classical language is given in Beeston (1968), Fleisch (1968), Denz (1982), Fischer (1997) and Retsö (2011). An excellent analysis of the morphology and phonology is in Watson (2002). For grammatical descriptions and coursebooks of Modern Standard Arabic, see Chapter 12, pp. 239f. For grammatical descriptions and coursebooks of Arabic dialects, see Chapter 11, pp. 217–20. The lexicon of Classical Arabic still remains to a large extent unexplored. For detailed information, research depends on the indigenous Arabic dictionaries (see Chapter 7), in particular the Lisān al-ʿarab by Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311). The beginnings of modern lexicography in the Middle East are described by Sawaie (1987, 1990). The Western Orientalist dictionaries of the Classical Arabic language that were written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were superseded by Lane (1863–93); his dictionary included all the available information from the Arabic sources, but remained incomplete (up to the letter qāf). Dozy (1881) was intended as a supplement, with special emphasis on the vocabulary of the North African and Andalusian sources. In 1957, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft

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began to work on a new dictionary of the Classical Arabic language (WKAS), starting with the letter kāf; in the meantime, this dictionary has reached the letter mīm (on the WKAS, see Gätje 1985). In France, Blachère, Chouémi and Denizeau (1964–) started their large Arabic–English–French dictionary with the letter ʾalif; this dictionary does not seem to have gone past three volumes. The lexicon of the Ḥadīṯ literature may be studied with the help of the index that was started by Wensinck (Concordances). An older dictionary of the Qurʾānic lexicon is the outdated Penrice (1873); two new dictionaries have appeared in the meantime, a smaller one by Ambros and Prochazka (2004), and a larger one by Badawi and Abdel Haleem (2008). Of the smaller dictionaries of the Classical language, Hava’s (1964) Arabic–English dictionary deserves to be mentioned. Dictionaries of Modern Standard Arabic are mentioned in Chapter 12, those of the dialects in Chapter 11. For the phoneme inventory of Classical Arabic, Cantineau (1960) is still one of the best historical studies. Fleisch’s Traité de philologie arabe in two volumes (1961, 1979) analyses the morphological structure of the language, with observations about its Semitic cognates and the indigenous system of grammar. Older literature on Arabic phonetics includes Gairdner (1925), and Al-Ani (1970). Detailed treatment of the phonology of Classical Arabic is in Roman (1983). A practical detailed guide to pronunciation is Mitchell (1990), which is based on the Egyptian realisation of fuṣḥā. Within a general linguistic framework phonetic and phonological studies of Arabic, in particular of the Arabic dialects, abound, starting with Brame (1970); a very good survey is in Watson (2002). The application of auto-segmental phonology to Arabic is largely the work of McCarthy (1985); for a summary see McCarthy (2008). On the Obligatory Contour Principle, see Rosenthall (2006, 2008). The incompatibility of phonemes within Semitic roots is analysed by Greenberg (1950), with comprehensive tables of all existing verbal roots in Arabic; redefinition in terms of the Obligatory Contour Principle and Optimality Theory is in Frisch et al. (2004). On emphasis, see Watson (2002: 268–86) and Bellem (2007). On emphasis spread, see the discussion in Davis (1995), Watson (1999) and Al Khatib (2008). There is an extensive literature on the nature of Arabic ḍād, see, for example, Cantineau (1960: 54–6), Steiner (1977); Roman (1983: I, 162–206); Versteegh (1999); on the realisation of /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ in modern dialects, see Al Wer (2004). On the pronunciation of the qāf and the split between /q/ and /g/, see Blanc (1969). The classic work about apophony (ablaut) in the Semitic languages is Kuryłowicz (1972); a more recent application to Moroccan Arabic is by Heath (1987); see also Guerssel and Lowenstamm (1996). On the stem-based approach of Arabic morphology, see Gafos (2002, 2003). On the reconstruction of stress in Classical Arabic, see the older studies by Birkeland (1954) and Janssens (1972). For a survey of the literature on stress, see

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Kager (2009); for stress in the modern dialects, with a comparison of Cairene and Ṣanʿānī Arabic, see Watson (2002: 79–121). Kenstowicz (1994) is a general introduction to generative phonology, with many examples from Arabic. Angoujard (1990) discusses the metrical structure of Arabic. Broselow (1992) examines the rules for epenthesis and syncope across dialects. A survey of theories about biradicalism can be found in Zaborski (1991b, 2006b); on weak roots in Semitic and in Arabic, see Voigt (1988), and Chekayri and Scheer (2003). Ehret (1989) analyses a large number of triconsonantal roots in terms of a combination of biconsonantal roots with root determinatives. Bohas’ (1993, 1995, 1997) theory about the structure of the Arabic lexicon has been mentioned in the text. Specifically on the broken plurals two important articles were published by McCarthy and Prince (1990 a, b); monograph treatment is in Ratcliffe (1998). The literature on the Arabic verbal system is extensive. For the older discussion, see, for example, Aartun (1963), Corriente (1971a), Fleisch (1979: 169–206) and Nebes (1982). Larcher (2012) is a survey of the verbal system of Classical Arabic, including the aspectual values of the verbal forms (2012: 133–62). On the distribution of the three perfect forms, faʿala, faʿila, faʿula, see Dichy (2007) and below, Chapter 7, p. 118. Eisele (1999) presents a detailed analysis of the tense/ aspect system of an Arabic dialect (Cairene), with a general introduction to the theory of aspect. An interesting treatment of aspect and tense in Arabic in the framework of Functional Grammar is in Cuvalay (1996). Reese (2011) discusses the function of the participle in Moroccan Arabic, and compares this with general developments in the Arabic dialects. The most recent analysis of the system of verbal measures is in Larcher (2012: 43–106). On diathesis and the system of the verbal measures, see Saad (1982), who discusses the semantic relations between transitivity, the causative measure and the passive, and Le Tourneau (1996). Retsö’s (1989) approach is more morphological and comparative across the Semitic languages; Leemhuis (1977) deals in detail with the verbal measures II and IV in Qurʾānic Arabic. For Arabic syntax, Reckendorff’s manuals (1895–8, 1921) are still valuable research tools. Nöldeke’s studies on Arabic grammar (1897) contain important additions to the existing grammars; they were re-edited by Spitaler together with Nöldeke’s marginal notes (1963). Syntax remains the main area in which general linguists have dealt with Arabic. Early attempts to apply a general linguistic framework to Arabic go back to the 1970s and 1980s; most of these worked within a generativist/transformational framework, for example, Khalafallah (1969, Saʿīdī Egyptian dialect); Hartmann (1974; transformational/generative); Khuli (1979; contrastive grammar Arabic–English on a transformationalist basis); Ayoub (1981); Fassi Fehri (1982; government and binding). Moutaouakil (1989) uses a different framework, that of functional grammar.

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More recently, most syntactic studies of Arabic have adopted a Principles and Parameters or a Minimalist framework. It would be impossible to give a full bibliographical treatment of all the studies that have appeared. A general survey of Arabic syntax within a Minimalist framework and covering all major aspects of Arabic syntactic structure at the sentential level was published by Aoun, Benmamoun and Choueiri (2010). Fassi Fehri (1993) and Benmamoun (2000) provide an introduction to the theoretical framework and deal with a number of syntactic topics. Mohammad (1999) deals with the syntax of Standard and Palestinian Arabic. Shlonsky (1997) compares the syntactic structure of Arabic and Hebrew; see also the papers in Ouhalla and Shlonsky (2002). An excellent summary of the structure of the noun phrase and the verb phrase in Standard Arabic is by Hoyt (2008a, 2009a); see also his analysis of nominal clauses and verbal clauses (2008b, 2009b); for the noun phrase, see also Kremers (2003). For the construct state, see Siloni (1997); for the construct state in Semitic languages, see Shlonsky (2004); for the maṣdar in the construct state, see Kremers (2003: 121–55). For agreement, see Aoun, Benmamoun and Choueiri (2010: 73–95). On negation, see the Minimalist approach in Ouhalla (2002); for an analysis in the framework of Lexical-Functional grammar, see Alsharif and Sadler (2009); see also Aoun, Benmamoun and Choeiri (2010: 96–126). On negation in Egyptian Arabic, see Woidich (1969). The topic of pseudo-verbs and verbless sentences is dealt with by Eid (1991) and, especially in Maltese, by Peterson (2009). For the theories about polarity agreement of the numerals, see Brugnatelli (1982); for the theories of the Arabic grammarians about the numerals, see Druel (2012). A new development altogether is that of computational linguistic studies dedicated to Arabic, which use the large corpora of Arabic that have been assembled. The most important are those of Modern Standard Arabic, with an emphasis on newspaper texts. One of the largest corpora is that coordinated by Tim Buckwalter, which works with a morphological parser, see www.qamus.org. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has initiated a project to compile an international corpus of Arabic (ICA), available at: http://www.bibalex.org/unl/Frontend/ Project.aspx?id=9. For the compilation of a tagged corpus, the Penn Arabic Treebank, see Smrž et al. (2007) and a report from 2003/4 by Mohamed Maamouri, Anne Bies, Tim Buckwalter and Hubert Jin, available at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228693973_The_penn_arabic_treebank_Building_a_largescale_annotated_arabic_corpus. On the one hand, development is occurring very quickly, especially in the domains of automatic speech recognition and translation; on the other hand, one may safely say that the advantages of corpus research have not yet been employed to the fullest. For a recent survey of Arabic corpus linguistics, see Ditters and Hoogland (2006); for computational studies about Arabic, see Ditters (2013).

Chapter 7

The Arabic Linguistic Tradition

7.1 Introduction Western grammars of Classical Arabic (see Chapter 6), almost without exception, use a Greco-Latin grammatical model and hardly ever mention the differences between this model and that of the Arabic grammarians. The choice of the Greco-Latin model serves a didactic purpose, because these grammars are intended for the teaching of Arabic to non-Arabophones, who are usually more familiar with the Greco-Latin model of school grammar. Either may be assumed to give an adequate description of the structure of Classical Arabic, but the framework of the Arabic grammarians served exclusively for the analysis of Arabic and therefore has a special relevance for the study of that language. From the period between 750 and 1500 we know the names of more than 4,000 grammarians who elaborated a comprehensive body of knowledge on their own language. In this chapter, we shall present some examples of their theories, which provide a novel way of looking at the language from the privileged point of view of its own scholars. Most Arabic grammars of Arabic follow the order established by the first grammarian, Sībawayhi (d. 177/793?), in his Kitāb and start with syntax, followed by morphology, with phonology added as an appendix. The Western terms used here correspond roughly to the two traditional components of Arabic linguistics: taṣrīf, usually translated as ‘morphology’, and naḥw, usually translated as ‘syntax’ (the latter term is also used to denote the discipline of grammar as a whole). But whereas we assign to morphology the study of all alterations of words, the Arabic grammarians assign the study of declensional endings to naḥw and all remaining changes in the form of words, for example, plural endings and derivational patterns, to taṣrīf. A remark is in order here concerning the practice of translating Arabic technical terms with technical terms from the Western model. The names of the components of grammar illustrate the lack of correspondence between the two sets of terms. Another example is that of the term rafʿ, usually equated with ‘nominative’, which introduces a Greco-Latin view of ‘declension’ that is foreign to this framework. The term ʿamal in Arabic grammar indicates the syntactic effect of one word on another; this term is often translated as ‘rection’, which suggests a

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parallel with Greco-Latin grammar, or as ‘governing’, which inevitably suggests a parallel with modern linguistic theories. On the other hand, using only the Arabic terms makes it difficult to follow the discussion. For the sake of convenience, we have chosen in this chapter to provide the Arabic terms with English equivalents, on the understanding that these will not be taken as exact equivalents. Where necessary, the difference between the concepts involved will be mentioned. The aim of linguistics in the Arabic tradition differed from that of modern linguistics. Traditionally, grammar is said to have been ‘invented’ in the first century of the Hijra, as a direct result of the many grammatical mistakes that the new converts to Islam made when speaking Arabic (see Chapter 4, p. 57). The name of ʾAbū l-ʾAswad ad-Duʾalī (d. 68/688?) is often mentioned in this connection. He is said at first to have refused to write down the rules of grammar when asked to do so by the caliph. But when he heard his own daughter say mā ʾaḥsanu s-samāʾi ‘what is the most beautiful thing in the sky?’, while what she meant to say was mā ʾaḥsana s-samāʾa ‘how beautiful is the sky!’, he realised that the ‘corruption of speech’ had started to affect native speakers as well. In reaction, so the account goes, he wrote the first grammatical treatise in Arabic (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, Nuzhat al-ʾalibbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-ʾudabāʾ, ed. Amer, Stockholm, 1963, p. 7). This may create the impression that grammatical treatises were mainly normative, but actually this applies only to a limited set of so-called laḥn al-ʿāmma treatises, which aimed, indeed, at the correction of speech errors (see Chapter 8, p. 131). For most grammarians, starting with Sībawayhi, the aim of grammar lies somewhere else: its function is to explain the way the Arabs speak. There was no need for them to describe, let alone prescribe, the rules of language, since the Arabs were supposed to speak the language perfectly. The grammarians had a fixed corpus of language at their disposal, consisting of the text of the Qurʾān, pre-Islamic poetry and the idealised speech of the Bedouin (cf. above, Chapter 5). Since by definition the native speakers knew how to speak Arabic, the grammarians did not have to give instructions: their grammar was not a prescriptive discipline. It was not a mere description either. Since (the Arabic) language was a part of God’s creation, its structure was perfect to the tiniest detail, and the task of the grammarian was to account for every single phenomenon of the language, that is, to determine its status within the system of rules. Language was regarded as a hierarchically ordered whole, in which each component had its own function. Explanations often took the form of a comparison or analogy (qiyās). Structural similarity between two components implied a similarity in status, or, in the terminology of the grammarians, a gain or loss in rights. Thus, for instance, nouns have a primary right to case endings, while particles are undeclinable. A noun like man ‘who, whoever’ in a sentence like man waʿada wafā ‘whoever makes a promise, has to keep it’ is construed in the same way as the conditional particle ʾin ‘if ’ in the sentence ʾin waʿada wafā ‘if he makes a promise, he has to keep it’, and therefore loses its declension. Apparent deviations

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from the perfect harmony of the language were explained by assuming that these belonged to the surface structure of speech, but that on an underlying level (ʾaṣl, maʿnā) the system of the language was restored. In the syntactic part of linguistics, the grammarians’ main preoccupation was the explanation of the case endings in the sentence, called ʾiʿrāb, a term that originally meant the correct use of Arabic according to the language of the Bedouin (ʿArab), but came to mean the declension. The case endings were assumed to be the result of the action of an ʿāmil, a word in the sentence affecting or governing another word. This influence manifested itself in what we would call ‘case endings’, that is, in the definition of the grammarians ‘a difference in the ending of the words caused by a difference in the governing word’ (iḫtilāf ʾawāḫir al-kalim bi-ḫtilāf al-ʿawāmil). In a sentence like ḍaraba zaydun ʿamran ‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’, for instance, the verb is said to be the governor (ʿāmil) of the words zaydun and ʿamran and to cause the endings -un and -an in these words. Explaining a case ending was tantamount to identifying the word responsible for this ending (ʿāmil). When no such word could be identified in the surface sentence, the grammarian had to reconstruct (taqdīr) the underlying level on which the governing word could be seen to operate. A simple example would be of someone shouting an-najdata ‘help!’, which on an underlying level is to be explained as ʾaṭlubu n-najdata ‘I request help’. In morphology (taṣrīf), the focus was on the structure of words and the explanation of those changes they undergo that are not caused by an ʿāmil, in other words, non-syntactic changes. These changes could be derivational, that is, entailing a change in meaning, or non-derivational, that is, resulting from phonological rules. Examples of these changes will be given below (pp. 116, 118f.). Phonology did not count as an independent discipline and was therefore relegated to a position at the end of the grammatical treatises. Only insofar as the phonological rules interacted with the form of the word did they draw the grammarians’ attention. Purely phonetic issues were dealt with only as a kind of appendix to the treatises, although a considerable body of phonetic knowledge was transmitted in introductions to dictionaries and in treatises on the recitation of the Qurʾān (tajwīd). Arabic grammatical treatises are full of references to the maʿnā ‘meaning’. By this they refer either to the intention of the speaker, or to the functional meaning of linguistic categories, but not to the lexical meaning of the words, which was reserved for lexicography (ʿilm al-luġa). In both cases, the semantic aspect of speech was taken for granted, but, at least in early grammar, hardly ever discussed thoroughly. The meaning of grammatical categories was thought to be expressed by the pattern of a word, the lexical meaning being inherent in the radicals from which it was derived. The derivational system of the Arabic grammarians operated with a chain of combinations of an ʾaṣl and a maʿnā. At the highest level, the ʾaṣl is the consonantal skeleton (root), for example, Ḍ-R-B carrying the meaning of ‘hitting’; to this root a pattern is applied, for example, FaʿaLa, which has a meaning

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of its own (transitive verb). The result is a morphological form |ḍaraba|, which in its turn functions as the ʾaṣl for further derivations, for example, with the pattern yaFaʿiL (imperfect), which produces |yaḍarib|. The morphological forms serve as the point of departure for further extensions, for example, with a first-person pronoun in |ḍaraba-tu|, or a case ending in |yaḍarib-u|. Finally, the morpholo­ gical forms are affected by phonological rules, producing the phonological forms / ḍarabtu/, /yaḍribu/ (cf. below, pp. 117f.). In the system of segmentation, one of the most important axioms was the one-to-one correlation between morphemes and grammatical functions: each function was represented by one morpheme, and each morpheme could represent only one function (see below, p. 116). 7.2 Syntax Traditionally, Arabic grammatical treatises start with a series of definitions in which the main categories of language are introduced. The first chapter in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb, for instance, reads as follows: Chapter of the knowledge of words in the Arabic language. Words are noun, verb, or particle intended for a meaning which is neither noun nor verb. Nouns are rajul ‘man’, faras ‘horse’, ḥāʾiṭ ‘wall’. Verbs are patterns taken from the expression of the events of the nouns; they are construed for what is past; for what is going to be, but has not yet happened; and for what is being without interruption … As for that which is intended for a meaning, without being a noun or a verb, this is like ṯumma ‘then’, sawfa [particle of the future], wa- in oaths, li- to indicate possession, and so on. (hāḏā bāb ʿilm al-kalim min al-ʿarabiyya, fa-l-kalim ism wa-fiʿl wa-ḥarf jāʾa li-maʿnan laysa bi-sm wa-lā fiʿl, fa-l-ism rajul wa-faras wa-ḥāʾiṭ wa-ʾammā l-fiʿl fa-ʾamṯila ʾuḫiḏat min lafḏ̣ ʾaḥdāṯ al-ʾasmāʾ wa-buniyat limā maḍā wa-limā yakūnu wa-lam yaqaʿ wa-mā huwa kāʾin lam yanqaṭiʿ … wa-ʾammā mā jāʾa li-maʿnan wa-laysa bi-sm wa-lā fiʿl fa-naḥwa ṯumma wa-sawfa wa-wāw al-qasam wa-lām al-ʾiḍāfa wa-naḥwa hāḏā) (al-Kitāb I, ed. Bulaq, n.d., p. 2)

This division into what we would call three parts of speech remained intact throughout the history of Arabic grammatical tradition. The category of the noun (ism) was defined either as a word with certain syntactic characteristics, such as its combinability with an article, or as a word denoting an essence. It included not only what Greco-Latin grammar calls nouns, but also adjectives, pronouns and even a number of prepositions and adverbs, such as ʾamāma ‘in front of ’, kayfa ‘how?’. The category of the verb (fiʿl) was defined either as a word that may be combined with the future particle sawfa, or as a word denoting an action. It included some words which are usually called interjections, such as hayhāt ‘come on!’, ṣah ‘hush!’. In the Arabic system, the category of the particle (ḥarf) included the remaining words; they could not be declined and acted only as governing words, for instance, li- ‘for’, governing nouns and verbs, and ʾan ‘that’, governing verbs alone. Their main function was to assist other words in their function in the sentence.

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The basic difference between the three parts of speech is the declension (ʾiʿrāb). In principle, only nouns have case endings to indicate their function in the sentence. Western grammars usually call the three endings -u, -i, -a ‘nominative’, ‘genitive’, ‘accusative’, respectively; in Arabic grammar they are called rafʿ, jarr, naṣb. The difference between the two sets is not merely terminological: in GrecoLatin grammar, the cases have an independent semantic meaning, whereas the Arabic tradition regards them as formal signs of syntactic functions. The nominative case indicates that a noun’s function is that of agent (fāʿil), topic (mubtadaʾ), or predicate (ḫabar) of the sentence (about these sentential constituents, see below, pp. 112–14). They may be followed by an ending -n to indicate that the word is indefinite (tanwīn, nunation). The two main functions of the genitive case are to mark the effect of particles on nouns and to indicate the second noun in possessive constructions. In the Western tradition, particles governing nouns (ḥurūf al-jarr) are called ‘prepositions’, for example, maʿa r-rajuli ‘with the man’, ʾilā l-madīnati ‘to the city’. In the possessive construction (ʾiḍāfa), the first noun (al-muḍāf ʾilayhi) has neither article nor nunation, and the second noun (al-muḍāf) is put in the genitive case, for example, baytu l-maliki ‘the king’s house’. The governance relationship between the two nouns in the ʾiḍāfa construction is a controversial issue. Since in principle nouns do not govern, later grammarians objected to Sībawayhi’s view that the first noun governs the second. Instead, they attributed the genitive ending to a particle li- ‘for, belonging to’, which was inserted on an underlying level, that is, *baytun li-l-maliki ‘house for-the-king [genitive]’. The accusative case is used for the direct object (mafʿūl), for example, ḍarabtu zaydan ‘I hit Zayd’, and for a large variety of other objects of time, place, intensity and reason. In Arabic grammar, the verb in a sentence such as ḍaraba zaydun ʿamran ‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’ is said to ‘transcend the agent towards the object’ (yataʿaddā l-fāʿil ʾilā l-mafʿūl). This means that such a verb, which we would call ‘transitive’, not only causes the accusative of the object, but also the nominative of the agent. A verb, moreover, implies not only an agent and, when it is transitive, an object, but also the time and the place of the action. Therefore, expressions of time and place (ẓurūf) also receive the accusative case ending, as in ḍarabtu-hu l-yawma ‘I hit him today’ and in ḍarabtu-hu ʾamāmaka ‘I hit him in front of you’. In addition, the verb implies its own action as an internal object (mafʿūl muṭlaq), as in ḍarabtu-hu ḍarban ‘I hit him a hitting, I hit him hard’. As in English, some Arabic verbs govern through a preposition, for instance, in marartu bi-hi ‘I passed by him’. Later grammarians regarded bi-hi in such a sentence as a real object, the particle (preposition) biserving as a link between the verb and its object. Although in principle verbs are not declined, there is one category of verbs that do receive declension. In Arabic grammar these are called muḍāriʿ ‘resembling’, since they owe their declension to their resemblance to the nouns. This resemblance manifests itself in the fact that in some constructions a verb may

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be used as a substitute for a noun, for example, ʾinna zaydan la-ḍāribun ‘Zayd is hitting’, which is equivalent to ʾinna zaydan la-yaḍribu ‘Zayd hits’. The resembling verbs correspond to what the Western tradition calls ‘imperfect verbs’ (Table 7.1), because they are used for incompleted actions, for example, yaḍribu ‘he is hitting, he will hit’ (see above, Chapter 6, pp. 93f.). The terminological difference demonstrates again the difference in approach: Greco-Latin grammar names after the semantic content, whereas Arabic grammar names after formal characteristics, in this case the fact that this category of verbs exhibits the same endings as the noun. In the Arabic tradition, the verbal endings -u, -a and -Ø are -regarded as having the same status as the endings of the nouns, and accordingly such verbs are said to be declined (muʿrab). The endings -u and -a are identical with those of the noun and, like these, are called rafʿ ‘nominative’ and naṣb ‘accusative’; the zero-ending is called jazm, literally ‘cutting off’. Nouns

Imperfect verbs

rafʿ zayd-u-n jarr (ḫafḍ) zayd-i-n naṣb zayd-a-n jazm

yaḍrib-u yaḍrib-a yaḍrib

Table 7.1  The endings of nouns and imperfect verbs When words are combined, they constitute an utterance (qawl). When this utterance conveys a meaningful message, it becomes kalām, a semantically complete message. The closest equivalent in Arabic grammar to our notion of ‘sentence’ is that of jumla, a syntactically complete string of words. In their analysis of sentential constructions, the Arabic grammarians differ from the Western analysis. According to them, there is a distinction between a nominal sentence (jumla ismiyya), that is, a sentence that in its underlying structure starts with a noun, and a verbal sentence (jumla fiʿliyya), that is, a sentence that in its underlying structure starts with a verb. These represent not just alternative word orders, but basically different sentence types. In the verbal sentence, the two constituents are the verb (fiʿl) and the agent (fāʿil); the sentence may also contain an object (mafʿūl). Thus, we have in (1): (1) ḍaraba fiʿl ‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’

zaydun ʿamran fāʿil mafʿūl

In this sentence, the verb is responsible for the nominative of the agent zaydun and the accusative of the object ʿamran. In the nominal sentence two basic constituents are distinguished by the Arabic grammarians, the one with which

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the sentence starts (mubtadaʾ) and the one that tells something about it (ḫabar), as in (2): (2) muḥammadun ʾaḫūka mubtadaʾ ḫabar ‘Muḥammad is your brother’ The grammarians found it difficult to account for the nominative of the first constituent in such a sentence: by definition, no other word preceding it could be held responsible for its ending. The standard theory found the solution in an abstract principle called ibtidāʾ, that is, the initial position in the sentence, which caused the nominative ending. The second constituent in its turn was assumed to be governed by the first. In the example given here, the ḫabar is a noun, but it may also be a sentence, as in (3) and (4): (3) muḥammadun ʾaḫūhu mubtadaʾ mubtadaʾ ḫabar ‘Muḥammad, his brother is Zayd’

zaydun ḫabar

(4) muḥammadun ḍaraba ʾabūhu mubtadaʾ ḫabar fiʿl fāʿil ‘Muḥammad, his father hit ʿAmr’

ʿamran mafʿūl

Most Western analyses call this phenomenon ‘topicalisation’: it consists in the fronting of a constituent from the sentence for special emphasis. In these sentences, the Arabic term mubtadaʾ is, therefore, the equivalent of the Western term ‘topic’. The advantage of the grammarians’ approach becomes evident when it is applied to sentences like (5): (5) muḥammadun mubtadaʾ

ḍaraba fiʿl-fāʿil

ʿamran mafʿūl

In such a sentence, the grammarians analyse ḍaraba as a combination of a verb with a zero agent, which is not visible on the surface level, but must be posited on an underlying level. When the agent is plural, it does appear, as in (6): (6) ar-rijālu mubtadaʾ ‘The men hit’

ḍarabū |ḍaraba-w| ḫabar fiʿl-fāʿil

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The verbal form ḍaraba is combined here with the bound agent pronoun of the plural -w; at a morphological level, this becomes |ḍaraba-w|, at a phonological level /ḍarabu-w/ with assimilation of the vowel to the glide, which is realised as [d̴ɑrɑbuː]. Similarly, in ḍarabta ‘you have hit’, the element -ta is regarded by the Arabic grammarians as a bound pronoun (/ḍaraba-ta/ > [d̴ɑrɑbta] because of a phonological rule which prohibits the occurrence of the sequence CvCvCvCv). In the case of a feminine noun, the analysis is somewhat more complicated. In (7) (7) al-fatāt-u ART-girl-NOM ‘The girl wrote’

kataba-t write.PERF-3fs

the ending -t cannot be analysed as an agent pronoun, since it also appears when the noun follows, as in (8): (8) kataba-t write.PERF-3fs ‘The girl wrote’

al-fatāt-u ART-girl-NOM

Since two agents cannot occur in one sentence, the -t cannot be an agent. Consequently, it is analysed by the grammarians as a feminine marker, essentially identical with the feminine marker -t of the noun. In al-fatātu katabat, the agent of katabat must then be a zero pronoun, just as in the masculine form. In this way, the Arabic analysis provides an explanation for the agreement between noun and verb in sentences where the noun is initial, and at the same time it brings together all noun-initial sentences into one category of topicalised sentences. The latter seems to be supported by the semantics of the construction: later grammarians pointed out that in a sentence such as zaydun ḍaraba the focus is on zaydun, about whom something is predicated, rather than on the action. The Arabic analysis of the linguistic material contrasts with the Western analysis, which applies the notions of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ to both sentence types in Arabic. 7.3 Morphology The most characteristic feature of all Semitic languages is the peculiar relationship between form and meaning. In the majority of words, the lexical meaning is represented by three radicals and the morphological meaning is added to these radicals in the form of a vowel pattern, sometimes with auxiliary consonants or augments (zawāʾid). The radicals k-t-b, for instance, represent the general meaning of ‘writing’, and from these radicals we get: kātib ‘writing [participle]’, plural kuttāb; yaktubu ‘he writes’, perfect kataba; kitāb ‘book’, plural kutub; maktab ‘desk, office’, plural makātib; maktaba ‘library’, plural maktabāt; takātaba ‘to correspond’,

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etc. At a very early date, the grammarians invented a notation for the morphological patterns, which represented the three radicals with the consonants f-ʿ-l, in which the vowels and the auxiliary consonants were inserted. The pattern of the word kātib, for instance, is represented as fāʿil, and the pattern of maktab as mafʿal. For the Arabic grammarians, the primary task of morphology (taṣrīf) was the breakdown of words into radical consonants and auxiliary consonants (zawāʾid). There are ten consonants that may serve as augments (/”/, /w/, /y/, /ʾ/, /m/, /t/, /n/, /h/, /s/, /l/, contained in the mnemonic phrase ʾal-yawma tansāhu ‘today you will forget him’. Since all ten consonants (except the abstract element /”/; cf. below, p. 121) may serve either as augment or as radical, it is not always obvious which of the consonants in a given form are radicals and which are zāʾid. Grammarians set up methods to identify the radicals, of which the most important was the ištiqāq (lit. ‘splitting’, sometimes translated with the Western term ‘etymology’), the comparison of the form under scrutiny with other words containing the same radicals and with the same semantic content. When ʾaktaba ‘he caused to write’ is compared with kataba ‘he wrote’, they turn out to have the same semantic load, so that the /ʾ/ must be regarded as an augment. Since not all words are triradical, this analysis is not as simple as it may sound. Apart from the triradical words, there are quadriradical verbs, and nouns consisting of four or maximally five radicals. The small group of biradical nouns such as yad ‘hand’, ibn ‘son’, fam ‘mouth’ were incorporated in the system by deriving them from triradical roots (y-d-y, b-n-w, f-w-h). In a word such as ʿankabūt /ʿankabuwt/ ‘spider’ there are six consonants (counting the ‘lengthening’ w as a consonant; cf. below), any of which may be a radical. The form of the plural, ʿanākib, shows that only four of them, ʿ-n-k-b, are really radicals, since these are the only ones to be preserved in derivational processes.

7.3.1  The noun The first part of speech is the noun (ism). We have seen above that nouns receive case endings (nominative, genitive, accusative) and, when they are indefinite, the nunation. However, there is a category of nouns with only two endings: one for the nominative; and one for the genitive and the accusative, which is identical with the accusative ending of other nouns (called in Western grammars the diptotic declension). Nouns belonging to this category, for example, ʾaḥmaru ‘red’, genitive/accusative ʾaḥmara, do not have nunation and lose the genitive ending. When they become definite, they return to the triptotic declension, for example, al-ʾaḥmaru, al-ʾaḥmari, al-ʾaḥmara. For the Arabic grammarians, explaining why some nouns lose part of their declension was an important task of morphology. Diptotic nouns are called in Arabic ġayr munṣarif ‘not free to move’, since they lack part of the alterability that is inherent in nouns. According to the Arabic grammarians, the main principle is that if a noun deviates from the unmarked

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(i.e., singular, masculine, indefinite) state in more than one way, it resembles a verb and therefore loses part of its declensional rights. These deviations are the so-called mawāniʿ aṣ-ṣarf ‘the preventing factors of complete declension’, for instance, when a noun is definite, plural, feminine, a proper name, of foreign origin, an epithet or when it has a verbal pattern. On this basis, words like yazīdu ‘Yazīd’ (name, verbal pattern), ʾibrāhīmu ‘Abraham’ (name, foreign origin) and the comparative ʾafʿalu (epithet, verbal pattern) are assigned to the category of the diptotic nouns. In Arabic grammatical theory, diptotic nouns are fundamentally different from nouns that in their surface form do not exhibit all case endings. This occurs in the so-called weak nouns, that is, nouns containing one of the glides w, y or ʾalif. In these nouns, phonological rules may produce a merger of case endings, for example, qāḍin ‘judge’, with genitive qāḍin, accusative qāḍiyan; or ʾafʿan ‘viper’, whose cases are all identical. The grammarians derive these surface forms from an underlying form, on which all three case endings are visible: /qa”ḍiyun/, / qa”ḍiyin/, /qa”ḍiyan/; /ʾafʿayun/, /ʾafʿayin/, /ʾafʿayan/. According to them, the reason for these specific changes is that the speakers of Arabic dislike combinations of the vowels i and u or of two a’s with the glide y, which they find too ‘heavy’ to pronounce. The difference with the diptotic nouns is that weak nouns are actually declinable, even though their surface case endings are identical. Apart from the case endings and the nunation, nouns may undergo morphological alterations, that is, changes in their form that are not caused by a governing word (ʿāmil). The most frequent alteration consists in the category of number: nouns may become dual or plural. The dual number of nouns is formed with suffixes, in the masculine -āni for the nominative, -ayni for the genitive/accusative; in the feminine -atāni/-atayni. In the plural, we have to distinguish between a declension with suffixes (the so-called sound plural) and a declension by pattern modification (the so-called broken plural). The sound plural suffixes are -ūna for the nominative, -īna for the genitive/accusative; in the feminine nouns, the suffixes are -ātun/-ātin. The sound plural is used almost exclusively for animate plurals and certain adjectives, as well as for the participles. Because of the abovementioned principle (p. 110) of one-morph-one-meaning, the segmentation of the dual and plural endings constituted a major problem for Arabic grammarians. Take, for instance, the form zaydūna ‘Zayds’, genitive/ accusative zaydīna: in the morph-by-morph segmentation of the Arabic grammarians, this becomes |zayd-u-w-n-a|, |zayd-i-y-n-a|. The /n/ is analysed as a compensation for the fact that plural nouns do not have nunation, which is why they receive an /n/ that disappears as soon as the word is followed by a genitive (zaydū l-madīnati ‘the Zayds of the city’). The vowel /a/ at the end is necessitated by the consonant cluster that arises with /-w-n/ at the end of the word. The real problem are the vowels /u/, /i/ and the glides /w/, /y/: they share between them the double function of indicating plurality and nominative case, but it is impos-

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sible to assign either function to any of them alone. The linguistic model followed by the grammarians did not allow them to posit combined morphs |-uw-|, |-iy-| with a double function. They resorted, therefore, to other solutions, for instance, by assigning the function of plural morph to the glides /w/, /y/ and positing an underlying, virtual case ending that was deleted in the surface form (e.g., /zayduw-u-na/ realised as [zajduːna]). The second type of plural is that of the broken or internal plural (jamʿ mukassar), referring to the breaking-up of the consonant pattern by different vowels. Of all Semitic languages, Arabic exhibits the largest expansion of the system of broken plurals (cf. above, Chapter 2, pp. 18f.; Chapter 6, p. 93). There are more than thirty-six patterns for plurals. In this domain, grammarians analysed the various morphological patterns, but they did not formulate rules for the plural formation of semantic classes of singular nouns.

7.3.2  The verb The second part of speech is the verb (fiʿl). The verbal system of Arabic has a two-way distinction of a prefix and a suffix conjugation, traditionally called in Western grammars the imperfect and the perfect. For Arabic grammarians, the verb’s main feature was the indication of time: already in Sībawayhi’s definition (see above, p. 110) three tenses are distinguished, namely, past, present and future, which are expressed by only two verbal forms, called by him māḍī ‘past’ and muḍāriʿ ‘resembling’. The latter term refers to the resemblance of the imperfect verb to the noun, which is the cause of its declension. Later grammarians called the prefix conjugation mustaqbal ‘future’ and denied the existence of a special form for the physical present. It remains surprising that with only two verbal forms grammarians thought in terms of a temporal tripartition; and foreign influence, for instance from Greek philosophy, is not to be excluded in this case. Arabic grammarians regarded conjugated verbs as combinations of a verb and a pronoun. A form such as ḍarabtu ‘I have hit’ is analysed by them as the verb ḍaraba with the bound pronoun of the first-person singular -tu; ḍarabū is the same verb ḍaraba with the pronoun of the third-person masculine plural -w. The form ḍaraba itself is ambiguous: in a verbal sentence it is the verbal form, but in a nominal sentence it is the verbal form with the zero pronoun for the third-person masculine singular (cf. above, pp. 112–14); likewise, the form ḍarabat is either the verb with a feminine marker -t, or the verb with the feminine marker and a zero pronoun. There are three morphological types of the perfect: faʿala, faʿila, faʿula. These correlate with three patterns of the imperfect verb: yafʿalu, yafʿilu, yafʿulu. The imperfect patterns are derived from the perfect; they consist of a prefix, the verbal stem and an ending. The verbal stem in the imperfect has the form CCvC, in which the first radical is vowel-less and the second radical has a vowel that

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correlates with the vowel of the perfect. The underlying form is CvCvC like the perfect, but in combination with the prefix and the ending this would produce a non-allowed form with a sequence of four Cv’s, hence, the deletion of the first vowel (|ya-ḍa-ri-bu| → yaḍribu). According to the grammarians, the derivation of the imperfect from faʿila and faʿula perfects is rule-bound: they always have an imperfect yafʿalu and yafʿulu, respectively. In the case of faʿala, the vowel of the imperfect is either u or i: here the correlation is based on samāʿ ‘hearing’, in other words, it has to be learned from the speakers and cannot be predicted. Those faʿala verbs that have a velar or pharyngal as second or third radical, for example, zaraʿa ‘to sow’, have a regular (qiyāsī) imperfect with a, yazraʿu. The endings -u/-a/-0/ of the imperfect verb are case endings (cf. above, pp. 111f.). Finally, the prefixes of the imperfect cannot be pronouns, since they co-occur with nominal agents, as in yaḍribu zaydun ‘Zayd hits’, and, as we have seen above, a sentence cannot contain two agents. Consequently, they are to be regarded as grammatical markers (dalāʾil) that have no independent status like the pronouns. When a verb contains one of the glides w or y, it is commonly known as a weak verb (muʿtall). For this class of verbs, the grammarians set up a number of morphological and phonological rules to explain the various changes that affect them. Morphologically, they patterned weak verbs on the sound verbs, and by reconstructing underlying forms they managed to achieve greater symmetry. For the hollow verbs (verbs in which the medial radical is w or y), for instance, they reconstructed the medial radical by referring to morphologically related words: qāla ‘to say’ is related to qawl ‘speech’, sāra ‘to go’ to sayr ‘journey’, and ḫāfa ‘to fear’ to ḫawf ‘fear’, therefore, their radicals are q-w-l, s-y-r and ḫ-w-f, respectively. Their next step was to determine to which perfect pattern these verbs belonged on the basis of the underlying forms of the imperfect *yaqwulu, *yasyiru and *yaḫwafu. The first two must come from a perfect faʿala (yaqwulu cannot come from faʿila, for then it would have an imperfect yafʿalu, and it cannot come from faʿula, since that pattern is reserved for intransitive verbs; for *yasyiru the only possibility is faʿala). But *yaḫwafu must come from *ḫawifa, since otherwise the imperfect pattern yafʿalu would be inexplicable. The next step was the explanation of the phonological changes: how do we get from *yaqwulu and so on to yaqūlu and so on? We cannot go into all the details of the intricate system of rules set up by the grammarians, so we will have to limit ourselves to some examples (an extensive analysis of all weak forms, including the perfect forms such as qultu, sirtu, ḫiftu, can be found in Bohas and Guillaume 1984). One of the first rules states that a combination of /a/ followed by /w/ or /y/ plus a vowel is changed into ʾalif /”/, an abstract element on the underlying level, thus /qawama/ → /qa”ma/, which is realised phonetically as [qɑːma] (cf. below, p. 121); likewise /sayara/ → /sa”ra/ and /ḫawifa/ → /ḫa”fa/. A second rule changes the order of the vowels and the glides for ease of pronunciation, so that, for instance, /yaqwulu/ becomes /yaquwlu/, and /yasyiru/

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becomes /yasiyru/. A third rule states that there is a special relationship between /i/ and /y/, /u/ and /w/, and /a/ and /”/; therefore, after a vowel, glides often change into the related glide of the vowel, for example, /iw/ → /iy/, /uy/ → / uw/, as in the words /miwqa”t/ → /miyqa”t/ and /muysir/ → /muwsir/. In the case of the weak verbs, this rule is invoked to explain derivations such as the imperfect of ḫāfa: /yaḫwafu/ → /yaḫawfu/ → /yaḫa”fu/. In the system of phonological rules with which the Arabic grammarians operated, one of the most important principles was that of the relative weight of the phonemes of the language. They set up a hierarchy that went from the lightest elements, the vowels, via the glides to the consonants. Within the class of the vowels, they determined the following order from the lightest to the heaviest vowel: /a/ > /i/ > /u/. In the explanation of phonological changes, this relative order of the phonemes played an important role, since speakers of the language were credited with an aversion to combinations that were too heavy. Thus, for instance, the combination /-iya-/ is possible, because it goes from heavy to light, whereas the combination /-iyu-/ is regarded as too heavy and therefore impermissible because it contains a passage from a heavy to a heavier element (e.g., in /qa”ḍiyu/ ‘judge’, which therefore becomes /qa”ḍiy/). Among the derivational alterations of the verb are the so-called verbal measures (see above, Chapter 6, pp. 95–7). Arabic grammarians regarded these as part of the derivational morphology. They distinguished between three primary augmented verbal measures, ʾafʿala, faʿʿala and fāʿala, each with its own concomitant meaning, but all expressing the syntactic process of taʿdiya ‘transitivity’, that is, increasing the valency of the verb with one, for example, ʿalima ‘to know something’ versus ʿallama ‘to instruct someone in something’ and ʾaʿlama ‘to inform someone about something’. These measures, just as the base stem, could receive an additional augment -t- to express the process of muṭāwaʿa, lit. ‘obedience, compliance’: faʿʿala > tafaʿʿala; fāʿala → tafāʿala; faʿala → iftaʿala; ʾafʿala → istafʿala. The augment -nin infaʿala expressed this same notion. Muṭāwaʿa was regarded as the opposite of taʿdiya, that is, decreasing the valency of the verb with one, for example, kasara ‘to break [transitive]’ versus inkasara ‘to break [intransitive]’; ʿallama ‘to instruct someone about something’ versus taʿallama ‘to be instructed, to become learned in something’ (Larcher 2012: 75–7). What mattered to the grammarians was the fact that the augment (ziyāda) correlated with an additional meaning. 7.4 Phonology Although Arabic grammarians were not concerned with phonetic analysis as such, they usually included an elementary description of the speech sounds in their treatises. In the introduction to the first Arabic dictionary, al-Ḫalīl’s Kitāb al-ʿayn, the consonants are classified according to their place of articulation (maḫraj). Al-Ḫalīl identifies each group of consonants with a collective term, but

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he does not differentiate between the active and the passive articulator (Kitāb al-ʿayn, I, ed. al-Maḫzūmī and as-Sāmarrāʾī, Beirut, 1988, p. 58): ḥalqiyya ‘consonants of the throat’: h, ʾ, ḥ, ḫ, ġ lahawiyya ‘consonants of the velum’: q, k šajriyya ‘consonants of the palate’: j, š, ḍ ʾasaliyya ‘consonants of the tongue-tip’: ṣ, s, z niṭʿiyya ‘consonants of the prepalate’: ṭ, t, d liṯawiyya ‘consonants of the gums’: ḏ̣, ḏ, ṯ ḏalaqiyya ‘consonants of the tongue-apex’: r, l, n šafawiyya ‘consonants of the lips’: f, b, m hawāʾiyya ‘consonants of the air’: y, w, ” (ʾalif), ʾ In Sībawayhi’s Kitāb (II, p. 405), a more detailed description of the various places of articulation is given, in which Sībawayhi corrects al-Ḫalīl’s classification in some points and identifies the active and the passive articulator of each group of consonants. In most respects, this classification is remarkably similar to the modern classification of the phonemic inventory of Arabic (see above, p. 23). In some respects, the classification of the consonants by Arabic grammarians differs from the modern account. Their main classification of the consonants according to manner of articulation was that between mahmūsa ‘whispered’ (h, ḥ, ḫ, k, š, t, ṣ, s, ṯ, f) and majhūra ‘spoken aloud’ (b, j, d, r, l, m, n, w, y, ḍ, ḏ̣, ṭ, q, ʾ, ”). In describing these two categories, Sībawayhi (Kitāb, II, p. 405) says that in the majhūra consonants the pressure is fully applied at the place of articulation and the breath is impeded from flowing through till the pressure is completed and the sound goes on (ʾušbiʿa l-iʿtimād fī mawḍiʿihi wa-muniʿa n-nafas ʾan yajriya maʿahu ḥattā yanqaḍiya l-iʿtimād ʿalayhi wa-yajriya ṣ-ṣawt). The mahmūsa consonants are described as follows: the pressure is weakly applied at the place of articulation so that the breath flows freely with it (ʾuḍʿifa l-iʿtimād fī mawḍiʿihi ḥattā jarā n-nafas maʿahu)

Elsewhere, he adds that in the case of the majhūra consonants the articulation is accompanied by a ṣawt fī ṣ-ṣadr ‘sound in the breast’, apparently in an effort to account for the difference in sound between voiced and voiceless consonants. He could not refer to the action of the vocal cords as such, since their function was unknown at the time (they were not discovered until the sixteenth century). The inclusion of ṭ and q in the category of the majhūra may seem surprising, since these are usually classified as voiceless consonants, which is how they are realised in Modern Standard Arabic. On the basis of historical data (cf. above, p.  24) it is not unreasonable, however, to suppose that in Sībawayhi’s time these two consonants were indeed voiced. In most of the modern Bedouin dialects, q is still realised as [ɡ] (cf. below, Chapter 10, p. 187).

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A third consonant, whose description by Sībawayhi differs from the modern pronunciation, is the ḍād. The unique character of this consonant is borne out by the fact that the grammarians called the Arabic language ‘the language of the ḍād’ (luġat aḍ-ḍād), apparently believing that only an Arab would be able to pronounce this sound. The modern realisation of the ḍād is that of an emphatic ḍ [d̴], yet there is reason to believe that in Classical Arabic it was a lateral consonant, possibly ḍl [d̴ɫ] (cf. above, Chapter 2, p. 24). This is supported by Sībawayhi’s description (Kitāb, II, p. 405) of the place of articulation of the ḍād, which he says is ‘between the first part of the side of the tongue and the adjoining molars’ (min bayna ʾawwal ḥāfat al-lisān wa-mā yalīhi min al-ʾaḍrās). Although Arabic grammarians were not interested in phonetics as such, they did distinguish a number of allophones, some of them permissible variants, others incorrect realisations of the phonemes of Arabic. In Classical Arabic, in certain contexts, the consonants r and l, for instance, could have an emphatic allophone (e.g., in the name of God after a back vowel: waḷḷāhi as against billāhi). Such emphatic realisations are called by the Arabic grammarians mufaḫḫam. Impermissible allophones refer to deviations in the pronunciation of Arabic by non-native speakers, for instance, ‘the kāf between the jīm and the kāf’ (i.e., č [ʧ]), ‘the jīm that is as the šīn’ (i.e., ž [ʒ]) and ‘the bāʾ that is as the fāʾ’ (i.e., v [v]). Arabic script, like most Semitic scripts, does not represent the vowels in writing. In Classical Arabic, there are only three vowels, a, i and u. The descriptions of the grammarians indicate, however, that there were various allophones, as in the Modern Standard realisation. The a has the allophone [æ] in non-emphatic, non-pharyngal contexts; this pronunciation is usually called ʾimāla ‘leaning [towards an anterior realisation]’; in emphatic contexts the allophone is [ɑ] (tafḫīm). The i has an allophone in emphatic contexts that was probably a centralised [ɨ]. It is not entirely clear why the grammarians occupied themselves with the allophones of the vowels, which are irrelevant for the morphological structure of the words. One possible explanation may be that the rules for ʾimāla are not exclusively phonological in nature, but depend at least in part on the morphological context. With regard to the long vowels, the relevance of phonological analysis for morphology is much more obvious. Arabic script indicates what we call ‘long vowels’ with an orthographic device, by writing the short vowels together with one of the three letters wāw, yāʾ and ʾalif. According to Arabic grammarians, the long vowels are to be analysed as combinations of a short vowel and a glide (ḥarf al-līn wa-l-madd). The three glides that they distinguish are w, y and an abstract element called ʾalif, indicated here with the sign /”/. Thus, for instance, sūdun ‘black [plural]’ is represented as /suwdun/, bīḍun ‘white [plural]’ as /biyḍun/, dārun ‘house’ as /da”run/. In this analysis, the glide ʾalif is an abstract element, which does not have any phonetic status, but serves purely as an element in the underlying phonological structure. Since the names of the phonemic glides are

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identical with those of the letter signs that are used to indicate the long vowels in the script, it has sometimes been assumed that the analysis of the Arabic grammarians was based on a confusion between letters and phonemes; but this is certainly wrong. The main argument for their analysis was its advantage in the analysis of word structure: compare, for instance, /suwdun/ with the word /  ḥumrun/ ‘red [plural]’, which has the same pattern. This analysis forms the basis for their explanation of the changes in the weak verbs (cf. above, pp. 118f.). Finally, there is one topic that is completely missing in Arabic linguistic treatises, that of stress. In Classical Arabic, stress is not phonemic: there are no two words that are distinguished solely by a difference in stress. It is, therefore, understandable that Arabic grammarians did not feel the need to discuss stress as a feature of Arabic. Stress must have existed as a prosodic feature in speech, but it is absent from the grammatical treatises (see above, Chapter 6, pp. 87f.). 7.5 Lexicography Arabic lexicography may be said to have its origin in the earliest period of Islam when commentators started to paraphrase words from the Qurʾānic text. The famous Companion Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 68/687) is said to have compiled a list of words of foreign origin (see Chapter 5, pp. 68–70), and early grammarians started to collect thematic word lists, for instance, on the terminology of the horse. The first dictionary without a thematic arrangement was the Kitāb al-ʿayn attributed to al-Ḫalīl ibn ʾAḥmad (d. 170/786 or 175/791). In the introduction to this dictionary, he classified the consonants of Arabic and explained the important role that this classification plays in the analysis of roots. In Semitic languages, certain constraints operate in verbal root-formation to avoid the co-occurrence of similar consonants. A general principle states that the first two radicals of the triradical root may not be identical, nor homorganic (belonging to the same ­articulatory class), while the last two radicals may be identical, but not homorganic; the first and the third radical usually obey the same principle (see above, Chapter 6, p. 89 on the Obligatory Contour Principle). Thus, for instance, there are no roots in Arabic beginning with b-m- (two bilabials) or j-k- (two velars; j deriving from *g, cf. above, Chapter 2, p. 24); likewise, there are roots like m-d-d, but no roots like m-d-t (two dentals). In his formulation of these constraints, al-Ḫalīl set up articulatory classes that extended over adjacent places of articulation. Thus, for instance, a root like ḫ-ḥ-q is inadmissible because the three consonants belong to the same ‘articulatory class’. Obviously, for the formulation of the constraints on root-building, articulatory terms were needed to describe the nature of consonants. In the identification of loanwords, similar constraints were established. One of al-Ḫalīl’s most interesting observations is that there are no quadriradical Arabic roots that do not contain at least one of the consonants b, f, m, r, n, l, which he calls collectively ḏalaqiyya.

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Al-Ḫalīl aimed at assembling all roots containing the same radicals in every different permutation. The chapter ʿayn -nūn -qāf, for instance, contains the roots ʿ-n-q, q-ʿ-n, q-n-ʿ, n-ʿ-q, and n-q-ʿ. The dictionary starts with all roots containing the letter ʿayn and then follows a phonetic order according to the place of articulation, from the pharyngals to the labials, rather than the normal order of the Arabic alphabet. One disadvantage of the ordering in the Kitāb al-ʿayn is that it is rather difficult to find a word in this dictionary. Later lexicographers abandoned this scheme and adopted the alphabetical order, starting, however, with the last of the three radicals, then the first, and then the second. This is sometimes called a rhyming order, and one of the reasons for adopting this principle may indeed have been the need to find rhyme words. The first to introduce this scheme was al-Jawharī (d. 393/1003 or 400/1010), in his Ṣiḥāḥ, which remained a popular dictionary until it was superseded by the large compilations, which aimed at complete coverage of the entire Arabic language. Ibn Manẓūr’s (d. 711/1311) Lisān al-ʿArab contains some 80,000 entries. The much shorter Qāmūs of al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1414) became even more popular, to such an extent that its name, which literally means ‘ocean’, has become the current word for ‘dictionary’. Finally, Murtaḍā az-Zabīdī’s (d. 1206/1791) Tāj al-ʿarūs contains no fewer than 120,000 entries. For all lexicographers, whether they arranged their entries in permutations or in a rhyming order, it was obvious that all words with the same radicals had a common semantic element. In fact, if a word deviated from this meaning, it was a sure sign that it was a foreign loan. Words formed with the radicals ḥ-b-b, for instance, are mostly connected with the notion of ‘loving’, but there also exists a word ḥubb ‘water container’. Ibn Durayd (Jamharat al-luġa, I, ed. Baalbaki, Beirut, 1987, p. 64) explains this discrepancy by asserting that it is borrowed from Persian, which has a word ḫunb with this meaning. Early on, the idea seems to have caught on that roots differing in only one consonant were related semantically. Lexicographers formalised this principle under the name of al-ištiqāq al-ʾakbar ‘greater etymology’, stating that words with two similar radicals are semantically related to each other. The grammarian Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), in his Ḫaṣāʾiṣ (II, ed. an-Najjār, Cairo, 1952–6, pp. 133–9), went one step further. The arrangement of roots in the Kitāb al-ʿayn (cf. above, Chapter 5) had already suggested a semantic relationship between the various permutations of a root. Ibn Jinnī formalised this principle by stating that there existed an ištiqāq kabīr ‘great etymology’, a higher semantic level on which all permutations of three radicals had a common meaning. From the set of radicals ʿ-b-r, for instance, Ibn Jinnī derived the following words: ʿibāra ‘expression’, ʿabra ‘tear’, ʿarab ‘nomads’, baraʿa ‘to excel’, baʿr ‘dung’, rabʿ ‘spring camping site’, ruʿb ‘fear’. He asserted that all these words expressed a common meaning, that of ‘transfer’. The general idea of a semantic relationship between words with similar consonants seems to have been accepted by most scholars in the Arabic tradition,

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although most of them hesitated to go as far as Ibn Jinnī (for modern theories about triradicalism see Chapter 6, pp. 89–92). Further reading For the theories of the Arabic grammarians, Carter (1981) is recommended as a first introduction. This book is a commentary on a late grammatical treatise by Ibn ʾĀjurrūm (d. 723/1323), the ʾĀjurrūmiyya, and its notes touch on virtually every aspect of Arabic grammar. Its counterpart for morphology is Åkesson’s (2001) translation and commentary of another late treatise, the Marāḥ al-ʾarwāḥ by ʾAḥmad ibn Masʿūd (end of the seventh/thirteenth century). A general survey in Arabic of the history of the Arabic grammatical tradition is Ḍayf (1968); handbook treatment is in Sezgin (1984); for shorter accounts see Carter (2007) and Owens (2007). A synthetic view of the theories of the grammarians is given by Bohas, Guillaume and Kouloughli (1990) and Versteegh (1997a). A lucid analysis of the phonological and (morpho)phonological principles of the Arabic grammarians is Bohas and Guillaume (1984), one of the best studies of the Arabic theory of grammar. For the grammarians’ methodological presuppositions, see the commentary on az-Zajjājī’s ʾĪḍāḥ (Versteegh 1995), and Suleiman’s (1999) study of argumentation in grammar. The thorny question of the comparison between Arabic grammar and modern Western linguistics is dealt with admirably by Owens (1988). On the notion of ‘underlying level’ in Arabic grammar, see Versteegh (1994). The place of semantics in the Arabic linguistic tradition is discussed in Gully (1995) and Versteegh (1997b). On the role of pragmatics in the linguistic tradition see the articles collected in Larcher (2014). On Sībawayhi’s theory of grammar, there is a large literature. A general introduction to his work is found in Carter (2004). The text of the Kitāb was published by Derenbourg (2 vols, Paris, 1881–9, repr. Hildesheim, 1970), which formed the basis for both the Bulaq edition (2 vols, A.H. 1316, repr. Baghdad, n.d.) and the edition by ʿAbd as-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (5 vols, Cairo, 1966–77). There is an older German translation by Jahn (2 vols, Berlin, 1895–1900, repr. Hildesheim, 1961). Sībawayhi’s grammatical system is analysed by Mosel (1975); Marogy compares his syntactic theory with modern linguistic theory (2010). An index of his grammatical terminology was compiled by Troupeau (1976); a number of terminological issues in the Kitāb is discussed in the collection of articles by Levin (1998). For the status of the Kitāb as one of the first published books in Arabic, see Schoeler (1989a). The early textual history of the Kitāb and its reception are dealt with by Humbert (1995) and Bernards (1997); its place within the context of Arabic grammatical theory is analysed by Baalbaki (2008). Special mention should be made of a few studies on methodological issues: Bohas (1981, 1985) deals with the phonological argumentation of the Arabic grammarians; Ayoub and Bohas (1983) treat the Arabic grammarians’ analysis of

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sentence structure; the problem of the declension of the plural and dual endings is discussed by Versteegh (1985). Ermers (1995) analyses the application of the Arabic linguistic model to the grammar of Turkic languages, which have an entirely different structure from Arabic. On the syntax of the sentence see Peled (2009). On the phonetic/phonological theories of Sībawayhi, see Al-Nassir (1993); on Arabic phonetics in general, see Bravmann (1934); on the interpretation of the notions majhūra/mahmūsa, see Fleisch (1958) and Blanc (1967). Ibn Jinnī’s theories are dealt with by Bakalla (1982). There is an extensive literature on the nature of Arabic ḍād: see, for example, Cantineau (1960: 54–6), Steiner (1977) and Versteegh (1999). On the pronunciation of the qāf and the split between /q/ and /g/, see Blanc (1969). About the development of lexicography in Islam, see Haywood (1965) and Wild (1965; about al-Ḥalīl ibn ʾAḥmad); handbook treatment is in Sezgin (1982); a short survey in Seidensticker (2008); for the most recent treatment of the history of lexicography see Baalbaki (2014).

Chapter 8

The Emergence of New Arabic

8.1  The linguistic situation in the Islamic empire The period of the Islamic conquests immediately after the death of the Prophet in 10/632 constituted a drastic change in the history of the Arabic language. Within a few decades, speakers of Arabic had spread over an enormous territory and imposed their language on the inhabitants of the conquered countries. Speakers of Arabic had been resident in Syria and Egypt before Islam (see above, Chapter 3), but their language had never been a language of prestige outside the peninsula, and consequently there had never been an incentive for non-Arabs in these countries to learn Arabic. In this chapter, we shall look at the consequences of the process of Arabicisation after the conquests for the structure of the language. First, we shall describe the linguistic situation in the conquered territories; then the changes in the language will be discussed; finally, we shall look into the explanations that have been advanced for these changes. The historical details of the conquests are known from the detailed accounts of the Muslim historians, but much less is known about the process of Arabicisation. In the earliest stages of the conquests, the military efforts of the Islamic authorities in Medina were aimed at the political control of the Arabic-speaking tribes, first within the peninsula during the so-called ridda wars, and then outside the peninsula, where since time immemorial Arabic-speaking tribes had roamed the Syrian desert and Iraq. The initial motive behind the conquests may have been the idea that all Arabic-speaking peoples should be united under the banner of Islam, while the conquest of the neighbouring sedentary areas occurred more or less as an afterthought. Because of the lack of relevant documents, it is hard to tell what the rate of Arabicisation was, and in most cases we can only make a guess as to the period of time that was needed for Arabic to be adopted as the main language of the empire. We do know that Arabicisation was much more complete, and possibly even progressed at a faster rate than the process of Islamicisation. There were probably material advantages in conversion to Islam, for instance, the dispensation of the poll tax (jizya) and the loss of minority status as ḏimmī, but on the whole the prevailing tolerance on the part of the Muslims towards Christians and Jews

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did not generate an urgent need to convert to Islam. As a result, language became a binding factor for the Islamic empire to a far greater degree than religion. Even nowadays there are large groups of Christians, and to a lesser degree Jews, in the Arabic-speaking countries whose mother tongue is Arabic just like that of their Muslim neighbours. The linguistic situation in the incipient Islamic empire is relatively well known. In the Arabian peninsula, the only ‘foreign’ language encountered by the Arabs was South Arabian. The language was no longer used in its epigraphic form, but some varieties must have remained in use as a colloquial language, since in a few linguistic pockets South Arabian languages are still spoken today by some tens of thousands of speakers in the provinces of Mahra (Yemen) and Ḏ̣ufār (Oman), and on the island of Suquṭra. These modern South Arabian languages probably do not derive directly from Epigraphic South Arabian, but represent isolated forms that were never touched by Arabic influence until the modern period. Six different languages have been identified so far (Mehri, Ḥarsūsī, Baṭḥarī, Jibbālī, Soqoṭrī and Hobyōt), all of them incomprehensible to a speaker of Arabic. We have seen above (p. 44) that in al-Hamdānī’s (d. 334/946) description of the linguistic situation in the peninsula they are characterised as ġutm ‘incorrect, indistinct’, and distinguished from varieties of Arabic that had been influenced by South Arabian. In Iraq, most of the population spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the area. Middle Persian (Pahlavi) was used as an administrative language in the regions under Sasanian control. Arabic was spoken by a sizeable portion of the population, most of them nomadic tribes who dwelt in Iraq. Some of the Arabic tribes had become sedentary, such as the Banū Tanūḫ, who inhabited an entire quarter of the city of Aleppo at the eve of the conquest. The majority of these tribes had converted to Christianity a long time ago, in particular those tribes that formed the state of al-Ḥīra, which the Persian kings used as a buffer between themselves and the Bedouin tribes of Arabia. Some of the tribes of north and east Arabia, even though their core area lay within the peninsula, had frequent contacts with the Mesopotamian tribes. In Syria, Greek remained in use for some time as the language of administration, but was replaced by Arabic at the end of the first century of the Hijra (Chapter 5, p. 65). Syriac continued to be used by the Christians as a spoken language until the eighth century ce, and as a literary language until the fourteenth century. In its spoken form, it has remained in use in a few isolated linguistic pockets: Western Aramaic in the village of Maʿlūla in the mountains of the Antilebanon; Central Aramaic, or Ṭurōyo, in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn in western Kurdistan. Eastern Aramaic, usually called Assyrian or Neo-Syriac, is still spoken by approximately 300,000 people in Iran, Turkey and Iraq, and by immigrants from Iraq in Syria and the Caucasus. Almost all of them belong to a Christian community. The history of Persian is a special case. During the first century of Islamic rule, the Middle Persian language (Pahlavi) was still used as an administrative language,

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but after the reforms of ʿAbd al-Malik it was replaced by Arabic; in Ḫurāsān at a somewhat later date, 124/741, than in western Iran. After that, it remained in use only as a written language in the circles of the Mazdaean priests, and Arabic reigned supreme as the administrative, literary and religious language. By the third/ninth century, Arabic had become the language of culture and literature. A large part of the relevant Iranian literature had been translated into Arabic, and Persian intellectuals, even when they proclaimed their ethnic distinctness in the movement of the Šuʿūbiyya (p. 81), accepted Arabic as the natural language of Iranian culture. The spoken language of the Iranian provinces was a different matter, however. Arabic had been the language of the Arab settlers in some of the towns and of those Arab tribes that came to live in Ḫurāsān. But, by the eighth century, these Arabicspeaking immigrants had taken over the colloquial language of the majority of the population, the dialect known as Dari, or Parsi-i dari, which had been in use as the spoken language of the court in Sasanian Iran and which represented the colloquial register of Middle Persian. With the spread of Islam, Dari was adopted by an increasing number of people and eventually ousted all the other local dialects. By the ninth century, most inhabitants of the Iranian provinces spoke Dari, albeit with a measure of regional variation. We shall see below that, starting at the courts of some of the independent dynasties in the Islamic East, Persian in its colloquial form regained its position as a language of literature during the ninth and tenth centuries (cf. Chapter 17, pp. 321f.). In Egypt, as in Syria, Greek was the language of a small, Hellenised elite, and it also served as the language of administration. The mass of the population spoke Coptic, which had become a literary language by the ninth century when the Bible was translated into the Sahidic dialect of Coptic in Upper Egypt. It served as a religious language for the common believer, who certainly did not understand Greek. When ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ started the conquest of Egypt in 640 with a small group of 4,000 soldiers – later reinforced with an additional 12,000 – he followed the pattern of the settlement policy in Iraq and made the military camp of al-Fusṭāṭ his centre of administration. Very soon, Copts came to live here, too, and the contacts between Coptic-speaking inhabitants and Arabic-speaking garrisons all over the country increased. Once the country had been incorporated into the Islamic empire, further migration of Arabian tribes took place on an irregular basis. During the early centuries of Islamic domination of the country, Coptic patriarchs had to communicate with the Arab conquerors through interpreters, but by the tenth century the Coptic bishop Severus of Eshmunein (or Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ) complained that most of the Copts no longer understood Greek or Coptic and were able to communicate in Arabic only (Griffith 1996: 25). Accordingly, he was one of the first Coptic authors to write exclusively in Arabic. This probably means that in Lower Egypt all Christians had switched from Coptic

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to Arabic. In Upper Egypt, Coptic may have survived somewhat longer, but by the fourteenth century Coptic had become limited to a few small pockets in the countryside and to the clergy in the monasteries. A German traveller, Johann Michael Vansleb (d. 1679), reported meeting speakers of Coptic in a few villages in Upper Egypt (Worrell and Vycichl 1942), but it is more likely that by this time the use of the language had become restricted to the liturgy in the Coptic Church, as it is now. The period of Coptic/Arabic bilingualism in Lower Egypt, which lasted about two centuries, was shorter than the period of bilingualism in Syria; this may be responsible for the limited influence of the language in the Egyptian Arabic dialect (cf. pp. 143f., 209). Even the number of loanwords from Coptic is surprisingly low, about 180 according to a recent estimate (Behnstedt 2006). The Arabicisation of North Africa is a special case, since it took place in two distinct waves which were centuries apart in time. During the first Arab invasion of North Africa, the few urban centres that were left after the wandering of the peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries ce were occupied by the Arab armies. But the most important centre for the dissemination of Arabic culture and language became a new city, the military camp of Qayrawān, which soon grew into the most important city of North Africa. In Qayrawān, as in other urban centres, Arabic soon became the language of communication. The geographer al-ʾIdrīsī (twelfth century) reports that in his time there were still speakers of some form of Romance (al-lisān al-laṭīnī al-ʾifrīqī) in Gafsa (Prevost 2007: 472–3), but it is rather more likely that he actually heard some variety of Berber. Most of the countryside and the nomadic population of North Africa remained Berber-speaking until the second invasion in the eleventh century, when the Bedouin tribes of the Banū Sulaym and Banū Hilāl entered the Maghreb. These tribes originally came from Syria and North Arabia; they were joined by a third tribe, that of the Maʿqil, of South Arabian origin. They had migrated first to Egypt, but had been sent away by the Fāṭimid caliphs, no doubt because the presence of so many nomads had become a threat to Egyptian society. The total number of Bedouin coming to North Africa was estimated by contemporary sources at 1 million (out of a total population of 6 million), but their invasion was not a single event. It took the Bedouin two years to reach Tunisia, but about a hundred years to come to Algiers, and eighty more years to reach Oran. Morocco had been invaded by them somewhat earlier. Parts of the Maʿqil confederation conquered Mauritania, where their dialect is still spoken nowadays under the name of Ḥassāniyya (cf. below, pp. 214–16). Wherever they went, the Bedouin tribes became an important military factor. They were not interested in political power as such, but the political landscape in North Africa with its numerous dynastic quarrels enabled them to switch alliances frequently. The result of the invasion of the Bedouin tribes was that a large part of the Berber population in the countryside took over the Arabic language. Nowadays the Berber languages are found almost exclusively in mountainous areas where,

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even after the second wave of Arabicisation, many people continued to speak Berber. In Morocco (al-Maġrib al-ʾaqṣā), the process of Arabicisation took place at a slower rate than in the rest of the Maghreb (ʾIfrīqiyā). Qayrāwān and other cities had been established in the same way as the army camps in Egypt and in the eastern part of the empire. These cities were inhabited by mixed populations, who quickly adopted Arabic. In Morocco, there were far fewer urban centres and they were inhabited by a more homogeneous, Arabophone population. As a result, it took much longer for Arabic to spread among the population at large (Rosenberger 1998). Nowadays, a considerable percentage of the population of the Maghreb still speak Berber (Tamazight) as their first, or even as their only, language. No exact figures about the number of speakers are available, partly because of the lingering taboo on Berber language and culture (cf. below, Chapter 14, pp. 271–3), but the usual estimates are 40–45 per cent for Morocco, 30 per cent for Algeria, 5 per cent for Tunisia and 25 per cent for Libya. In Egypt, Berber is spoken only in the small oasis of Siwa. These percentages reflect the local differences in settlement and diffusion of the Arabic language. The conquest of North Africa was the starting point of the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and the subsequent attempt to penetrate Europe. From 711 onwards, the Arab presence in al-ʾAndalus, as the peninsula was called in the Arabic sources, was uninterrupted until 1492, and Arabic very soon became the administrative, religious, cultural and even colloquial language of most of Spain (cf. below Chapter 17, pp. 315–17). The island of Malta was conquered in 256/870 by the Aghlabid emirs in present-day Tunisia; the further history of the Arabic language on this island will be dealt with below (Chapter 15, pp. 276–9). In the early stages of the conquests, Arabic was disseminated primarily from the cities, either existing ones like Damascus, or the military centres that were established all over the empire. Most contacts with the indigenous population took place in these camps, which soon grew into new cities and towns, such as Baṣra, Kūfa, al-Fusṭāṭ and Qayrawān. In these centres, the necessary contacts between conquered and conquerors in matters of taxation, trading and administration led to some kind of linguistic accommodation on the part of the conquered. In Arabic geographical literature, the difference between the speech of the sedentary population and that of the Bedouin is mentioned frequently (Chapter 10, pp. 172–4), but the only linguistic sources that we have about the kind of Arabic that was spoken between non-Arabs and Arabs are the numerous anecdotes about the speech of the early converts. The standard form of an anecdote is that a client (mawlā), that is, a recently converted non-Arab, comes to the caliph and attempts to speak in correct Arabic, without success (cf. above, p. 57). What these anecdotes document is not the actual colloquial speech of the new converts, but their efforts to adopt the standard language in certain situations. They confirm that, for the newly converted, the standard language with the declensional system was

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a­ vailable as a model: mistakes in the use of case endings occur only when people attempt to imitate a model in which these endings occur. Throughout the history of Arabic philology, treatises have been written about the linguistic mistakes of the common people (laḥn al-ʿāmma). But in spite of what the titles of these treatises might lead us to believe, they are not concerned with the colloquial language as such. Their aim is to preserve the purity of the standard language; and, while some of the mistakes they criticise may have been caused by interference of the colloquial language, it would be wrong to assume that we can reconstruct the vernacular on the basis of this material. A few examples from a sixth-/twelfth-century Andalusian treatise of this genre may suffice to demonstrate this. In his Madḫal ʾilā taqwīm al-lisān wa-taʿlīm al-bayān (Introduction to the Correction of Speech and the Teaching of Eloquence’, ed. Pérez Lázaro, Madrid, 1990), Ibn Hišām al-Laḫmī (d. 577/1182) mentions a large number of ‘mistakes’ made by the common people (yaqūlūna … ‘they say …’), and he gives the form that he regards as correct (wa-ṣ-ṣawāb …): wrong vowels (muqāmāt instead of maqāmāt ‘standing-places’; ḏihāb instead of ḏahāb ‘going away [verbal noun]’); wrong consonants (sanbūsak instead of sanbūsaq ‘meat pie’; mutadaʿdiʿ instead of mutaḍaʿḍiʿ ‘humbling’); inappropriate assimilations (muštahid instead of mujtahid ‘exerting o.s.’); wrong form of the verb (ʾarsā instead of rasā ‘to lay at anchor’); noun of place instead of noun of instrument (maġsal instead of miġsal ‘wash-pot’); dropping of glottal stop (ṯār instead of ṯaʾr ‘revenge’; riyya instead of riʾa ‘lungs’); wrong construction of the numerals (ṯalāṯ šuhūr instead of ṯalāṯat ʾašhur ‘three months’). Some of these mistakes may have been inspired by the spoken language, but the author’s main concern is with mistakes that were made in writing. Thus, he also mentions cases such as ḥalwa (with tāʾ marbūṭa) instead of ḥalwā ‘candy’ (with ʾalif maqṣūra), which in his time must have been purely a matter of orthography. The sum total of the mistakes may tell us something about the interference of the colloquial language in the use of Classical Arabic, but it does not provide a complete view of the structure of the vernacular of the time, let alone of the relative chronology of the changes. An important source for our reconstruction of the colloquial in the early Islamic period is the corpus of so-called Middle Arabic texts, in the first place the papyri, and in the second place the more or less literary texts that contain many ‘mistakes’ and deviations from Classical grammar. Some of these mistakes can, indeed, be explained as interference by colloquial speech, but since the written medium remained the domain of the Classical language, Middle Arabic texts cannot provide us with material to study the chronology of the development of spoken Arabic. What the written texts document are changes in the norms for the standard language. A striking illustration is the use of colloquial personal suffixes in North African Middle Arabic texts. While these texts exhibit fairly often the use of the first-person singular of the imperfect with n- (in writing nqtl ‘I kill’), the use of n-…-ū (in writing nqtlw ‘we kill’) for the first-person plural is much less common. It is reasonable to assume that the avoidance of the plural form

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is connected with the fact that in Classical Arabic such a form cannot occur in writing, whereas the singular form is at least a possible word, even though it has a different meaning in Classical Arabic. When in later texts the plural form does occur, this cannot be taken to imply that it has recently been introduced in the colloquial language, but it simply means that the norms for the written language have changed, and the form has become less stigmatised (for more details about Middle Arabic, see below, Chapter 9). 8.2  The new type of Arabic Our main sources for the reconstruction of the historical process of emergence of a colloquial type of Arabic are the modern dialects. Terminologically, there is some confusion about the name for the new type of Arabic. The name ‘New Arabic’ (or ‘Neo-Arabic’) will be used here for the colloquial type of Arabic that became current in the early stages of the conquests and that developed into the Arabic dialects as we know them today. In this terminology, the new type of Arabic is contrasted with Old Arabic, that is, the Arabic that was used in the Jāhiliyya. As we have seen in Chapter 4, there is no consensus about the linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period, so that the term ‘Old Arabic’ is used both for the ʿArabiyya as the uniform language of the Bedouin tribes, the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic poetry, and alternatively, for the poetico-Qurʾānic koine that was used as a literary language transcending the dialects of the Bedouin tribes. In either case, Old Arabic represents the type of Arabic that in its codified form by the grammarians became the literary and cultural language of the Arabo-Islamic empire and is known as Classical Arabic. After the period of the conquests, Old and New Arabic coexisted in a sociolinguistic relationship that is usually called ‘diglossia’ (see below, Chapter 13). As we shall see below (pp. 139f.), the opposition of Old/New Arabic is strongly opposed by Owens (2006), who does not believe that the history of the Arabic language was punctuated by a break in transmission between an alleged Old and New type: both types coexisted in the pre-Islamic period and in fact, ‘New’ Arabic may even go back to an older stage in the development of the Semitic languages than ‘Old’ Arabic, which he believes represents in some ways an innovation. Notwithstanding these objections, we shall continue to use the two terms here, but on the understanding that the diachronic relationship between the two is controversial and not accepted by all scholars. Whatever our views on the linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period, we still need an explanation for the emergence of the new type of Arabic. Even if some of the traits of this new type of Arabic were already found in the pre-Islamic dialects – such as the subject–verb agreement or the undeclined dual in the Ḥijāz (cf. above, Chapter 4, pp. 51f.), or the possible disappearance of the declensional endings in the peripheral dialects in North Arabia (cf. above, pp. 53f.) –

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no one maintains that all features of the modern dialects can be traced back to the pre-Islamic period. Any theory about the emergence of the dialects must therefore account for the changes that took place after the conquests and that demarcate the new type of Arabic from the old type. At the same time, such a theory must not only explain the common features of the dialects as against the Classical standard, but also provide an explanation for the numerous differences among the dialects. In the pre-Islamic period, Arabs from all over the peninsula could communicate with each other with relative ease. Nowadays, Moroccans and Iraqis, each speaking their own dialect, would find it extremely difficult to understand each other, and it is fair to say that the linguistic distance between the dialects is as large as that between the Germanic languages and the Romance languages, including Romanian, if not larger. Before we go into the theories that have been advanced for the present-day situation of Arabic, we shall first survey the common features that characterise the dialects vis-à-vis the Classical language. No single dialect exhibits all of these features, but they may be regarded as a common denominator of the structure of dialects in the Arab world. Generally speaking, these features are much more frequent in the sedentary dialects, for which Syrian Arabic has been used here in most examples, whereas the Bedouin dialects tend to be more conservative (cf. below, Chapter 10). In the following list of features, the structure of the dialects will be compared with that of Classical Arabic. This might create the impression that the dialects were directly derived from Classical Arabic input. In view of the controversies surrounding the relationship between the two types, such a presupposition should be avoided. If we follow Owens, most traits were already there and it could not be said that the ‘New’ type derives from the ‘Old’ type. Even from the opposite point of view – that the ‘New’ type did not emerge until after the conquests in a process of second-language acquisition (see below Chapter 16, pp. 299f.) – the input for the new speakers of Arabic was certainly not the elevated form of Arabic used in poetry and the Qurʾān, nor even the everyday language of the Bedouin, but a simplified version of the language, which they used to address foreigners. For the sake of convenience, in comparing the two types we shall sometimes resort to formulations that might suggest a diachronic relationship (for instance, when we use the signs < or > in comparisons). In the phonological system of the dialects, a number of differences may be noted: • The glottal stop, which was present in Eastern Arabic and in the Qurʾān, but absent in Western Arabic (cf. above, pp. 45f., 49), is not found in any dialect (e.g., Classical Arabic raʾs ‘head’, Syrian Arabic rās; Classical Arabic miʾa ‘hundred’, Syrian Arabic mīye), except where it is the reflex of another phoneme, such as Egyptian /ʾ/ for Classical Arabic /q/.

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• In the sedentary dialects, the interdental fricatives correspond to dental stops (e.g., Classical Arabic ṯalāṯa ‘three’, Syrian Arabic tlāte; Classical Arabic ḏanab ‘tail’, Syrian Arabic danab); most Bedouin dialects have interdentals. • The two Classical Arabic phonemes /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ have merged into /ḍ/ in the sedentary dialects, and /ḏ̣/ in the Bedouin dialects (e.g., Classical ḏ̣uhr ‘noon’, Syrian Arabic ḍǝhr). • Final short vowels have been dropped in the dialects; final long vowels have become short (e.g., kataba/katabū ‘he wrote/they wrote’, Syrian Arabic katab/katabu). • Stress in the Arabic dialects has become more expiratory, as shown by the frequent reduction of short vowels in open syllables (e.g., Classical Arabic kaṯīr ‘many’ > kiṯīr > Syrian Arabic ktīr; Classical Arabic kātiba ‘writing [feminine]’ > Syrian Arabic kātbe); in the dialects of North Africa, only stressed short vowels have been retained. • The opposition of the two short vowels /i/ and /u/ has been reduced in many of the sedentary dialects; often they merge into one phoneme, usually transcribed with /ǝ/, e.g., in Syrian Arabic ʾǝṣṣa ‘story’ (Classical Arabic qiṣṣa), and mǝrr ‘bitter’ (Classical Arabic murr). Partly as the result of phonological changes, there are a number of morphological differences between the dialects and Classical Arabic: • The use of the vowel -i- instead of -a- in the prefixes of the imperfect verb, for example, Classical Arabic yaḥmilu ‘he carries’ > yiḥmil > Syrian Arabic yǝḥmel; some of the pre-Islamic dialects exhibited this feature, which was known as taltala (see above, Chapter 4, p. 49). • The use of the pattern fuʿāl instead of fiʿāl in the plural of adjectives (Classical Arabic kibār ‘large [plural]’ > kubāṛ > Syrian Arabic kbāṛ). • The absence of the consonant -h- in the pronominal suffix of the third-person masculine after consonants (Classical Arabic qatala-hu, Syrian Arabic ʾatal-o). • The use of the pattern fʿālil instead of faʿālīl in quadriradical plural patterns (Classical Arabic sikkīn, plural sakākīn ‘knife’, Syrian Arabic sǝkkīn, plural sakakīn). • The use of the ending -i in nisba adjectives instead of -iyy or -īy (Classical Arabic masīḥiyyun ‘Christian’, Syrian Arabic masīḥi). The morphology of the dialects is characterised by a considerable reduction of morphological categories: • The sedentary dialects do not have a gender distinction in the secondand the third-person plural of pronouns and verbs, whereas the Bedouin dialects exhibit this distinction, cf. Cairene Arabic humma ‘they [masculine/ feminine]’ with Najdi Arabic hum ‘they [masculine]’, hin ‘they [feminine]’.

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• In verbs and pronouns the category of the dual has disappeared; in nouns the names for parts of the body have retained the historical dual ending, which came to be used for the plural as well (pseudo-dual, cf. below); most dialects have developed a new category of dual with strictly dual meaning, which may be used with many nouns. • The internal passive (Classical Arabic fuʿila, yufʿalu) has been replaced by either an n-form or a t-form, for example, in Syrian Arabic nḍarab ‘to be hit’; Moroccan Arabic ttǝḍṛǝb ‘to be hit’; in some of the Bedouin dialects, the internal passive is still productive. • The causative of the verb (ʾafʿala) has been replaced in most dialects by analytical expressions with the help of verbs meaning ‘to make, to let’; only in some Bedouin dialects does the causative pattern remain productive (cf. Chapter 11, p. 193). • Of the three patterns of the perfect verb in Classical Arabic (faʿala, faʿila, faʿūla), faʿula has disappeared; verbs of this pattern, which in Classical Arabic was used for permanent qualities, have merged with faʿila, or been replaced with other forms, for example, Classical Arabic ḥamuḍa ‘to be sour’, Syrian Arabic ḥammaḍ. • The three feminine endings of Classical Arabic, -ah, -ā and -āʾ, have merged into one ending, -a, as, for instance, in the Classical Arabic adjective ḥamrāʾu ‘red [feminine]’, Syrian Arabic ḥamra. • The relative pronoun (Classical Arabic allaḏī, feminine allatī, plural allaḏīna, allawātī, allātī) has lost its inflection, for instance, in Syrian Arabic (y)ǝlli. The working of analogy has eliminated a large number of anomalous or irregular forms. In Classical Arabic, weak verbs with a third radical w were still distinct from verbs with a third radical y in the basic pattern of the verb. In the dialects, both categories have merged into those with a third radical y; thus we find, for instance, in Syrian Arabic rama/ramēt ‘he/I threw’ and šaka/šakēt ‘he/I complained’, as against Classical Arabic ramā/ramaytu and šakā/šakawtu. Likewise, the reduplicated verbs (Classical Arabic radda ‘to repeat’, first-person singular of the perfect radadtu) have been re-analysed as verbs with a third radical y in the second measure, for example, in Syrian Arabic radd, first-person singular raddēt. Individual dialects have gone a long way towards a general levelling of the endings of the weak and the strong verbs. In many dialects, some of the endings of the weak verbs have been replaced by those of the strong verbs, for instance, in Syrian Arabic ramu ‘they threw’ like katabu ‘they wrote’, as against Classical Arabic katabū/ramaw. Inversely, in Muslim Baġdādī Arabic, weak endings have substituted for some of the endings of the strong verbs (e.g., kitbaw ‘they wrote’, like mašaw ‘they walked’). In the Jewish dialect of Baghdad, this tendency is also manifest in the endings of the imperfect verb, for example, ykǝtbōn ‘they write’/ tkǝtbēn ‘you [feminine singular] write’, like yǝnsōn ‘they forget’/tǝnsēn ‘you forget’

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[feminine singular] (cf. Classical Arabic yaktubūna/taktubīna and yansawna/ tansayna). In the Sunnī dialect of Bahrain, the first-person singular of the perfect of all verbal classes has taken the weak ending: kitbēt ‘I wrote’, nāmēt ‘I slept’, ligēt ‘I found’ (Classical Arabic katabtu, nimtu, laqītu). In some syntactic constructions, the Arabic dialects developed towards a more analytic type of language, in which syntactic functions are expressed by independent words rather than by morphological means. Often, these independent words were subsequently grammaticalised and became new morphological markers. In the nominal system, the declensional endings have disappeared, and in the place of the Classical Arabic possessive construction with a genitive an analytic possessive construction has developed, in which a genitive exponent expresses the meaning of possessivity (see below). In the verbal system, the distinction between three moods in the imperfect verb has disappeared. The imperfect verb without modal endings has taken over most modal functions. In most dialects, a new morphological contrast has developed in the imperfect by means of a set of markers to express tense and aspect (see below). The sentence structure of Classical Arabic has changed drastically in the modern dialects. The distinction between two types of sentence, one with topic– comment and one with verb–agent (cf. above, Chapter 6, pp. 98f.; Chapter 7, pp. 112–14), has disappeared. In its place, one canonical word order has emerged, which in most dialects seems to be Subject–Verb–Object, although Verb–Subject occurs in many dialects as a stylistic variant. But even in those cases in which the verb precedes the subject, there is full number agreement between them. This proves that such constructions are not simply a translation of a Classical Arabic pattern, but belong to the structure of the dialect (on the occurrence of variable agreement patterns in some dialects, see below, p. 148). In Classical Arabic, the pronominal indirect object had a relatively free syntactic position, as in (1a,b), which were both allowed: (1a)

ʾurīdu ʾan want.IMPERF.1s COMPL risālat-an letter-ACC ‘I want to write you a letter’

ʾaktub-a write.1s-SUBJ

(1b) ʾurīdu ʾan ʾaktuba want.IMPERF.1s COMPL write.1s-SUBJ ‘I want to write a letter to you’

la-kum to-2mp

risālat-an lakum letter-ACC to-2mp

In the modern dialects, the pronominal indirect object is connected clitically with the verbal form, as in (2) from Syrian Arabic:

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(2) bǝdd-i ʾǝktob-l-kon want-1s write.IMPER.1s-to-2p ‘I want to write you a letter’

risāle letter

The dialects differ with regard to the scope of this construction: some dialects allow almost any combination of direct and indirect object suffixes on the verb, others make a more restricted use of clitics. In combination with the negative circumfix mā-…-š, the aspectual particles of future and continuous, and the pronominal clitics, verbal forms in some dialects can become quite complex, as in (3) from Moroccan Arabic: (3) ma-ġa-nǝktǝb-o-lǝ-k-š NEG-FUT-write.IMPERF.1s-3ms-to-2s-NEG ‘I won’t write it to you’ or in (4) from Egyptian Arabic: (4) ma-bi-tgib-ha-l-nā-š NEG-CONT-bring.IMPERF.2ms-3fs-to-1p-NEG ‘You’re not bringing her to us’ In modal expressions such as ‘want to, must, can’, Classical Arabic made use of a hypotactic construction with the conjunction ʾan governing the following verb in the subjunctive form of the imperfect, for example, yurīdu ʾan yaqtul-a-nī ‘he wants to kill me’. In the modern dialects, this construction was replaced by an asyndetic construction of the imperfect without modal endings, for example, in Syrian Arabic bǝddo yǝʾtolni ‘he wants to kill me’ (where bǝddo derives from Classical Arabic bi-wuddihi ‘it is in his wish’), in Egyptian Arabic lāzim tiʿmil da ‘you must do this’ (where lāzim derives from Classical Arabic lāzim ‘necessary, binding’), and in Moroccan Arabic ḫǝṣṣni nǝktǝb ‘I must write’ (where ḫǝṣṣ derives from Classical Arabic ḫaṣṣa ‘to concern especially’). There is a set of lexical items that is found in almost all dialects, for example, the verbs jāb (< jāʾa bi-) ‘to bring’, šāf ‘to see’, sawwa (sāwa) ‘to do, make’, and rāḥ ‘to go away’. Some of these items were used in Classical Arabic in a less general sense, which was expanded by a process of semantic bleaching; šāf, for instance, originally meant ‘to observe from above’ (cf. šayyifa ‘scout’), sawwā ‘to render equal, to arrange’, rāḥ ‘to go away in the evening’. Characteristic of the dialects is the nominal periphrasis of some interrogative words: they all have a variant of the expression ʾayyu šayʾin ‘which thing?’ instead of Classical Arabic mā, for example, Egyptian ʾēh, Moroccan āš, Syrian šū, Iraqi šinu. For kayfa ‘how?’, such periphrases as Syrian Arabic šlōn (< ʾēš lōn, literally ‘what colour?’, Classical Arabic lawn) and Egyptian Arabic izzayy (< ʾēš zayy, literally ‘what appearance?’, Classical Arabic ziyy) are found.

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8.3  Theories about the emergence of New Arabic According to the Arabic sources, the language of the Arab tribes in the peninsula was basically uniform, with only marginal differences. After the conquests, however, when the Arabs came into contact with people who spoke other languages, they transmitted their language to these people, who then started to speak Arabic with lots of mistakes. As a result, the language became corrupted (fasād al-luġa), and the grammarians had to intervene because the text of the Revealed Book threatened to become incomprehensible. This view is summed up by the famous historian Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 757/1356) as follows: When Islam came and they [the Arabs] left the Ḥijāz … and started to mingle with the non-Arabs, their [linguistic] habits began to change as a result of the different ways of speaking they heard from those who tried to learn Arabic, for hearing is the source of linguistic habits. As a result of this influence, Arabic became corrupt … Their scholars began to fear lest the [linguistic] habit should become completely corrupted, and lest people should grow used to it, so that the Qurʾān and the Tradition would become incomprehensible. Consequently, they deduced laws from their [the Arabs’] ways of speaking, that were universally valid for this habit … and that could be used as a canon for the rest of their speech. (fa-lammā jāʾa l-ʾIslām wa-fāraqū l-Ḥijāz … wa-ḫālaṭū l-ʿAjam taġayyarat tilka l-malaka bimā ʾalqā ʾilayhā s-samʿ min al-mustaʿribīn wa-s-samʿ ʾabū l-malakāt al-lisāniyya wa-fasadat bimā ʾulqiya ʾilayhā … wa-ḫašiya ʾahl al-ʿulūm minhum ʾan tafsuda tilka l-malaka raʾsan wa-yaṭūla l-ʿahd bihā fa-yanġaliqa l-Qurʾān wa-l-Ḥadīṯ ʿalā l-mafhūm fa-stanbaṭū min majārī kalāmihim qawānīn li-tilka l-malaka muṭṭaridatan ... yaqīsūna ʿalayhā sāʾir ʾanwāʿ al-kalām) (Muqaddima, ed. Beirut, n.d., p. 546)

This quotation shows clearly that in the mind of the Arabs the changes in the language and the emergence of the colloquial varieties were linked with the polyglot composition of the Islamic empire and the introduction of Arabic as the new lingua franca. Some scholars have attempted to explain the presence of numerous common features in the Arabic dialects as against the Classical language with a theory of monogenesis, which posits a single point of origin for the present-day dialects. According to Ferguson (1959a), for instance, the common ancestor of the dialects originated in the military camps in Iraq, where the speakers of the various pre-Islamic dialects mingled. The coalescence of these dialects led to the emergence of a military koine in which the common features developed. Specifically, Ferguson bases his theory on a list of fourteen features that, in his view, cannot be attributed to an independent, general trend in the development of the dialects, but must be assigned to a common ancestor, for instance, the use of the lexical items šāf and jāb, the disappearance of the dual in the verb and the pronoun, the merger of /ḏ/ and /ḏ̣/, and the merger of verbs with a third radical w and y. A theory of monogenesis, such as Ferguson’s, proposes a common origin for the modern dialects in order to explain the features that they have in common against

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the standard language. Differences between the dialects are then explained as the result of a later process of divergence, possibly because of the substratal influence of the languages that were spoken in the various regions into which Arabic was imported. Critics of the theory of a common origin have objected to Ferguson’s theory that the resemblances could also be explained as either the product of a general trend, or as the result of a later process of convergence that homogenised the dialects in the various areas. Proponents of the idea of a general trend point out, for instance, that languages not related to Arabic have also lost their dual, just like the Arabic dialects, so that it is entirely possible that the dialects lost this category independently from each other. The main problem with the theory of a general trend is that the explanatory power of such a principle is minimal, since the mere fact that similar phenomena occur in different languages does not provide us with an explanation of the causes behind the change. Other critics of a theory of common origin emphasise the role of convergence in the development of the language. According to Cohen (1970), the Arab armies consisted of a mixture of different tribes, so that the existing differences between the pre-Islamic dialects were levelled out. The new dialects in the conquered territories must have resulted from local, independent evolution. Later convergence resulted from the pervasive influence of Classical Arabic and the spreading of linguistic innovations from one, or several, cultural or political centres. These innovations were taken over by speakers accommodating to the language of prestige. Theories of convergence look upon the origin of the dialects as a polygenetic process: colloquial varieties sprang up independently in each region where the Arab armies came, hence the differences between them. As the result of later contact and convergence, they gradually became more similar to each other. In Edzard’s (1998) model for the genesis of the Semitic languages and the modern Arabic dialects, too, polygenesis is taken as the point of departure for later developments. But Edzard situates the differences in the period before the expansion of Arabic, while Cohen regards them as the products of independent evolution during the expansion. One problem with convergence models is that, while some of the similarities between the dialects within one region can undoubtedly be regarded as convergence from one cultural centre, it would be difficult to explain in this way such common features as the genitive exponent, for which each individual dialect uses a different lexical item (see below, pp. 144–6). Owens (2006) looks at the relationship between the dialects and Standard Arabic from a different perspective. In his model, the differences between the dialects, on the one hand, and Classical Arabic, on the other, were already present before the period of the expansion of Arabic. During the conquests they were exported by the Arab tribes. In his view, similarities between the dialects, even when they are geographically distant from each other, should be explained, not by a process of convergence, but by their descent from a common ancestor. Using

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comparative–historical methods he seeks to reconstruct the common ancestor of the modern dialects, which he identifies as pre-diasporic Arabic, that is, the state of the language before the period of expansion, roughly the period between 630 and 790. This variety of Arabic always coexisted with the variety that is represented by the standard language. According to Owens, in some respects the Arabic of the dialects may represent an older type of the language than Classical Arabic. A case in point is the absence of case endings in the modern dialects, which in his view is not an innovation in the language that originated in the period of the conquests, but may well go back as far as proto-Semitic. The development of case endings in some Semitic languages, such as Akkadian and Arabic, is regarded by him as a later innovation. Owens refers to the linguistic situation in Nabataean cities like Petra, where the two types of Arabic already coexisted, and claims that there is no reason to assume that in the peninsula there was only one type. Many linguists would probably agree with this distinction between two varieties in the period before Islam: a poetic language and a vernacular of the Bedouin tribes. Yet it is somewhat more difficult to accept that in claiming continuity in the transmission of the language Owens leaves the sociocultural circumstances of the acquisition process out of consideration, but relies, instead, on reconstruction. In his view, historical–comparative reconstruction provides the only valid way to measure the relationship between dialects. The statistical comparison of features in such distant varieties as West Sudanic Arabic and Uzbekistan Arabic, for instance, reveals surprising commonalities (2006: 155–65). In the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, it is usually claimed that it is related to Mesopotamian Arabic dialects. Yet, statistically, Uzbekistan Arabic turns out to have more in common with Western Sudanic Arabic. One example of this is the presence of the linker suffix -in- in participles with a pronominal object (see Chapter 15, p. 287), for example, Uzbekistan Arabic zorb-in-nā-kum ‘we have hit you’, and Nigerian Arabic kātb-in-he ‘she has written it’. From the comparison of forty-nine features, Owens concludes (2006: 155) that these two varieties have more in common with each other than with varieties that are geographically much closer to them, which means they must have a common ancestor from the pre-diasporic period, probably located in the Arabian peninsula. He links this with the migration of the Qays tribal confederation, who migrated both to the east and to the west and brought this feature with them in both areas. Whether the similarities between the dialects are the result of a common origin or a secondary process of convergence, there are many differences between the dialects, too. In the theory of polygenesis, these are regarded as the natural outcome of the independent development of colloquial varieties. The linguistic input in all regions outside the original tribal area was more or less the same (the type of speech spoken by the Arab armies), but the local circumstances differed because of the presence of other languages in the region into which Arabic was introduced. When the speakers of these languages came into contact with Arabic,

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they started speaking this new language in their own way, introducing the kind of interference that takes place in any process of second-language learning. In the course of time, these local ways of speaking developed into local dialects of Arabic, when the speakers of the original language shifted to Arabic. In the case of Berber, the original language triggering the deviations is still spoken in approximately the same area, even though some Berber speakers have now given up their own language. In such a case, it is customary to speak of an adstratal language. Interference in the realisation of Arabic by speakers of this adstratal language is to be expected. Thus, for the Algerian dialect of Djidjelli, Ph. Marçais (n.d.) traces a number of phenomena to the surrounding Berber dialects. Berber influence is first of all demonstrated by the presence of more than 150 words of Berber origin with the prefix a-, for example, agméz ‘thumb’, arīsek ‘blackbird’, aġrūm ‘bread’. The use of this prefix has spread to words of Arabic origin as well, for example, asdér ‘breast’ (Classical Arabic ṣadr), ažnéḥ ‘wing’ (Classical Arabic janāḥ), aqṭōṭ ‘cat’ (Classical Arabic qiṭṭ), aḥmír ‘donkey’ (Classical Arabic ḥimār, pl. ḥamīr). In most words the prefix may be omitted, so that both asdér and sdér are heard. The origin of the Berber prefix is obscure, but contemporary speakers seem to regard it as a definite article: when it is used in a word, it cannot be combined with the Arabic article. Marçais also mentions a few syntactic phenomena. Certain nouns change their gender under the influence of the Berber equivalents: lḥém ‘meat’, for instance, is feminine (like Berber tifi), and ržél ‘foot, leg’ is masculine (like Berber aḍar). The word má ‘water’ is plural in Djidjelli Arabic like its Berber equivalent aman. In possessive constructions with kinship names, the first word carries a pronominal suffix, for example, ḫtú ddǝ-mḥǝmmed sisterhis of-Muḥammad ‘Muḥammad’s sister’. Djidjelli Arabic also uses a presentative particle d- in sentences such as d-āna ‘it’s me’, d-buk w-úll ‘is it your father or not?’, húma d-el-ḫāwa ‘they are brothers’. This particle may have its origin in a Berber particle ḏ-, although some of its uses are paralleled in Egyptian Arabic. In the examples mentioned from Djidjelli Arabic, the Berber connection is obvious, since most of the speakers of the dialect speak Berber as well, and the phenomena concerned do not occur elsewhere. In many cases, however, the original language has disappeared completely, as in the case of Syriac or Coptic. When interference of such a language in the development of Arabic is claimed, one speaks of substratal influence. This influence is much harder to prove than that of an adstratal language. Phenomena that appear in a certain region and could in principle be attributed to substratal influence sometimes appear in other regions as well, where the substratal language concerned was never spoken. In Egyptian dialects, for instance, the interdentals have shifted to dentals, and it has sometimes been claimed that this was caused by the substratal influence of Coptic. But the disappearance of the interdentals is a widespread phenomenon in all sedentary dialects of Arabic, even in places where Coptic was never spoken. The shift from interdentals to dentals can, therefore, not be attributed to

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substratal influence alone, but must be regarded as an instance of a more general process of second-language acquisition, in which marked phonemes like the interdentals were replaced by unmarked ones, just as the emphatic or pharyngal consonants disappeared in some of the Arabic linguistic enclaves (cf. below, pp. 277, 285). A similar situation of bilingualism to that in North Africa must have existed in the Syrian area between Aramaic and Arabic, and still exists in the linguistic enclaves in the Qalamūn mountains north of Damascus where Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken in three villages around Maʿlūla. The Arabic dialects in the neighbourhood of these villages exhibit several traces of Aramaic influence. According to Arnold and Behnstedt (1993), isoglosses of possible Aramaic traits in these dialects increase in frequency as one approaches the area where Aramaic is still spoken. They conclude that for a long time, possibly until the fourteenth century, Aramaic remained the language of the entire region, but that it was gradually forced back towards its present small area. Some of the phenomena in the Arabic dialects in this region may help to clarify the question of Aramaic substratal influence in Syrian dialects. Arnold and Behnstedt show, for instance, how the personal pronoun of the third-person plural hinne, suffix -hun (Damascus hǝnne, suffix -hon) could have originated in a bilingual environment, in which the Aramaic forms hinn, suffix -hun were current. Other phenomena in Syrian dialects that have been attributed to Aramaic substratal influence include the voiceless realisation of /q/, the elision of unstressed short /u/ and /i/, and the shift from interdentals to dentals. But the general occurrence of these phenomena in many other areas of the Arabicspeaking world obviates the need for such an explanation. This is not to say that the presence of substratal languages was completely immaterial. Obviously, when speakers of a language having interdentals started learning Arabic, they had no reason to shift to dentals. But for speakers of languages like Coptic or Syriac, which had no interdentals, there was nothing in their own language to prevent them from following the general tendency of simplifying the articulation of the interdentals. In this sense, we may say that the structure of Coptic and Aramaic reinforced a change that was already taking place. In an article that appeared in 1979, Diem (1979a) follows up on all the alleged cases of substratal influence in the Arabic dialects. He allows the attribution to substratal influence only on two conditions: first, the presence of a certain phenomenon in a modern dialect as well as in the original language spoken in the region; and, second, the absence of this phenomenon in any other region. His conclusion is that in most of the alleged instances similar developments can be attested in other dialects as well, where the same substratal language was not present, so that the explanatory power of a theory of substratal influence is minimal. Only in a few cases does he concede that the structure of the language of the conquered population may have affected the development of the local dialect,

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for example, the split of the phoneme /ā/ into /å/̄ [ɒː] and /ǟ/ [æː] (or /ō/ and /ē/) in North Lebanese dialects (cf. pp. 198f.), and perhaps the elision of /a/ in open unstressed syllables in these dialects, which may have been influenced by the phonemic structure of the Aramaic dialects spoken in this area. In the case of Berber influence in North Africa, Diem mentions cases such as the affricated realisation of /t/ as [ts] and the loan pattern tafǝʿʿalǝt, but adds that it is difficult to decide whether this is an instance of substratal influence or of interference as the result of prolonged bilingualism. Of special interest are those phenomena in Yemenite Arabic dialects that are attributed to substratal influence from South Arabian. In this region, the evidence of the Modern South Arabian languages makes it relatively easy to determine substratal influence. Among the phenomena mentioned by Diem are the use of the k- perfect and the plural patterns faʿawwil/faʿāwil and fiʿwal/fuʿwal (fiʿyal/fuʿyal). In some of the Yemenite dialects, the first- and the second-person singular of the perfect verb have a suffix -k-, instead of Classical Arabic -t-, for example, katab-k ‘I have written’. This feature, which they share with the South Semitic languages (cf. above, Chapter 2), occurs in the western mountains, where according to Classical sources the Ḥimyaritic language was spoken, that is, the area of the pre-Islamic immigrants in the South Arabian region (cf. above, Chapter 4; below, p. 196; see also Map 11.1). The plural patterns faʿawwil and fiʿwal are used exclusively in some regions in Yemen: for faʿawwil, Diem cites cases such as bilād/belawwid ‘country’, kalām/ kalawwim ‘speech’, kitāb/kutawwib ‘book’. These are related to a plural pattern that exists in Mehri (qetōwel < *qetawwel), and it may reasonably be assumed that in this case the Arabic dialect borrowed the plural pattern from South Arabian during the early stages of settlement, perhaps even before the Islamic conquests. Likewise, the pattern fiʿwal occurs in the mountainous regions of Yemen where the first settlement of Arab tribes took place; the dialects in this region present forms such as ṭarīg/ṭirwag ‘street’, šarīṭ/širwaṭ ‘rope’ that are related to Modern South Arabian plurals qetwōl/qetyōl. In the majority of cases, the interference that resulted from language contact may have consisted not in the emergence of new phenomena, but in the tipping of the balance towards one of two existing alternatives. In such cases, the learners of Arabic may have been influenced by their first language in the selection of one alternative. An interesting example is that of the position of the interrogatives in Egyptian dialects. In Egyptian Arabic, there is no fronting of interrogative words, which remain at their structural position in the sentence, as in (5) and (6): (5) ʾulti da tell.PERF.2ms DEM ‘You told the teacher this’

li to

l-muʿallim ART-teacher

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(6) ʾulti ʾēh li tell.PERF.2ms what to ‘What did you tell the teacher?’

l-muʿallim ART-teacher

In other Arabic dialects, such a word order is also possible, but then it is highly marked (corresponding to English ‘you told the teacher whát!?’). Likewise, in Egyptian it is possible to say (7): (7) ʾēh (illi) ʾulti li what REL tell.PERF.2s to ‘what was it you told the teacher?’

l-muʿallim ART-teacher

Such alternatives exist in all spoken languages as discourse phenomena that have to do with emphasis, highlighting, topicalisation and so on. Speakers of Coptic were used to a language in which there was no fronting of interrogatives, as in (8): (8) ek-čō de 2ms-say TOP ‘What are you saying?’

ou what

Here the interrogative pronoun ou remains in situ at the normal position of the object instead of being fronted. When these speakers became acquainted with the two alternatives of Arabic, they were likely to choose the alternative that was more similar to their own language, even though in Arabic this was the marked option (for a similar explanation of word order in Uzbekistan Arabic, see below, p. 287). Substratal influence is not a sufficient explanation for the differences between the dialects, but neither is convergence for the common features. Typical examples of structural changes that took place in virtually all dialects, but with a different realisation, are the possessive construction and the aspectual particles. New Arabic was characterised by the disappearance of the case endings, often quoted as the most characteristic difference between colloquial and standard language. We have seen above (Chapter 4, p. 56) that there are several reasons why this process cannot be explained by purely phonetic reasons. In all dialects, the genitive case in the possessive construction was replaced by an analytic possessive construction, as in (9a,b): (9a) bayt-u l-malik-i house-NOM ART-king-GEN ‘the house of the king’ (Classical Arabic)

(9b) il-bēt bitāʿ il-malik ART-house POSS ART-king ‘the house of the king’ (Egyptian Arabic)

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In the analytic construction, the meaning of possessivity is indicated with a possessive marker, bitāʿ (also called ‘genitive exponent’), which replaces the Classical Arabic possessive construction and genitive case ending. This construction is found in all dialects, with the exception of some Bedouin dialects, but they differ with regard to the form of the possessive marker, as shown in Table 8.1. Egyptian Arabic (Cairo) Syrian Arabic (Damascus) Moroccan Arabic (Rabat) Maltese Sudanese Arabic Chad Arabic Cypriot Arabic Baghdad Muslim Arabic qəltu Arabic

bitāʿ tabaʿ dyal, dtaʾ ḥaqq hana šáyt māl līl

Table 8.1  Genitive exponents in Arabic dialects The second phenomenon of pluriform development of a common feature is connected with the loss of the modal endings. In Classical Arabic, there is a distinction in the imperfect verb between yaktubu (indicative), yaktuba (subjunctive) and yaktub (jussive). In the dialects, the morphological category of mood has disappeared, and in the singular the form is always yaktub. In most dialects, this form has acquired a modal meaning. In Egyptian Arabic, for instance, tišrab ʾahwa? means ‘would you like to drink coffee?’. For aspectual distinctions the dialects have developed a new system of markers, originally auxiliary verbs or temporal adverbs, which became grammaticalised as part of the morphology of the verbal form (see Table 8.2).

continuous/habitual

future

Syrian Arabic (Damascus) Egyptian Arabic (Cairo) Moroccan Arabic (Rabat) Iraqi Arabic (Baghdad) Yemeni Arabic (Ṣanʿāʾ)

ʿam-, bi- bi- ka- da- bi- (1st person bayn-)

raḥ(a)-, laḥ(a)ḥaġaraḥʿa- (1st person šā-)

Table 8.2  Aspectual markers in Arabic dialects In Egyptian Arabic, for instance, we find bi- for the continuous or habitual aspect, ḥa- for the future, as in (10): (10) b-tišrab ‘you are drinking; you habitually drink’ ḥa-tišrab ‘you will drink’

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In this respect, too, all dialects have gone through the same development, but again they differ with regard to the form and the scope of the markers. Most dialects have a system of two markers: continuous/habitual and future. The exact distribution of semantic functions differs in the individual dialects. In Syrian Arabic, strict continuity is expressed by ʿam-, while bi- is used for intended actions in the future (volitional) and for habitual actions. In Iraqi Arabic, da- is used for continuous/habitual actions, but the imperfect without marker is used for statements that are generally valid. In many cases, the exact etymology of the markers is unknown, but it seems to be the case that future markers often derive from verbs meaning ‘to go’ (e.g., Egyptian Arabic ḥa-, Syrian Arabic raḥ-; Tunisian Jewish Arabic maši-; Maltese sejjer), whereas continuous markers derive from the verb kāna, or from participial forms meaning ‘sitting’, ‘doing’, ‘standing’ (Syrian Arabic ʿam < ʿammāl ‘doing [intensively]’; Anatolian Arabic qa-, Maltese ʾaed < qāʿid ‘sitting’; Moroccan Arabic ka- < kāʾin ‘being’ [?]; Uzbekistan Arabic wōqif ‘standing’). In both the analytic genitive and the system of aspectual markers, we find a similar pattern: a general trend that has occurred in all Arabic dialects, and an individual instantiation of this trend in each area. Any theory about the emergence of the new type of Arabic must take into account this development. The difference in realisation precludes an explanation in terms of later convergence, because typically dialect contact leads to the borrowing of another dialect’s markers, not to the borrowing of a structure, which is then filled independently. Most theories about the emergence of the new dialects tend to look for the cause of the innovations in natural tendencies already existing latently in the pre-Islamic language. A different scenario connects the origin of the changes in the language with the acquisitional process during the conquests. Generally speaking, scholars agree that at the beginning of the Islamic era simplified varieties of the language were current. During the first centuries of Islam, Arabic was learnt by the local population as a second language in a highly unstructured way, with no formal teaching and with minimal attention to correctness and maximal attention to communicational value. During the period of bilingualism, most speakers used Arabic as a second language, whereas only a minority spoke it as their mother tongue. In such a situation, redundant forms disappear, leading to a greater degree of regularity; preference is given to analytic constructions (as in the case of the genitive exponent), and various categories are conflated in order to increase learnability. Besides, the lexicon is partially restructured, as items of lesser transparency are replaced by items that are more transparent. In such a scenario, most of the ‘initiative’ in the changes is assigned to the inhabitants of the conquered territories (see Chapter 16). Yet the consensus seems to be that these disappeared without leaving any traces. This issue hinges on the development of the standard language. If at first the acquisition process of Arabic led to a drastic restructuring of the language

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and to the emergence of simplified varieties, one must assume that at a later stage the influence of the Classical standard and, in particular, the language of the Qurʾān reintroduced many of the features of Standard Arabic that are found in the modern dialects, such as the inflection of the verb and the existence of two verbal forms. In this scenario, the population of the urban centres of the Islamic empire originally communicated with the Arab conquerors in a simplified variety of Arabic. In the linguistic melting-pot of the cities, such varieties became the mother tongue of children in mixed marriages between Arabs and indigenous women, or between speakers of different languages whose common second language was Arabic. The dissemination of Classical Arabic as the prestige language of culture and religion introduced a model that affected the linguistic situation to such a degree that between colloquial speech and standard language a linguistic continuum arose that paralleled the present-day diglossia of the Arabophone world. In this continuum, the lower (basilectal) speech levels were stigmatised and ultimately abandoned by the speakers in favour of higher (acrolectal) features. In principle, the replacement of basilectal features by acrolectal features is not an uncommon phenomenon. There is no direct evidence for such a large-scale restructuring in historical times, but to some extent the process may be compared with contemporary Classical interference, which leads to shifts in the language used by dialect speakers. For many literate speakers of Arabic, for instance, the use of the Classical genitive construction alongside the dialectal construction has become a normal part of their linguistic competence, and this use filters down to the speech of illiterate speakers. A major difference with the situation in the first centuries of Islam is, of course, the influence of the language of the mass media. A similar process takes place between dialects. In Cairene Arabic, the massive influx of dialect speakers from the countryside led to a stigmatisation of those features that Cairene Arabic at that time had in common with the countryside dialects. As a result, some of these forms have become restricted to the lower classes, and eventually they may even disappear completely. As an example, we may mention the ending of the third-person plural of the perfect verb, which was probably -um in all registers in the nineteenth century, but which is now restricted to the poor quarters of the city (cf. below, Chapter 11, pp. 206f.). Another example is the introduction of the b- imperfect in Bedouin dialects of the Negev and the Sinai. According to Palva (1991), these Bedouin dialects belong to a group of dialects that in general do not have the b- prefix, and he ascribes its occurrence in them to a process of levelling to sedentary speech. In some cases, variation may still be observed in which the b- imperfect is used in polite conversation with sedentary speakers, whereas the y- imperfect is used with fellow tribesmen. The possibility of the disappearance of basilectal speech is illustrated dramatically by recent developments in Sudan, where the pidginised and creolised variety of Arabic that goes by the name of Juba Arabic seems to have recovered some of

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the categories of ‘normal’ Arabic under the influence of the prestige dialect of Khartoum (Chapter 16, p. 307). Since our only information about the vernacular in the early centuries of Islam derives from written sources that were highly classicised, we must at least allow for the possibility that this vernacular resembled the uncontaminated form of such varieties as Juba Arabic and was later classicised to such a degree that the original structure was erased. Against the scenario of interference from Classical Arabic, various arguments have been adduced. Contrary evidence consists, first of all, of Classical features in dialects that cannot be attributed to Classical interference. Ferguson (1989) cites the case of the dual in modern dialects. Most dialects distinguish between a pseudo-dual and a ‘real’ dual. The pseudo-dual is used for paired parts of the body (hands, feet, eyes, ears) and also for the countable plurals of these words; it loses the -n- before a personal suffix. The ‘real’ dual almost always has the same ending as the pseudo-dual, but it is never used for a plural and cannot be combined with personal suffixes. In Egyptian Arabic, for instance, we have riglēn ‘feet’ as plural and pseudo-dual (with personal suffixes riglēhum, riglēki, etc.), and waladēn ‘two boys’ as a real dual. In some dialects the two duals are even distinguished formally, for instance, in Moroccan Arabic wǝdnin ‘ears’, rǝžlin ‘feet’ as against yumayn ‘two days’. The point of this argument is that the ‘real’ dual always takes plural agreement and thus cannot have been introduced from Classical Arabic. The evidence of Middle Arabic shows that when a dual is used as a classicising device, it sometimes takes feminine singular and sometimes plural agreement. Therefore, in Ferguson’s view, the distinction of two duals must be an old dialectal distinction; since they were both used for countable entities, they took plural agreement. Ferguson also signals the existence of an equivocal agreement pattern as an alternative for plural agreement. In Damascene Arabic, for instance, instead of using plural agreement between subject and predicate it is possible to say ʾǝžāna makatīb ktīr/ʾǝžǝtna makatīb ktīr ‘many letters reached us’. This pattern may seem to conform to the Classical Arabic pattern, and one might, therefore, be tempted to attribute it to interference from the standard language. Yet Ferguson believes that it cannot be regarded as a reintroduction of the standard pattern, since contrary to expectation the dialect pattern of plural agreement, ʾǝžūna makatīb ktīr, instead of disappearing, is gaining in popularity over the Classical pattern. The point of Ferguson’s argument is that it should not be taken for granted that all movement on the continuum between dialect and standard is upwards. In some contexts, it is perfectly possible that there is a movement towards the dialect pattern. In other cases, interference from the standard language leads to a redistribution of grammatical functions. In the case of the agreement in Syrian Arabic, there is probably a semantic difference in that the plural is used for countable entities, whereas the feminine singular is used for non-countable or collective plurals. In the absence of a reliable corpus of dialect speech, which would allow frequency counts, it is hard to judge the validity of this particular argument.

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A second argument against the interference of Classical Arabic calls into question the capacity of the standard language to affect the structure of the colloquial language. Diem (1978) points out that historically in most dialect areas there are two layers. The first wave of conquests led to the emergence of urban dialects with a high rate of innovation. These spread in the form of urban koines over the area immediately adjacent to the cities. The urban dialects were superseded by a second wave that was much more gradual: the steady migration of Arabian tribesmen to areas outside the Arabian peninsula. In Mesopotamia, for instance, the older layer of sedentary qǝltu dialects was partially covered by a second layer of Bedouin gilit dialects. In Lower Egypt, a sedentary dialect was introduced during the first conquests, but the countryside and Upper Egypt were Arabicised by later migrations of Bedouin tribes from the peninsula. In North Africa, the Arabicisation of most of the countryside was not accomplished until the invasion of the Banū Hilāl in the eleventh century. In Diem’s view, this second wave of Arabicisation achieved a measure of homogeneity of Arabic dialects within each area that was absent before the Bedouin immigration. Compared with the development of the Aramaic dialects, which produced widely differing Eastern and Western varieties, Arabic dialects, in spite of their differences, are remarkably uniform typologically. In Diem’s view, this is the result of convergence during the formative period, which prevented too large a deviation from the target. In this process, the Bedouin dialects that broke up the sedentary koines played a much more important role than the Classical language. Others, for instance Holes (1995a), add to these objections considerations of a sociopolitical nature: the situation in the early Islamic empire was such that simplified varieties of Arabic did not get a chance to develop into full-blown vernaculars. He assumes that in the early stages of the conquests linguistic accommodation did take place, but neither the linguistic data nor the historical record supports the existence of an environment in which the simplified varieties could be maintained over time. According to Holes, the early papyri (cf. below, p. 157) document a transitional phase on the road to standardisation, in which the linguistic norms were still unstable. In his view, the language of the papyri does not document any drastic breakdown of the language, and accordingly he opts for a gradual evolution of the language towards the present colloquial type for most speakers, while only a few professionals among the population learnt the standard language. Most people, he maintains, were not in contact with any model of the Classical language. In short, Arabic, when it was learnt, was learnt as a foreign language rather than as a makeshift variety. One way of reconciling the two views on the possibility of influence by the standard language could be to speculate that it was the second wave of Arabicisation that was responsible for the reintroduction of Classical features. The Bedouin speakers involved in the second wave of migration had not yet been affected by sedentary speech patterns and were able to impose the patterns of

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their own dialects. Secondary Bedouinisation is not an uncommon phenomenon even in more recent times, when Muslim urban populations shifted to a Bedouinised dialect, whereas the Christians and Jews stuck to their urban dialect. As for the Bedouin speakers themselves, even today some of them have managed to escape sedentary interference to some extent (cf. Chapter 10, pp. 186f.). Besides, in the course of time the scale of prestige has changed. In the early period of the Islamic conquests, the urban dialects almost certainly did not have the kind of prestige that they enjoy nowadays, so that they were not likely to affect the way of speaking of the Bedouin. At a later stage, the urban centres became the focus of Islamic civilisation and the seat of power, so that the Bedouin could hardly avoid the interference of urban speech. In general, we must conclude that too little is known about the process of classicisation to determine the extent to which it may have influenced the growth of the dialects. Since we know only the output of the process of change which Arabic underwent after it was exported from the Arabian peninsula, namely, the modern dialects, the question of interference on the part of the Classical standard is crucial if we wish to extrapolate from the structure of the modern dialects to the early vernacular varieties of the language during the first centuries of the Islamic era. On the other hand, none of the existing theories about the emergence of the new dialects – monogenesis, substratal influence, convergence, natural development, general trends – offers a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of the dialects, although each of them explains a subset of the phenomena in this process. In the present state of affairs, we have to conclude that historical linguistics alone cannot provide a satisfactory answer. Much more information is needed about the sociolinguistic context of the early Islamic empire and the pattern of settlement in each particular area. Even more help may be expected from general models to explain the evolution of languages. Further reading Many details of the Islamic conquests beyond the military account (for which see Donner 1981) are still unknown. There is no comprehensive account, for instance, of the process of Arabicisation, but see Al-Sharkawi (2010). For individual areas, we may refer to Poliak (1938, the Arabicisation of Syria), W. Marçais (1961, the Arabicisation of North Africa), Anawati (1975, the Arabicisation of Egypt), ʿUmar (1992, history of Arabic in Egypt) and Zarrinkūb (1975, the conquest of Persia). Several articles in Aguadé et al. (1998) deal with the Arabicisation of the Maghreb, in particular in the urban centres, see Lévy (1998), Cressier (1998) and Rosenberger (1998). For the role of the Bedouin in the process of Arabicisation, see Singer (1994). For the history of Persian in the Islamic empire, see Lazard (1975). An extensive survey of the common features in the modern Arabic dialects is given in Fischer and Jastrow (1980: 39–48); most of the examples from Syrian

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Arabic quoted above have been taken from Grotzfeld’s (1965) analysis of the dialect of Damascus. In view of the many conflicting theories about the emergence of the new type of Arabic, it is hardly possible to refer to an authoritative account. For a general overview, see A. Miller (1986). Owens’ (2006) theory on the linguistic history of Arabic, which was discussed in this chapter, contains a discussion of alternative models. The original theory of a monogenetic development was advanced by Ferguson (1959a) and repeated by him (1989); for a discussion of the fourteen features, see Kaye (1976: 137–70). Cohen’s article (1970) on convergence has already been referred to in this chapter (see also Diem 1978); a polygenetic model with convergence as the driving force behind the reduction of variants is applied by Edzard (1998) to the history of the Semitic languages and Arabic, see Chapter 2, pp. 16f. Diem’s survey of possible substratal changes (1979a) has been mentioned in this chapter. Some publications deal with the Coptic influence on Egyptian Arabic, for example, Sobhy (1950), Bishai (1960, 1961, 1962) and Palva (1969b); for a recent appraisal see Behnstedt (2006); on the word order in interrogative sentences, see Nishio (1996). Aramaic influence in Syrian Arabic is discussed by Arnold and Behnstedt (1993); for the issue of substratal influence in the personal pronouns in Syrian Arabic, see also Diem (1971). On Berber influence in the Arabic of Djidjelli, see Ph. Marçais (n.d.: 607–11). Versteegh’s (1984) proposal to interpret the development of the new type of Arabic in terms of a process of pidginisation/ creolisation is discussed in Chapter 16. For special topics dealt with in this chapter, we may refer to the following publications: the laḥn al-ʿāmma treatises: Molan (1978); Pérez Lázaro (1990 edition and critical study of Ibn Hišām al-Laḫmī’s treatise); for the anecdotes about the mawālī, see above, Chapter 4, p. 57; the possessive construction in the Arabic dialects: Eksell Harning (1980; partly based on written texts that contain classicisms); the aspectual particles: Czapkiewicz (1975); pseudo-dual: Blanc (1970a); agreement rules: Ferguson (1989). About variation in Juba Arabic, see Mahmud’s (1979) study on variation in this dialect; cf. also Versteegh (1993b), as well as the discussion in Chapter 16. On classicisation in Arabic dialects, see Palva (1969a).

Chapter 9

Middle Arabic

9.1  The definition of ‘Middle Arabic’ In the preceding chapters, both the development of literary Arabic and the emergence of colloquial Arabic have been discussed. A principal question that we should now address concerns the relationship between these two varieties of the language in the written production, both literary and non-literary, in early Islam. The language of many of the preserved written sources does not correspond to the form of Arabic as it was codified by the grammatical tradition. This applies both to the formal literary language of the later period and to the language of the early papyri. No grammarian, for instance, would ever use a form such as yaktubū instead of yaktubūna for the indicative of the verb, but this form regularly turns up both in the papyri and in some written texts. Since this is the form that the contemporary dialects use, the obvious conclusion is that this usage reflects the vernacular of the writer. In this chapter, we shall look at the source of the deviations from the Classical norm in written texts. In modern studies of Arabic, the collective name for all texts with deviations from Classical grammar is Middle Arabic. The term in itself has led to a lot of ambiguity, and it is essential to explain first what it does not mean. In the history of English, Old English, Middle English and Modern English are distinguished as chronological periods, and it is tempting to take the term Middle Arabic to mean a stage of the language between the Classical period and the modern period, say between 800 and 1800. As a matter of fact, some writers use the term ‘Middle Arabic’ in this way. In his handbook of Christian Middle Arabic (1966–7: I, 36), Blau stated that ‘M[iddle] A[rabic] constitutes the missing link between C[lassical] A[rabic] and modern dialects’. In later publications, however, he has modified his use of the term, in order to avoid the misunderstandings that arise when Middle Arabic is treated as an historically intermediate stage. In contemporary Arabic texts, mistakes may occur just as easily as in the Classical period, and it would therefore be a mistake to assign any chronological connotation to the term ‘Middle Arabic’. We shall see below that when we analyse mistakes in contemporary texts, these turn out to be very much like those in Middle Arabic texts from the ‘Classical’ period.

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Some people regard Middle Arabic as a discrete variety of the language, a special brand of Arabic, situated between the Classical language and the colloquial language. This is not in accordance with the true nature of these texts. Anyone wishing to write in Arabic does so with the Classical norm in mind. The amount of deviation or the distance from the colloquial varies with the degree of education of the author of the text. Thus, some Middle Arabic texts exhibit only an occasional mistake, whereas in other texts the entire structure of the language is almost colloquial. But even in the most extreme cases of colloquial interference the texts still cannot be regarded as truly dialectal, because they continue to be approximations of Classical Arabic, albeit with a lot of colloquial features thrown in. When in 1888 Landberg edited one of the first Middle Arabic texts to be published, he was convinced that he had found in the story of Bāsim a true specimen of Egyptian dialect. In reality, it is easy to see that although some of the passages of the story really sound Egyptian, in most cases its author was not able to escape, and probably did not even want to, the norms of written Arabic. But the novelty of finding dialectal expressions in a written text was still such that it is easy to understand why Landberg believed that this story had been recorded in ‘real’ dialect. In every linguistic community, there is a certain distance between the colloquial language and the written norm, in spelling, lexicon and even in structure. But in those communities in which there is an institutionalised relationship between a high and a low variety (called ‘diglossia’; see below, Chapter 13), the distance between the written standard and normal everyday speech is very large. If in such a community the average level of education is low, access to the written language remains severely restricted. At the same time, the use of the written medium is automatically linked with the acceptance of the written norm: if one wishes to write in Arabic, one has no choice but to submit to the written norm. The problem is, of course, that the level of the written standard language is beyond the reach of most people. As soon as they start writing in Arabic, they make mistakes, which in many cases originate in their spoken language. An example is the merger of the two Classical phonemes /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ into colloquial /ḍ/, which leads to spelling errors such as ʿaḍīm instead of ʿaḏ̣īm ‘great, mighty’ or ḍabyun instead of ḏ̣abyun ‘gazelle’. An example from the domain of morphology is the disappearance of the modal endings of the imperfect verb in dialect, which makes it difficult for people to know when to use the indicative yaktubūna ‘they write’ and when to use the subjunctive yaktubū. This induces them to use the colloquial form yaktubū in all contexts. It would be wrong to suppose that every deviation in a written text is colloquial. Since people know that there is a difference between written and spoken language, they make a conscious attempt to write correctly, but in doing so sometimes overreact using forms that are neither colloquial nor standard. In the case of the modal endings just cited, for instance, the correct form in the jussive

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is lam yaktubū ‘they did not write’, but in their fear of colloquial interference people sometimes use lam yaktubūna in order to show that they are not illiterate. A parallel error involving the spelling of /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ consists in writing ḏ̣araba instead of ḍaraba ‘to he hit’. Such errors are called ‘pseudo-corrections’. Usually two categories are distinguished: hypercorrections and hypocorrections. In the example given above, we have an instance of a hypercorrection: in correcting the dialectal forms, the writer exaggerates and ends up using a form that is ‘too Classical’. In hypocorrections, on the other hand, the correction is incomplete. In Middle Arabic texts, the usual verbal form to refer to a dual subject is the plural, for example, ar-rajulāni yadḫulū ‘the two men [dual] enter [plural]’. When this form is corrected incompletely, it becomes yadḫulā, which is neither colloquial nor Classical Arabic (yadḫulāni). A further example of incomplete correction occurs when the writer inverts the order of the sentence to make it more Classical, but leaves the dual form instead of changing it into a singular as in Classical Arabic yadḫulu r-rajulāni. The use of pseudo-corrections is not limited to written speech. Since the written standard also serves as the model for formal elevated speech, in modern times one finds many examples of pseudo-corrections in speech (Chapter 13). Egyptian speakers, for instance, are very much aware of the correlation of Classical /q/ with colloquial /ʾ/ (glottal stop). When they wish to appear educated, they tend to replace every glottal stop with /q/, not only in those words that in Classical Arabic contain /q/, but also in those words that never had /q/ in the first place. Thus, one might even hear forms such as qurqān for qurʾān. Apart from deficient knowledge of the standard, manifesting itself in plain errors and pseudo-corrections, deviations in written language from the standard norm may have another source. Because of the large distance between spoken and written language, it is difficult to represent a lively dialogue between real people in written language. In modern Arabic literature this is a much-debated problem, and it must have existed in the Classical period as well, in particular, in stories that were intended to be read to a larger audience. As a result, in such text types there was always a tendency to enliven the dialogue with dialect words or even dialect constructions. In the aforementioned story of Bāsim (Landberg 1888), for instance, we find in a conversation between the Caliph Hārūn ar-Rašīd, his vizier Jaʿfar and his eunuch Masrūr the following expressions, that add to the couleur locale. First, the vizier says to the caliph: yā ʾamīr al-muʾminīn Masrūr ʿammāl yaqūlu lī rubbamā ʾanna l-malika jāʿa isʾalhu r-rujūʿ li-s-sarāya ‘O, Prince of the Believers, Masrūr keeps telling me “perhaps the Caliph is hungry, ask him to return to the palace!”’

To this Masrūr says: ʾanā qultu laka wallā ʾanta bi-taqūlu lī qūl lahu ‘Did I say that or were you saying that to me? Tell him!’

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And the caliph says:

mānīš jūʿān ḫallūnā natafarraj ‘I am not hungry; let’s have a look!’

All participants in the conversation use colloquial expressions: continuous imperfects with an aspectual prefix (ʿammāl yaqūlu, bi-taqūlu), li- instead of ʾilā, wallā for Classical ʾam, nominal negation mānīš. In telling the story, the narrator doubtless adapted to the colloquial pronunciation even more (ʾinta, bi-tʾūl, ʾultíllak, nitfarrag, etc.). Obviously, the writer knew very well what the correct Classical expressions were, but he chose to use the colloquial ones in order to amuse his audience. In some cases, one has the impression that he deliberately has someone deliver a sentence in Classical Arabic ending with a colloquial word in order to increase the humorous effect. One may be sure that the audience had to laugh when such lofty personages were speaking in what they recognised as Egyptian colloquial. In the Syrian version of the same story, the Egyptian colloquialisms were dutifully replaced by Syrian forms. In another story of the same type, that of the Doctor and the Cook (Nöldeke 1891), the deviations are clearly not intentional: wa-hāḏihi l-jusūra marākib murabbaṭīn fī baʿḍihim al-baʿḍ wa-tamšī n-nās ʿalayhim li-yaqḍūna ʾašġālahum … wa-baynamā huwa fī ḏāt yawm yatafarraj fī l-ʾaswāq fa-jtāza ʿalā dukkān ṭabbāḫ ‘These bridges were ships that had been tied together and the people crossed them in order to go about their business … and one day when he was looking through the markets, he came upon a cook’s shop.’ (Nöldeke 1891: 14)

In this story, it is apparent that the author attempts to write in Classical Arabic, but is unable to observe the rules of the standard language consistently. Thus, for instance, he refers to the plural jusūra sometimes with a feminine singular and sometimes with a masculine plural, he uses the indicative instead of the subjunctive of the verb after the conjunction li-, and gets into trouble with the complicated reciprocal expression baʿḍuhā fī baʿḍ. In the temporal sentence with baynamā, he tries to enhance the Classical character of his language by introducing the main clause with fa-. The author of this text does not bother to insert dialecticisms for humorous reasons. There may be a third reason for the presence of deviations in a Middle Arabic text, connected with the use of Middle Arabic as a written in-group language in the Classical period. Since for Christians and Jews the model of the language of the Qurʾān was not as powerful or as authoritative as it was for Muslims, they felt much freer than Muslims did to use colloquial forms in their written language. In this sense, it is legitimate to speak of Jewish Middle Arabic (or Judaeo-Arabic) and Christian Middle Arabic as special languages, in much the same way that the in-group language of the early Christians in the Roman Empire may be called Christian Latin or Christian Greek. While it is true that the term ‘Middle Arabic’ may be used for texts that are found as early as the seventh century and as late as the twenty-first century, it

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is also true that most studies of Middle Arabic concentrate on texts from the Classical period. This is because these texts are often used in attempts to reconstruct the emergence of the dialects. The presupposition here is that the use of colloquialisms in the texts reflects a diachronic development in the spoken language. However, because of their nature, the Middle Arabic texts have only limited value for historical linguistic research. The mixture of spoken/written language depends on the individual author’s abilities and inclinations, so that the presence or absence of a certain feature does not tell us anything about the actual situation in the vernacular. Because of this individual character, the increased frequency of a feature over time does not necessarily correlate with a development in the vernacular, but only signals a change in the linguistic norms. The fact that the analytical genitive does not occur in early texts but is used increasingly often in later texts does not reflect an increased use of this construction in the vernacular, but an erosion of the norm that proscribed the use of such a form in writing. Besides, as we have seen, some of the deviations in the texts stem from a different source: pseudo-corrections, forms that never existed in either variety of the language. This is not to say that we cannot use the evidence of Middle Arabic texts, but it should be done with care. From the confusion of ḍ and ḏ̣ in Middle Arabic texts, we may draw the conclusion that these two phonemes had merged in the vernacular, but the texts provide us only with a terminus ante quem, that is, we know that this feature existed at the time of writing the text, but we do not know for how long it had been present in the vernacular. This conclusion even applies to the very few examples of vocalised transcriptions of Arabic into other scripts, of which the best-known example is that of a psalm translation in Greek letters that was edited by Violet. The text, a translation into Arabic of Psalm 78 probably dating from the beginning of the ninth century, is unique in that it provides us with some clues about the pronunciation of the vowels in this period. It exhibits, for instance, the loss of short vowels at the end of words, for example, oamithl raml elbou.chour (wa-miṯl raml al-buḥūr ‘and like the sand of the seas’). The ʾimāla of the a/ā in certain environments is clearly visible, for example, fá.dat (fāḍat ‘it overflowed’) and faou.kag.at (fa-waqaʿat ‘and then it fell’) as against fasélet (fa-sālat ‘and then it poured out’), ken (kāna ‘it was’) and geb (jāba ‘he brought’). There are some indications that the Arabic represented here had taltala, that is, the prefix vowel -i- in the imperfect instead of Classical -a-, for example, in the form lam iechfa.dou (lam yaḥfaḏ̣ū ‘they did not preserve’), in which the e probably does not represent ʾimāla, because of the following ḥ, but i > e. The form semig (samiʿa ‘he heard’) possibly indicates a change faʿila > fiʿil. But the language of the translation itself is not particularly colloquial, and the author of the transcription must have had a written example, since the article is transcribed in an unassimilated form, for example, elturáb (at-turāb ‘the dust’), and the vowel of the hamzat al-waṣl, which is dropped in pronunciation, is retained

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in the transcription, for example, fa.ankalebou (fa-nqalabū ‘and then they turned away’). There were also transcriptions in other scripts, for instance, in Coptic, Syriac, Iranian, Latin, Hebrew, Armenian and South Arabian, but most of these transcriptions date from later periods and are therefore not very helpful in any reconstruction of the pronunciation of Arabic in the earliest period. In section 9.3 below, on Jewish Middle Arabic, we shall mention the transcription of Arabic into Hebrew, and in section 9.4, on Christian Middle Arabic, Arabic texts in Coptic letters will be discussed. 9.2  Muslim Middle Arabic There is one category of texts that stands apart from all other categories to be mentioned here, namely, the large corpus of papyri. The earliest manuscript copies of Classical Arabic texts, literary and non-literary alike, date from the third century of the Hijra. Since they may contain adaptations and corrections by scribes or copyists, it is hazardous to draw any conclusions from them about the state of the language at the time the texts were composed. The papyri, however, are original documents. It has been estimated that more than 16,000 papyri have been preserved and a total of more than 33,000 items written on paper; there is, moreover, a very large collection of texts written on other materials (leather, wood, coins, glass and so on), as well as a corpus of inscriptions. The earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Hijra (two papyri and a Greek– Arabic bilingual; cf. Sijpesteijn 2013: 119, 231, 235f.). For the period between years 54 and 70 of the Hijra, the archives of Nessana (Nitsana, a Nabataean site in the Negev) have produced as many as a hundred Arabic papyri and many fragments (Stroumsa 2008). In the archives of Aphrodito (present-day Kūm Išqāw in Upper Egypt) a large number of papyri has been found, dating from the end of the first century of the Hijra and containing official correspondence with the governor of Egypt. From the end of the first century of the Hijra, there is a steady increase of papyri, the largest number dating from the third century of the Hijra, after which they gradually disappeared. Most of the papyri stem from Egypt, most of them were written by Muslims, and most of them contain non-literary (administrative or commercial) texts. The significance of the papyri lies in the fact that their language exhibits more or less the same traits as later Middle Arabic texts, which confirms the fact that from the very beginning these changes had been present in colloquial language. On the other hand, the colloquial interference should not be exaggerated, since the language of the papyri is never free from the influence of the Classical norms. In view of the purpose of most of these documents, this is not surprising: they were written by official scribes (i.e., people who had had some kind of education) for official purposes, and their bureaucratic language contains many stereotyped

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formulae. Thus, for instance, when we find that in the papyri the internal passive is used rather frequently or that the negative lam is quite common, this does not mean that people used the passive in everyday speech. Such forms are typical examples of Classical markers (not only then but still today!). This is also confirmed by the abundant occurrence of pseudo-corrections in the papyri, for instance, the use of the accusative ʾalif in nominative position, the verbal ending -ūna after lam, etc. There are no instances of analytic genitives or ­aspectual ­particles, but this is not unexpected, since such forms belonged to the most informal register of speech. Apart from the papyri, various categories of pre-modern Middle Arabic texts may be distinguished. Among the best known are fairytales of the Arabian Nights (ʾAlf layla wa-layla) type. Most of these stories originated in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and the manuscripts date from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In the form in which we have them, they have undergone a literary adaptation, and the colloquial elements represent a conscious attempt to enliven the narrative. Most printed editions have ‘corrected’ the text in the manuscripts according to the standard norm, but the most important collection, that of the Arabian Nights, is now available in a critical edition by Muḥsin Mahdī (1984), based entirely on the manuscripts. As an example of this style, we quote from another collection of similar stories the following passage, again with the caliph, his vizier and his eunuch as protagonists. It illustrates the dialogue style with a number of colloquial traits (use of the negation mā, imperatives imḍī, jī; feminine gender of ḫātam ‘ring’; asyndetic use of a hypotactic clause with ʾaṣlaḥ): fa-qāla r-Rašīd: ḏālika l-Malīḥ man huwa? ʾaḫbirnī bihi! fa-qāla: yā mawlānā mā yanfahim kalām Masrūr? fa-qāla: imḍī izʿaq bihi! fa-qāla Masrūr: mā ʾamḍī ʾilayhi, fa-qāla r-Rašīd: yā Jaʿfar, udḫul bi-llāh wa-ʾabšir man huwa llaḏī qad ḍaraba Masrūr wa-hāḏihi ḫātamī imḍī bihā ʾilayhi wa-jī bihi! fa-qāla Jaʿfar: yā mawlānā Masrūr yajī ʾaṣlaḥ! ‘Ar-Rašīd said: “Who is this Malīḥ? Tell me about him!”. He said: “My Lord, are Masrūr’s words not understood?” He said: “Go and frighten him!” Masrūr said: “By God, I’m not going!” Ar-Rašīd said: “Jaʿfar, by God, go in and see who it is that hit Masrūr; here is my ring, take it to him and bring him!” Jaʿfar said: “My Lord, it is better for Masrūr to go”.’ (Wehr 1956: 386.12–15)

The Arabian Nights differ from real folktales in that the latter stem from an oral tradition of folk poetry and folktales, told by professional storytellers wherever people were gathered in the marketplace. Presumably, these stories were originally told in the vernacular. When they were written down later by interested collectors, they did not escape the influence of the standard norm, so that in their present form they cannot be regarded as examples of pure colloquial speech. Many of these stories are still extant in manuscript form, especially in the libraries in Moscow and Cambridge. Throughout history, poets have sometimes used the medium of colloquial Arabic to express their feelings. This led to some kind of literary vernacular

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rather than a true reflection of the colloquial as it was spoken by the poet and his audience. Such poems have been preserved, for instance, from the Iraqi poet Ṣafī d-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. c. 1350), who provides valuable evidence for the reconstruction of fourteenth-century Iraqi Arabic, for example, the sound shift r > ġ, the use of the ending -ūn in the imperfect verb, and the use of fard as an indefinite article (Levin 1975). The poems of the Egyptian poet ʿAlī ibn Sūdūn al-Bašbuġāwī (d. 868/1464) contain a large number of Egyptianisms, for example, undeclinable relative illī, demonstrative dī (but always before the noun, never in postposition as in modern Egyptian), imperfects with the continuous marker bi-, and many colloquial nouns. One remarkable trait of the preserved autographs of Ibn Sūdūn’s work is that they use many vowel signs; this makes it possible to trace the working of ʾimāla, for example, in the feminine ending in ṭubaylih ‘little drum’ (Vrolijk 1998: 143). It may be added that in one poem Ibn Sūdūn mimics the speech of a hunchback from Baghdad who pronounces r as ġ, for example, ġabbī, šāʿiġ instead of rabbī ‘my lord’, šāʿir ‘poet’ (Levin 1975: 266). It is obvious that these poets were perfectly aware of the interdialectal differences. Yet Vrolijk (1998: 136–7) is certainly right when he emphasises that these texts cannot be regarded as a faithful rendering of the colloquial language of the poet’s time. Dialect poetry was particularly popular in the Maghreb, where it even infiltrated Classical poems. In the genre known as muwaššaḥa, it became customary to add a refrain in the colloquial language, either the Arabic colloquial or in some cases the Romance language spoken in Andalusia (the so-called jarchas; cf. below, Chapter 17, pp. 315f.). In the types of texts mentioned thus far, the colloquial elements were connected with their literary or narrative function. In Arabic scientific treatises, however, when the topic is exclusively technical and of no interest to the general intellectual elite, the colloquial elements are more or less accidental. In the fields of medicine or pharmacology, or in the field of the technical sciences such as mathematics, astronomy or mechanics, the author was less constricted by the norms of the Classical language, and, if he preferred to follow the rules of his colloquial speech instead, nobody blamed him. In such texts, as in those texts whose author deliberately chose a more informal medium of expression, deviations from the Classical norm are widespread, but pseudo-corrections are seldom found. As an example of ‘educated’ Muslim Middle Arabic, we quote here a passage from the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ (d. 584/1188): fa-lammā waṣalnā ʿAsqalān saḥaran wa-waḍaʿnā ʾaṯqālanā ʿinda l-muṣallā ṣabaḥūnā l-ʾIfranj ʿinda ṭulūʿ aš-šams fa-ḫaraja ʾilaynā Nāṣir ad-Dawla Yāqūt wālī ʿAsqalān fa-qāla: irfaʿū, irfaʿū ʾaṯqālakum, qultu: taḫāfu lā yaġlibūnā l-ʾIfranj ʿalayhā? qāla: naʿam, qultu: lā taḫāf, hum yarawnā fī l-barriyya wa-yuʿāriḍūnā ʾilā ʾan waṣalnā ʾilā ʿAsqalān, mā ḫifnāhum; naḫāfuhum l-ʾān wa-naḥnu ʿinda madīnatinā? ‘When we came to Asqalon at daybreak and we put down our luggage at the prayer site, the Franks came on us at sunrise. Nāṣir ad-Dawla Yāqūt, the governor of Asqalon, came to us and said: “Take up, take

160  The Arabic Language up your luggage!” I said: “You’re afraid the Franks will take them away from us?” He said: “Yes!” I said: “Don’t be afraid! They saw us in the desert and kept up with us until we came to Asqalon. We didn’t fear them then, so shall we fear them now that we are near our city?”’ (ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ, Kitāb al-iʿtibār, ed. Qāsim as-Sāmarrāʾī, Riyadh, 1987, pp. 38–9)

In this fragment, we find the kind of language that could be expected from an ‘Arab gentleman’ like ʾUsāma, who had studied grammar without becoming a purist. He had no qualms about leaving out accusative endings, using verb– subject agreement, using ʾayy šayʾ (i.e., ʾēš) instead of mā, connecting verbs with hypotactic clauses asyndetically, and using the imperfect verb ending -ū instead of -ūna. In his writing, he maintained a colloquial flavour without losing touch with the standard language, and felt free to bend the grammatical rules without appearing illiterate. The common feature between this kind of Middle Arabic and the texts mentioned above is the presence of deviations from standard grammar. But pseudo-corrections are completely absent from the prose of ʾUsāma and other writers like him. 9.3 Judaeo-Arabic As we have seen above, Middle Arabic is not a special variety of the language, but a label for a category of texts with deviations from the Classical standard language. When Jews and Christians write in Arabic, however, it is legitimate to regard their language as a special variety, since their brand of written Arabic became a special in-group form of the language, a new norm. The Jewish variety of Middle Arabic is often indicated with the special name of ‘Judaeo-Arabic’. At the beginning of the Islamic conquests, the language of the Jews in the conquered territories was Aramaic; Hebrew was their language of religion and poetry, but was not used as a spoken language. We do not know when the colloquial language of the Jews became Arabic, but it must have been rather early. The first literary works written in Arabic by Jews date from the ninth century, and most of the non-literary documents date from the period after the year 1000. The majority of them have been found in the Geniza, the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. Since for Jewish speakers of Arabic the Classical standard served as less of a constraint, their written version of the language exhibited more colloquial features. These are not to be regarded as mistakes or signs of deficient knowledge. Maimonides (d. 1204), for instance, uses a flawless type of Classical Arabic in letters to Muslims, but when he writes to his co-religionists his language contains many of the features found in other Middle Arabic texts. The written Arabic of Jewish authors is characterised by two special features: the fact that it is written in Hebrew script; and the presence of a large number of Hebrew loans. The representation of the Arabic phonemes by Hebrew letters is strictly a system of transliteration, that is, every character of the Arabic text

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is represented by a Hebrew character on a one-to-one basis. Since the Hebrew alphabet has fewer letters than the Arabic, some adjustments were needed. The most ingenious invention of the Jewish scribes is their use of Hebrew allophones for Arabic phonemes. In Hebrew, most stops have a fricative allophone in certain environments, indicated by the absence of a dot in the letter (the so-called dāgēš), for example, the Hebrew dālet with a dot indicates d, and without a dot its allophone ḏ; similarly, tāw indicates t/ṯ, kāf indicates k/ḫ and so on. In transcribing Arabic words, the scribes used these letters with dots to represent Arabic ḏ, ṯ, ḫ (in the manuscripts the dot is often omitted, so that the script retains a certain ambiguity). For those letters with which this device did not work, they used the letters for Hebrew voiceless sounds, and provided them with a dot: in this way, ṣādē with a dot was used for Arabic ḍād, and ṭēt was used for ḏ̣āʾ. The fact that the scribes distinguished between ḍād and ḏ̣āʾ suggests that we are dealing here with a strictly written tradition, since in pronunciation both phonemes had merged. Likewise, the scribes faithfully rendered the Arabic article, even when it was assimilated, as well as the otiose ʾalif in the Arabic plural perfect katabū. There are traces of an earlier stage in which the transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew took place on the basis of the spoken language. Although most JudaeoArabic texts date from the period after the year 1000, we have a few ninth-century Judaeo-Arabic papyri from Egypt, written in a transcription not influenced by the orthography of Classical Arabic. The most significant feature is that both Arabic ḍ and ḏ̣ are transcribed with Hebrew dālet, which for the scribes must have been the closest phonetic equivalent available. Moreover, the Arabic article is always represented in its assimilated form. This means that originally the scribes used a transcription system that was based on the conventions of their own Hebrew/ Aramaic script applied to an oral form of Arabic. After the year 1000, this system was replaced by a system based entirely on the Arabic script, possibly because of the influential position held by the Arabic translation of the Pentateuch by Saadya Gaon (882–942 ce), in which these conventions are used. There are a few early texts in which the Arabic vowels are consistently transcribed with Hebrew Tiberian vowel signs. In a fragment of Saadya’s translation of the Bible (Levy 1936: 18), the declensional endings are indicated, as befits a Bible translation, but other short final vowels have been elided. Noteworthy are the strong ʾimāla (e.g., mūsē for Mūsā, Allēhi for Allāhi), as well as the -i- in the relative pronoun illaḏī (allaḏī), the conjunction wi- and the article il. The reason behind the use of Hebrew letters is the special position of the Jews in the Islamic empire. Although generally speaking they were emancipated, and as ḏimmīs lived under the protection of the caliph and could freely exercise their religion, the social barriers between Jews and Muslims were considerable, and no doubt they remained a special group. The use of their own alphabet reinforced this in-group feeling. Many Arabic texts were either transcribed by them in Hebrew letters or translated into Hebrew.

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The second feature that sets the Judaeo-Arabic texts apart from the rest of Middle Arabic literature is the extensive use of Hebrew loans. Through the use of these loans, the language of Jewish literary and scientific writings became in fact incomprehensible or unfamiliar to Muslims. Thus, although structurally Judaeo-Arabic is quite similar to Muslim Middle Arabic or to Christian Arabic, the presence of Hebrew words immediately marks a text as having been written by a Jewish author. The use of Hebrew words is not restricted to the written language only, as we know from the evidence of the modern Judaeo-Arabic dialects, for instance, the Arabic of the Jews of Tunis, or that of the Jews who emigrated from Iraq to Israel. In their colloquial speech, one finds many Hebrew words, especially in typically Jewish domains such as religion and worship. In some Judaeo-Arabic texts, Hebrew passages alternate with Arabic ones, for instance, in explanations of the Talmud, where first the Hebrew (or Aramaic) text is quoted and then explained in Arabic. But exclusively Arabic passages also abound in Hebrew words. When Hebrew words are used in their Hebrew form, that is, not as loans but as instances of code-switching, they are integrated syntactically; in most cases, however, the Hebrew words are also integrated phonologically and morphologically, thus showing that they have become part of an Arabic vocabulary. The writers of Judaeo-Arabic were aware of equivalences between Hebrew and Arabic, and this enabled them to Arabicise Hebrew words, for instance, by shifting them from the Hebrew hitpaʿēl measure to the Arabic tafaʿʿala, or from the Hebrew hifʿīl to the Arabic ʾafʿala: hitʾabbēl becomes taʾabbala ‘to mourn’, hisdīr becomes ʾasdara ‘to organise a prayer’. Hebrew verbs may be inflected as Arabic verbs, for example, naḥūšū ‘we fear’ (< Hebrew ḥ-w-š ‘to fear’ with the Maghrebi Arabic prefix of the first person plural n-…-ū). Hebrew substantives may receive an Arabic broken plural, for example, rewaḥ, plural ʾarwāḥ ‘profits’ instead of the Hebrew plural rǝwāḥīm; sēder ‘order of the Mishna’, Hebrew plural sǝdārīm, receives an Arabic plural ʾasdār; maḥzōr ‘prayer book for the festival’, Hebrew plural maḥzōrīm, receives an Arabic plural maḫāzīr. The Arabic article replaces the Hebrew article sometimes even when the entire context is Hebrew, thus demonstrating the fact that al- was regarded as an integral part of the Hebrew words, for example, bēt al-kneset ‘the synagogue’ or al-bǝrīt qodeš ‘the holy covenant’. There is one text from the Cairo Geniza in which the Arabic components are written in Arabic and the Hebrew ones in Hebrew, so that it is easy to see which elements were regarded as Hebrew. In this text, the combination of Arabic article with Hebrew noun is written in Hebrew characters. As an example illustrating the mixed character of Judaeo-Arabic, we may quote from Blau (1965: 152; Hebrew written words underlined) the phrase al-ʿiqār wǝ-ʾaf ʿal gab ʾin lam yuktab šǝṭār ‘the immovable property, in spite of the fact that no note was written’. The ad hoc character of the use of Hebrew words instead of Arabic words is demonstrated in texts in which both alternatives are used in an arbitrary pattern;

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thus, we may find in one line zawj ṯānī ‘a second husband’ and in the next baʿluhā ṯ-ṯānī ‘her second husband’, or dīney gōyīm ‘laws of the Gentiles’ alternating with maḏhab al-gōyīm. This happens even with proper names, so that the same person may be indicated within one text alternating as Šǝlomoh ben Dāwid and Sulaymān ibn Dāʾūd. Most of the integrated loanwords, but by no means all of them, belong to the sphere of religion and religious practice, for which there were sometimes no corresponding Arabic words. It is difficult to distinguish regionally defined categories within the group of Judaeo-Arabic texts. In the first place, the use of written Arabic by Jews tended to become conventionalised, and a kind of standard Judaeo-Arabic developed all over the empire. In the second place, the patterns of migration among the Jews in the Islamic empire often disturbed the picture, so that, for instance, Egyptian Jews wrote in a markedly more Maghrebi Arabic than their Muslim compatriots. Finally, as in all varieties of Middle Arabic, even Judaeo-Arabic could not escape entirely the attraction of the Classical standard. 9.4  Christian Middle Arabic Just as was the case for Judaeo-Arabic, texts in Arabic written by Christians were much less influenced by the Classical standard than those written by Muslim writers. The majority of the texts stem from the southern Palestinian area, including the Sinai. Many of the texts are preserved nowadays in the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai. A special characteristic of Christian Arabic literature is the fact that most of the texts are translations from either Greek or Syriac, and only a very few were written originally in Arabic. This adds, of course, to the peculiar quality of the language of these texts and at times makes it difficult to distinguish between regular phenomena of interference by the vernacular of the writer, on the one hand, and interference due to the translation, on the other. The translations were often rather literal, using loan constructions from the Greek or Syriac original. Such constructions no doubt sounded awkward in Arabic, but they could become productive in the idiom of Christian Arabic writers in the same way that the Bible translations in European languages to a large extent influenced the stylistic and idiomatic development of these languages in spite of the fact that they contained calques from the original Greek or Hebrew text. Christian Arabic documents go back to an earlier date than the Jewish Arabic documents, sometimes even to the eighth century. In this period, Aramaic was still a living language, and many of the Christian writers were bilingual in Aramaic/ Syriac and Arabic, so that their use of Arabic may even reflect direct interference from their first language. Some of the texts are written in Syriac characters, known as Ḫaršūnī texts, and there is one in Greek characters, the famous psalm fragment mentioned above (p. 156). There are even a few texts that have been preserved in Coptic characters (cf. below).

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Among the Christian Middle Arabic texts, translations of hagiographic texts, for instance, vitae of Christian saints, homilies and sermons, and patristic texts constitute the most important category. A considerable number of Bible translations existed, both of the Old and the New Testament, but it is doubtful that these go back to pre-Islamic times, as has sometimes been maintained, since they contain the type of pseudo-corrections that belong to the period in which there was a codified linguistic norm. A number of texts were originally written in Arabic and are not translations of a Greek or Syriac original; most of these concern Christological treatises by Arab Christians, for instance, the treatises by Theodore ʾAbū Qurra (d. ± 820). Non-literary texts by Christians include historical texts, for instance, the chronicle of Agapius (tenth century) and the Taʾrīḫ al-ʾābāʾ al-baṭārika by Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr (eleventh century). In the South Palestinian texts from the eighth century onwards that were used by Blau in his grammar of Christian Arabic, some features are conspicuously absent. Blau specifically mentions the near-absence of the genitive exponent in these texts. In these older texts, the norm of the standard language was still more or less adhered to, and some features do not make their appearance until much later, when the norm had been eroded. In a Christian Arabic text written in Coptic script and dating from the thirteenth century, we find clear traces of colloquial pronunciation, but in spite of the fact that it was written in a foreign orthography the syntax and part of the morphology are still Classical, and the presence of several pseudo-corrections shows the inclination of the author towards the standard language. Although this Coptic text, possibly a vita of Saint Pachomius, does not exhibit many deviations from Classical Arabic, it is a fascinating document of thirteenth-century Arabic because of the spelling of the vowels. The ʾimāla is very pronounced, a/ā are consistently transliterated as e, except after an emphatic or guttural consonant, for example, wekefeh (wāqifa ‘standing’), seha (sāʿa ‘hour’), bemexafet (bi-maḫāfa ‘in fear’). Since the article is written with e even before emphatic consonants, as in essora (aṣ-ṣūra ‘the picture’), we may assume that it transliterates colloquial il- rather than Classical al- with ʾimāla. The vowel e is also used for unstressed i/u, which were probably elided and reduced as in the modern dialects, for example, eššeyoux (aš-šuyūḫ ‘the old men’). A striking feature of the text is the use of a suffix -en, sometimes written as an independent word, which is used after indefinite nouns, regardless of their syntactic function in the sentence, to indicate that they are connected with an attribute, as in khen mehellemen ǵarib (kāna muʿallim ġarīb ‘there was a strange teacher’), be meskhenethen hazimeh (bi-maskana ʿaḏ̣īma ‘in awful poverty’), rojol en kaddis ebsar (rajul qaddīs ʾabṣara ‘a holy man saw’). This suffix is probably derived from the Classical nunation, but it has become a new marker that serves as the connection between indefinite noun and attribute. In this function, it resembles the tanwīn markers in modern Arabic Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula (cf. below, Chapter 11, p. 193).

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As we go to later Christian texts, we find phenomena that demonstrate a clear neglect of the Classical norm. For an example of an analytic genitive in a manuscript, we may refer to a vita of Saint Menas dating from the eighteenth century: bi-l-ḥaqīqa lā budd hādihi l-ʾaʿḍā min aš-šuhadāʾ bitāʿinā ‘indeed, these bones must belong to our martyrs’ (Jaritz 1993: 452.6). The vita of Saint Menas is preserved in many versions, most of which contain an abundance of pseudocorrections, for example: fa-lammā mašayat fī l-barriyya waḥdahā wa-hiya bi-l-qurb min bayʿat al-qiddīsa Tikla naḥwa mayl wa-lam yakūn ʾaḥadan min an-nās yamšī maʿahā wa-ʾidā bi-jundī min ḥurrās aṭ-ṭarīq qad daḫala fīhi š-šayṭān jamīʿ ʾaʿṭāhu fa-masakahā wa-qāla lahā: ʾilā ʾayna māḍiya? fa-ḍannat ʾannahu yaḥmil alladī ʾaḫadathu maʿahā fa-qālat lahu: ʾanā māḍiya yā sayyidī ʾilā bayʿat aš-šahīd al-ʿaḏ̣īm ʾAbū Mīnā ‘When she was going in the desert all alone and came near the church of Saint Thecla, approximately one mile, and nobody was walking with her, and lo, there was a soldier from the guardians of the road, in all whose limbs the devil had gone, and he grabbed her and said to her: “Where are you going?” She thought that he was going to carry away the things she had taken with her and said to him: “I am going to the church of the great martyr ʾAbū Mīnā”.’ (Jaritz 1993: 416)

In this text, we find several instances of pseudo-correct accusatives, incorrect verbal forms (mašayat, lam yakūn), use of ʾanna instead of ʾan, colloquial construction of the participle without subject (māḍiya), and a real jumble in the orthography (sometimes ḍ for ḏ̣, sometimes ṭ: ḍannat, ʾaʿṭāhu = ʾaʿḍāʾihi, and a fairly consistent replacement of all tāʾ marbūṭas with tāʾ (on the other hand, ḍannat is spelled with tāʾ marbūṭa!). These examples show, on the one hand, that Christian writers did feel restricted by the Classical standard (otherwise they would not have been tempted to use pseudo-corrections), and, on the other hand, that in some respects the standard had become more lenient than before (otherwise no analytical genitives would occur in these texts). In the explanatory texts on Coptic icons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although these belong to the religious domain, one finds elements that are conspicuously absent from contemporaneous Muslim Arabic texts, for instance, the use of the bi- imperfect. 9.5  Contemporary Middle Arabic Depending on the definition of ‘Middle Arabic’, contemporary texts in a mixed style may be regarded as a special category, or they may be included in the category of texts that has been discussed so far. Paradoxically, with the spreading of education the number of people with some degree of schooling in Standard Arabic has increased immensely. There is a large number of semi-literates, people who are able to write simple messages, but lack the skills to write the language correctly according to the strict rules of grammar. When these people write

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Arabic, they tend to make the very same mistakes that one finds in the Middle Arabic texts of the Classical period. The most obvious feature of both Classical and contemporary texts is their variation and inconsistency, which underscores the fact that these texts are not written in a discrete variety of the language. An incorrect form in one sentence may be repeated correctly in the next, the word order may vary between the colloquial and the standard order, the agreement rules of Classical Arabic are applied in one sentence and neglected in another, within one and the same sentence reference to two persons may be made in the dual and in the plural, and so on. In the usual definition, the term ‘Middle Arabic’ also includes literary texts with dialectal elements, such as the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ. There is a large difference, however, between the mixed literary texts of the Classical period and examples from modern literature. After the period of the Nahḍa (cf. below, Chapter 12), the use of colloquial elements in literary texts became a permanent issue in any discussion between intellectuals in the Arab world. In Egypt, the emphasis on ‘Egyptianisation’ stimulated some writers to experiment with the diglossic reality of their language. Some writers felt that the use of dialect in dialogues was unavoidable when reporting the speech of illiterate people, and started using a combination of standard and colloquial. Although educated people, too, use dialect in their everyday speech, there was a general feeling that it would be improper to have them speak like that on paper. After the initial attempts to integrate dialect and standard in literary texts in the early part of the twentieth century, the shift towards pan-Arabic nationalism in most Arab countries turned the use of colloquial elements in literature into a controversial option. Even those writers who had used dialect in earlier publications, such as Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987), publicly regretted their transgressions and reverted to the use of a pure standard. Two points are to be noted here. First, even those writers who were determined to write in colloquial Arabic could never escape completely the influence of the written language. Thus, the language of their writings is hardly ever an example of ‘pure’ colloquial speech. Very often, the use of dialect amounts to no more than the insertion of colloquial markers (cf. also below, Chapter 13). Second, literary writers have an intimate knowledge of Classical Arabic, and their use of colloquial language is always intentional. Thus, in their writings there are no examples of pseudo-correction due to lack of grammatical education. This kind of Middle Arabic is therefore much more akin to those Middle Arabic texts in which colloquial elements are used for the purpose of couleur locale. Some contemporary Arab authors pride themselves on being able to write theatre plays in ‘pure’ colloquial speech, whereas in reality they have adopted a literary form of the dialect. Admittedly, contemporary Egypt is farthest in this direction, since the position of the dialect in Egypt is different from that in other Arab countries. But even in Egypt, written dialect is not identical with spoken dialect,

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and theatre plays have to be ‘translated’ into ‘real’ colloquial Egyptian before they can actually be staged. An interesting parallel is the use of colloquial colouring in formal radio speech. Sometimes the speaker in a radio programme, in order to create an intimate atmosphere, tries to transform the (written) text serving as the basis for the broadcast into a dialect text with the help of dialect markers. Take the following example from the beginning of a programme for housewives: fī ʾakbar magalla nisāʾiyya fī ʾurubba ʾarēt dirāsa ʿan il-marʾa; dirāsa ġarība wi-mufīda, wa-ʾayḍan musīra; li-ʾannáha tikallim ʿan is-sirr ʾallaḏī yagʿal il-marʾa šaḫṣiyya lā tunsa, šaḫṣiyya mā ḥaddiš ʾabadan yiʾdar yinsāha ‘In the largest women’s weekly in Europe I read an article about women; a strange and useful article, and also touching; because it speaks about the secret that makes a woman into an unforgettable personality, a personality that nobody can ever forget’ (Diem 1974: 71)

In this example, the speaker tries to use dialect – and apparently feels that she is actually speaking dialect – but at the same time it is clear that the original version of her speech is in Standard Arabic: the construction with ʾakbar, the use of ʾayḍan, the use of the conjunction li-ʾannahā, and the phrase with an internal passive (lā tunsa), which is paraphrased in its entirety. This example shows the strength of the standard model in formal settings: even when speakers make a deliberate effort to speak dialect, they will always unconsciously revert to Classical patterns. An interesting parallel may be found in official Dutch brochures for the Moroccan minority. For ideological reasons, the policy in the Netherlands was to use the Moroccan dialect. In actual practice, this led to the insertion of a few markers, whereas the structure of the text remained decidedly Standard Arabic. As an example, we quote the following sentence from a brochure about taxes in the Netherlands from the 1980s: kamā taʿrifūna ʾinna l-ʾajnabī ka-yitlaqqā kaṯīr aṣ-ṣuʿūbāt wa-t-taġayyurāt fī l-ḥayāt dyālo wa-bi-l-ḫuṣūṣ maʿa l-ʾawlād ʾillī ka-yimšiw li-l-madrasa; wa-li-hāḏā fa-min al-wājib ʿalaykum bāš taʿrifū n-niḏ̣ām wa-kayfiyyat at-taʿlīm fī hūlandā ‘As you know, a foreigner encounters many difficulties and changes in his life and in particular with the children that go to school; therefore, it is necessary for you to know the system and the nature of education in Holland.’

In spite of the obvious attempts at writing Moroccan dialect (aspectual prefix ka-; genitive exponent dyāl; conjunction bāš; the verbal form ka-yimšiw, spelled ), the translator of this originally Dutch text obviously could not escape Standard Arabic phraseology and structure of the sentence (although, of course, the transcription used here masks some of the dialectal features that would come out in pronouncing the text). In the rest of the text, there is a constant vacillation between dialectal and standard forms that shows the inability of the translator to avoid classicisms.

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It is certainly not current usage to call a text such as the one just quoted ‘Middle Arabic’. Yet there is an unmistakable similarity between these contemporary examples and the texts discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter. The common denominator in all instances of mixed language and at all levels of written production is the centripetal force of the standard language. Whether authors deliberately use colloquial features or simply fail to attain the level of grammatically correct speech, they always remain within the framework of the standard language. Mejdell (2012a) compares the linguistic features commonly occurring in Middle Arabic with the ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ style that is becoming increasingly popular in formal spoken Arabic (see Chapter 13, p. 248). Mejdell believes that in some respects Middle Arabic and ‘mixed style’ are similar, but points out a number of significant differences. The degree of variation within spoken speech produced in mixed style is the same as in Middle Arabic texts, even when speakers explicitly aim for such a style as target. The inventory of variants is, however, much smaller than in Middle Arabic. Moreover, in ‘mixed style’, pseudo-corrections occur much less frequently than in written texts. The most likely explanation for this difference is that speakers of such public discourses are educated and perfectly aware of both the standard and the vernacular register, which they skilfully manipulate. The writers of Middle Arabic texts, on the other hand, are very often semi-literate and lack knowledge of the grammar of the prestige variety. The classification of contemporary written dialect as Middle Arabic is tantamount to rejecting these literary products as evidence of ‘genuine’ dialect literature. This label represents them as attempts to use vernacular elements while remaining within the sphere of influence of the standard language. Such attempts at using the vernacular might still be viewed within the perspective taken in this chapter, that is, viewing dialect features as a means to enliven the dialogue. However, when writing in the vernacular becomes a really ideological issue, that is, when people are convinced that dialect may be used in written production on the same footing as Standard Arabic, or perhaps even as a replacement, a paradigm shift might take place. In Lebanon, the short-lived experiment in writing Lebanese Arabic with Latin characters by Saʿīd ʿAql (b. 1912) might still be seen as part of the sectarian conflict in Lebanon. But there can be no doubt that written dialect is gaining a much wider visibility, not only in Egypt, but also in other countries. In Egypt, after the first experiments at the end of the nineteenth century and the vivid discussions in the 1960s about the use of dialect in literature and especially in the theatre, the acceptability of dialect as a medium for literature seems to be taken more or less for granted. At least two journals, the monthly news magazine Barti and the weekly Iḍḥak li-d-Dunyā, are mentioned by Davies (2006) as examples of media that regularly publish contributions in vernacular. The use of vernacular language has become common, not only in the theatre, but also in autobiographies, novels and even in expository prose. In a

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contribution to the international conference on language in Morocco at Agadir in 2011, Hoogland (2013) discussed the use of written Moroccan dialect in public life and literature. He mentioned three journals (Ḫbar bladna, al-ʾAmal and Nichane), which for a limited period of time were published in Moroccan Arabic, two of them with systematic vernacular vocalisation. But he concluded that one of the reasons that these journals had to be closed down after a number of years was the lack of interest and prestige of the vernacular. In one case, the author of an editorial that quoted the Moroccan king in vernacular, was even arrested on a charge of lèse majesté! The contribution of social media to the promotion of written dialect can hardly be overestimated (see Chapter 12, pp. 237f.). Moreover, it is undeniable that in the course of events in the Middle East, and particularly the events leading up to and accompanying the Arab Spring, a number of developments have taken place that have changed the situation considerably. An interesting example is the Egyptian version of Wikipedia, wīkīpīdiyā maṣrī, which was established in 2008. The fluid character of texts in Wikipedia contributes to the high degree of variation in its language. Panović (2010) points out that even though the professed aim of the contributors to the Wikipedia masry is the promotion of the Egyptian language as an independent variety in its own right, its language remains influenced by the norms of the standard. In particular in those lemmas that are ‘translated’ from the Arabic Wikipedia into Egyptian, the underlying structure of the text is Standard Arabic, which has been ‘colloquialised’ by a number of devices, e.g., the replacement of the fifth measure of the verb by the vernacular form (taḫarraja > itḫarraj ‘to graduate’) or the use of the abbreviated form ʿa- of the preposition ʿalā ‘on’. In some articles, the rather frequent use of nominal constructions and ḥāl accusatives betrays the influence of the fuṣḥā. Nonetheless, this initiative represents a daring attempt to introduce the colloquial language in the realm of scholarly discourse. We may also point at the increased use of transcription to represent Arabic. In mobile phone messages and in chat room discussions a system of transcription with Latin and numerical characters has become popular under the name of arabish or ʿarabīzī, for example, the use of 9 for qāf, 5 for ḫāʾ and 3 for ʿayn. All these elements may contribute to a greater acceptability of non-standard written language. Whether this will eventually lead to the emancipation of the vernacular language and the emergence of national languages remains to be seen. Perhaps, it is still too soon to decide what further developments may be expected. The degree of political cohesion in the Arab world will decide whether national standards will develop. The emergence of the Romance languages instead of Latin as national languages in Europe shows that in order for dialects to become standard languages, political and geopolitical realities must change first. In the Arab world, dialects will continue to be used in the production of written speech, but the products of this process will continue to be affected by the real standard.

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Further reading A bibliography of publications on Middle Arabic is in Lentin (2009, 2012). The best general introduction to Middle Arabic is still Blau (1965); see also Lebedev (1977). In numerous articles, Blau has defined the character of Middle Arabic (e.g., 1972–3, 1981); especially worth reading is his terminological discussion of the term ‘Middle Arabic’ (1982), in which he admits that his earlier use of the term erroneously assumed that Middle Arabic is a speech variety rather than a sociolinguistic label to indicate a category of texts. The important subject of hyperand hypocorrections is dealt with by Blau (1965: 27–34, 1970). A reprint of Blau’s most important articles on the subject of Middle Arabic was published in Blau (1988). For Muslim Middle Arabic the papyri are an important source; an introduction to the study of the papyri is in Grohmann (1966). For the languages in the Nessana archive, see Stroumsa (2008: 185–213). The language of the papyri is analysed by Diem (1984) and Hopkins (1984); on the sociolinguistic context of the Egyptian papyri, see Sijpesteijn (2013). A checklist of the Aphrodito papyri was compiled by Sijpesteijn, available at: http://www.ori.uzh.ch/isap/isapchecklist.html. Older studies on texts in Muslim Middle Arabic include Schen (the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ, 1972–3) and Müller (1884; the language of Ibn ʾAbī ʾUṣaybiʿa’s biographical lexicon of medical scholars). Of primary importance is the critical edition of the Arabian Nights by Mahdī (1984): most of the preceding editions consisted in an adaptation of the text to Classical norms and did not give an insight in the real language of the texts. On folktales, see Lebedev (1993); on the colloquialisms in the work of Ṣafī d-Dīn al-Ḥillī, see Levin (1975); on those in the work of ʿAlī ibn Sūdūn, see Vrolijk (1998: 137–59); on colloquial poetry in al-ʾAndalus, see Corriente (1980) and Zwartjes (1997). For Middle Arabic in Syrian texts from the Ottoman period, see Lentin (1997). For the dictionary of Egyptian Arabic by Yūsuf al-Maġribī (d. 1019/1611), see Chapter 10, p. 174. The best manual for Judaeo-Arabic is Blau (1965); it contains a large appendix about the Hebrew element in Judaeo-Arabic, as well as an appendix on the characteristics of Muslim Middle Arabic. An anthology of texts in Judaeo-Arabic was published by Blau in 1980. On the early orthography of Judaeo-Arabic, see Blau and Hopkins (1984). On Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch, see Dikken (2012). Gallego (2006) analyses the Judaeo-Arabic elements in the work of Yonah ibn Janāḥ (eleventh century), a Hebrew grammarian from al-ʾAndalus. For Christian Arabic, Blau (1966–7) is fundamental; an older publication on the language of Arabic texts written by Christians is Graf (1905); on the literature of the Arab Christians, see Graf (1944–66). The Arabic psalm translation in Greek letters was edited by Violet (1902); see also the remarks in the section on phonology in Hopkins (1984: 1–61). The text in Coptic letters was edited partially by Casanova (1902) and fully by Sobhy (1926); for an analysis, see Blau (1979). An

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edition of the vita of ʾAbū Mīnā (Menas) and analysis of its language is in Jaritz (1993). The Arabic of the Bible translations is studied by Bengtsson (1995) on the basis of the translation of the Book of Ruth. A series of studies by Grand’Henry (1984, 2012) analyses the Middle Arabic elements in the tenth-century Arabic version of the sermons of Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390). On the language of CoptoArabic historiography see den Heijer (1989, 2009). Mejdell (2012b) discusses the appropriateness of comparisons between Middle Arabic from the classical period and contemporary mixed styles in written Arabic. On the older stages of the controversy about the use of dialect in literature, see Diem (1974: 96–125); for a more recent summary, see Davies (2006). Woidich and Landau (1993) produced ʾAḥmad il-Fāṛ’s farces in Egyptian dialect from the beginning of the twentieth century, with extensive notes on their language. Analysis of a work in contemporary colloquial Egyptian (Saʿd ad-Dīn Wahba’s theatre play Il-wazīr šāl it-tallāga) is in Malina (1987). A list of dialect words in Egyptian literature was compiled by Vial (1983). Written Egyptian Arabic in public life is discussed by Borg (2007). Examples of playful use of mixed styles in so-called fuṣḥāmmiyya is presented by Rosenbaum (2000). On Saʿīd ʿAql and his proposal for a new alphabet to write Lebanese Arabic, see Plonka (2004). For the most recent developments in written Moroccan, see Hoogland (2013). For the use of transcription in the social media, see Palfreyman and al Khalil (2003).

Chapter 10

The Study of the Arabic Dialects

10.1  The Study of the Arabic Dialects In the preceding chapters, we have concentrated on the features that the Arabic vernaculars or dialects have in common as against the Classical Standard language. In that context, we have shown that they represent a different type of Arabic, rather than just a modified version of the Classical language. In this chapter and the next the focus will be on differences between the dialects, in particular, the geographical variation and the separation into several dialect areas. The issue of the sociolinguistic variation between the dialects and the standard language will be reserved for Chapter 13. The systematic study of dialect geography is a typical invention of Western European nineteenth-century linguistics. But it would be wrong to suppose that the Arabs themselves were not aware of the variation in speech in the Arabophone world. We have seen above that grammarians accepted the variation in the pre-Islamic dialects and even collected the variants, because in their view these belonged to the corpus of pure Arabic speech (p. 45). They were not interested, however, in the urban dialects that arose all over the empire. In accordance with their views on the Arabic language, they regarded these as erroneous and refrained from mentioning them in their writings. But those outside the grammatical tradition did show an interest in the linguistic differences between the various parts of the empire and their causes. At an early date, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) informs us that ‘the people in the cities talk according to the language of the Bedouin immigrants that had settled there, which is why you find lexical differences between the people of Kūfa and Baṣra and Syria and Egypt’ (wa-ʾahl al-ʾamṣār ʾinnamā yatakallamūna ʿalā luġat an-nāzila fīhim min al-ʿArab, wa-li-ḏālika tajidu l-iḫtilāf fī ʾalfāḏ̣ min ʾalfāḏ̣ ʾahl al-Kūfa wa-l-Baṣra wa-š-Šām wa-Miṣr) (al-Bayān wa-t-tabyīn, I, ed. as-Sandūbī, Beirut, n.d., p. 38). In Kūfa, he adds, the immigration of Persians to the city brought in a number of Persian words: the inhabitants of this city say jahār-sūj (Persian čahār ‘four’ + sū(j) ‘road’) where the Basrans say marbaʿa for a crossroads, and they use words such as ḫiyār instead of qiṯṯāʾ ‘cucumber’, and wāzār instead of sūq ‘market’ (Persian ḫiyār, bāzār). The books of Arabic geographers and travellers sometimes inform us about different pronunciations and lexical variation in the areas they

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visited. The most extensive description of regional linguistic differences in the Islamic empire is given by al-Muqaddasī (d. 335/946) in his Kitāb ʾaḥsan at-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-ʾaqālīm (The Best Arrangement for the Knowledge of the Regions). For all the provinces visited by him, he systematically discusses their linguistic peculiarities and supplies a list of lexical and phonetic regionalisms. In other writers, the emphasis is on the social distribution of linguistic features. Ibn Ḫaldūn (Muqaddima, ed. Beirut, n.d., pp. 558–9) has a chapter dedicated to the differences between sedentary and Bedouin speech, entitled ‘The language of the sedentary population and the city-dwellers is an independent language, differing from the language of Muḍar’ (fī ʾanna luġa ʾahl al-ḥaḍar wa-l-ʾamṣār luġa qāʾima bi-nafsihā li-luġa Muḍar). He explains that the way in which city people talk differs essentially from the language of the Jāhiliyya (the language of Muḍar, the ancestor of the Qurayš through whom they traced their descent from ʿAdnān, the ancestor of all northern Arabs) and from the language of the contemporary Bedouin, for instance, by their omitting the declensional endings, a phenomenon called by the grammarians laḥn. Each region has its own dialect, the Eastern dialects differing from the Western dialects, and the Andalusian dialect being different from both. As we have seen above (p. 138), Ibn Ḫaldūn ascribes the changes in the Arabic language to the contact with the population of the conquered territories, and in this connection he again correlates the differences between the various dialects with the presence of other ethnic groups. Thus, the peculiarity of the dialect of the Maghreb is explained by him with a reference to the Berber presence: ‘it has become a different language, a mixed one, in which the foreign language dominates’ (wa-ṣārat luġa ʾuḫrā mumtazija wa-l-ʿAjamiyya fīhā ʾaġlab). Similarly, he says, the contact with speakers of Persian and Turkic has brought changes to the dialects spoken in the Islamic East. In one passage, the historian demonstrates that he is very much aware of the peculiarities of Bedouin speech: One of the phenomena that happen in the contemporary speech of these Arabs, wherever they dwell, is their special way of pronouncing the q. They do not pronounce it at the place of articulation of the urban people, as it is mentioned in the books on Arabic, namely between the back of the tongue and the opposite point of the upper palate. They do not pronounce it at the place of articulation of the k, either, which is somewhat lower than the place of the q on the tongue and the upper palate, but they pronounce it at a place that is somewhere in the middle between the q and the k. (wa-mimmā waqaʿa fī luġa hāḏā l-jayl al-ʿarabī li-hāḏā l-ʿahd mā kānū min al-ʾaqṭār šaʾnuhum fī n-nuṭq bi-l-qāf fa-ʾinnahum lā yanṭuqūna min maḫraj al-qāf ʿinda ʾahl al-ʾamṣār kamā huwa maḏkūr fī kutub al-ʿarabiyya ʾannahu min ʾaqṣā l-lisān wa-mā fawqahu min al-ḥanak al-ʾaʿlā wa-mā yanṭuqūna bihā ʾayḍan min maḫraj al-kāf wa-ʾin kāna ʾasfal min mawḍiʿ al-qāf wa-mā yalīhi min al-ḥanak al-ʾaʿlā kamā hiya bal yajīʾūna bihā mutawassiṭatan bayna l-kāf wa-l-qāf) (Muqaddima, p. 557)

This is an accurate description of one of the best-known differences between Bedouin and sedentary speech, the realisation of /q/. We have seen above

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(Chapter 7, p. 120) that in Sībawayhi’s description of the qāf, it is classified as a voiced (majhūr) phoneme. Ibn Ḫaldūn does not mention that most sedentary dialects realised it as a voiceless phoneme, but emphasises the difference in place of articulation. In grammatical texts, one looks in vain for any reference to such variations in speech. When in the nineteenth century European scholars started to become ­interested in the colloquial varieties of the Arabic language (cf. above, Chapter 1, pp. 6f.), this new trend did not always meet with approval in the Arab countries themselves. Since the dialects were a non-prestigious variety of the language, interest in their structure for its own sake was regarded as suspect. An exception is the situation in Egypt, where an interest in lexical regionalisms can be witnessed as early as the sixteenth century. In his dictionary entitled Daf al-ʾiṣr ʿan kalām ʾahl Miṣr (The Removal of the Burden from the Language of the People of Egypt), Yūsuf al-Maġribī (d. 1019/1611) intends to record the way in which Arabic is spoken in Egypt. He criticises some of the ‘errors’ that Egyptians make, but even when he disapproves of these ‘errors’, his examples are a precious source of information about early Egyptian Arabic: The people in Egypt, including some of the elite, say without thinking, for instance fulān ʾad huwwā ʿamal kaḏā ‘someone acted like this’ or ʾad huwwā jā ‘look, he came’. There is no way of correcting such an expression; what they mean is hā huwa or hāḏā huwa. (an-nās fī Miṣr yaqūlūna ḥattā baʿḍ al-ḫawāṣṣ bi-ġayr fikr fulān ʾad huwwā ʿamal kaḏā ʾaw ʾad huwwā jā maṯalan hāḏihi l-lafḏ̣a lā ḥīla fī taṣḥīḥihā wa-murāduhum maʿnā hā huwa ʾaw hāḏā) (Yūsuf al-Maġribī, Ḍafʿ al-ʾiṣr, ed. Zack, Leiden, 2009, f. 3b)

It would be wrong to assume that Yūsuf intended to write a dialect grammar; one could say, though, that he defends the Egyptian version of Classical Arabic, because whenever it is possible to find a Classical origin for a regional expression, he accepts it. In the nineteenth century, however, even in Egypt many people felt that the role of the Classical language as the uniting factor in the Arab world was threatened by too much attention to the dialects, symbols of the fragmentation of the Arab world. There was some truth in this suspicion, since the colonial authorities have been known to actively promote the use of the dialect. In Algeria, for instance, the French for some time outlawed the teaching of Classical Arabic, which was replaced by the Algerian dialect, and in Egypt the British authorities actively supported experiments by Orientalists to replace the Arabic script with the Latin script as a medium for the Egyptian dialect. As a result, dialectology became associated with the divisive policy of the colonial authorities, and the dialectologist was regarded as a tool of imperialism. In addition, orthodox circles condemned any attempt to study the dialects as detrimental to the language of the Qurʾān. In the modern period, it remains difficult in the Arab world to arouse interest in the dialects as a serious object of study. Many speakers of Arabic still feel that the dialect is a variety of language without a grammar, a variety used by children

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and women. Even in universities there is a certain reluctance to accept dialect studies as a dissertation subject. This is not to say that there are no Arab dialectologists. Many Arab linguists have applied their expertise to their native dialect, and some of the best dialect monographs have been written by Arab linguists. But on the whole, one may say that the study of dialectology still suffers from the drawbacks mentioned here. Apart from the ‘political’ problem in Arabic dialectology, researchers are also confronted by a general problem of dialectological research, that of the observer’s paradox. This is not a specific problem in the study of Arabic dialects, yet the study of these dialects is particularly affected by it. Researchers are always faced by a paradox in that they wish the speakers of the dialect to speak as informally as possible, but it is precisely the attention to their speech that forces the speakers to upgrade their dialect and talk as ‘correctly’ as possible. In a situation of diglossia (see Chapter 13), this ‘observer’s paradox’ is even more intense than elsewhere, since there is a constant temptation for the speakers to move upwards on the speech continuum, even without the presence of a dialectologist. The result is manifest in a considerable number of dialect monographs and collections of dialect texts with traces of classicising. Dialect grammars often state, for instance, that the dialect has two ways of expressing possession, one with the Classical Arabic construct state and another with the analytic genitive. Such a statement is true as a synchronic observation, since many speakers indeed use the Classical construction because of the prestige of the standard language. But from a diachronic point of view, it would appear that the Classical construction is an intruder in the structure of the (sedentary) dialects. The degree of emphasis one places on the presence of both constructions in the dialect partly depends on the informants: when dialectologists choose to talk to the learned men of a village, they are bound to receive a highly upgraded kind of dialect in return. Incidentally, the grammatical descriptions often ignore the fact that the coexistence of the two constructions may bring about a new differentiation in function. In some dialects, the two possessive constructions have come to mark the opposition between alienable and inalienable possession (for instance, in Egyptian Arabic laḥmi ‘my flesh’/il-laḥm ibtāʿi ‘my meat’). The upgrading of local dialect forms does not always have to take the form of classicisms. In cases of competing forms, informants will often choose the one that is identical with the prestige dialect, either a local one or, more often, the dialect of the capital. This applies even to those instances where the prestige form is not identical with the Classical form, whereas the local form is. In areas where an interdental and a dental reflex of Classical Arabic /ṯ/ compete, the former is often avoided because it is associated with rural or Bedouin dialects, even though it is generally used in Qurʾānic recitation. Likewise, in some areas in the Egyptian Delta, the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ are avoided in conversations with outsiders and replaced with Cairene /ē/, /ō/.

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One particularly striking example of this phenomenon is mentioned by Holes (1987: 74–6). Both in Kuwait and in Bahrain, the standard dialect realisation of Classical /j/ is /y/. In Kuwait, upgrading leads to the replacement of /y/ with /j/, which sounds more literate. In Bahrain, however, there is a Shiʿite minority that consistently uses /j/. As a result, Sunnites in Bahrain never use /j/ in upgrading, because this variant is associated with the non-prestige Shiʿite dialect, in spite of the fact that in Qurʾānic recitation they do use /j/ themselves. 10.2  The classification of the dialects Dialect atlases remain the most important tool for dialect geography and dialect classification. At the moment, atlases are available for only some of the areas of the Arabophone world. The oldest atlases were made of the Syro-Lebanese area by Bergsträßer (1915) and of the area around Ḥōrān and Palmyra by Cantineau (1940, 1946), a remarkable achievement for that time. In the modern period, the geographical distribution of the Egyptian dialects of the Šarqiyya was studied by Abul Fadl (1961), and a complete atlas of all Egyptian dialects (except Cairene) was produced by Behnstedt and Woidich (1985, 1987, 1988, 1994). Behnstedt also produced an atlas of the North Yemenite dialects (1985, 1992), and an atlas of the Syrian dialects (1997). In Tunisia, a large-scale project to establish an Atlas linguistique de la Tunisie (ALT), headed by Taïeb Bacouche, was initiated in 1997 to record all dialectal variation in Tunisia on the basis of questionnaires. Other projects are in various stages of execution, such as the Atlas linguistique des parlers du nordouest marocain (Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat), the Atlas linguistique du Maghreb, for which a questionnaire has been designed (Caubet 2000–1), and the Atlas of the Arabic Dialects Spoken in Northern Israel (Talmon 2002). For other areas in the Arabic-speaking world, there are partial maps and dialect monographs, but on the whole the dialect map of the Arabophone world exhibits large blank spaces, especially so in the case of the Arabian peninsula. Even in the case of Egypt, our knowledge of varieties other than Cairene Arabic was sketchy until fairly recently. With the help of dialect maps the distribution of certain features over an area is reproduced by means of isoglosses, imaginary boundaries drawn on the map. Their value depends to a great extent on the density of the points on which information is available. Typically, these isoglosses occur in bundles, and when the bundle is strong enough – that is, when enough features roughly share the same boundaries – it becomes possible to distinguish between dialect areas that differ markedly from other areas. This phenomenon is best seen in the case of geographical obstacles such as mountain ranges, which act as a boundary between areas. In traditional dialect geography certain isoglosses have always been perceived as more important than others (e.g., the voiced versus unvoiced realisation of /q/). There is, however, no a priori reason why one isogloss should be selected as the main basis for classification rather than others. The choice of isoglosses

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as distinguishing markers determines the classification of the dialects. In recent dialect geography new methodologies have been introduced to avoid the problem of assessing the relative weight of isoglosses. In these dialectometrical methods all variables have an equal weight. They are used in combination to calculate the linguistic distance between points on a dialect map, and from this a new map is constructed that visualises the relationship between dialects (Behnstedt and Woidich (2005: 106–35). One of the objections to dialectometrical methods is the indifference of this method towards the nature of the variables. However, it turns out that it is usually enough to calculate the linguistic distance on the basis of a limited number of variables. According to Behnstedt and Woidich, the number of necessary variables lies between 200 and 300, after which the addition of more variables does not change the map substantially. One important result of such maps is that they visualise the isolated position of some dialects. In a comparison of the dialects of the Egyptian oases (Behnstedt and Woidich 2005: 107–18), for instance, the dialectometrical maps show clearly the isolated position of the dialect of Farafra within the dialects of the oases, and that of Daḫla East within the dialects of the Daḫla oasis. Most dialect maps focus on phonological or morphological features. Classifying varieties on the basis of lexical items may, and often does, lead to results that differ from the usual classification. Until recently, lack of resources made it difficult to assess lexical variation. The word atlas by Behnstedt and Woidich (2011, 2012) seeks to remedy this by presenting all the available evidence in the form of lexical maps covering the entire Arabic-speaking world. This Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte has been set up onomasiologically, that is, classified according to the meaning of the lexical items. The first volume, dedicated to humans and nature, contains maps on items such as ‘widow’, ‘thief ’, ‘gecko’ and, of course, the famous ḫōḫ (WAD I, 502–7), often adduced as an example of lexical variation by speakers of Arabic: in the Levant it means ‘prune’, in Egypt ‘peach’ and in Mauritania ‘apricot’. The second volume deals with material culture. Unlike traditional lexical investigations, the authors do not limit their maps to agricultural items, but also include modern items, such as ‘gas station’ or ‘mobile phone’. The latter (WAD II, 467–8) nicely illustrates the creation of neologisms as well as the influence of English and French: in Egypt maḥmūl is becoming old-fashioned and is increasingly replaced by mūbayl (English mobile); in Iraq and Libya naqqāl is used, in Saudi Arabia jawwāl, but in Morocco poṛṭabl (French portable) is the most popular designation (cf. p. 234). The synchronic record of a dialect map represents innovations as clear-cut phenomena that are either present or absent, but at the same time, it allows one to infer something about the diachronic development of the area. Very often maps tell us something about the relative chronology of the features, since as a rule the periphery of the area preserves the oldest features, that have not yet been reached by innovations from the prestige dialect of a cultural or political centre. The existence of transitional zones demonstrates the gradual introduction

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Map 10.1  Pronominal prefixes of the first person of the imperfect verb in the Egyptian Delta (after Behnstedt and Woidich 1985: map 211) of innovations. On the dialect maps, this is visualised in the form of an accumulation of phenomena (terrace landscape, or in German Staffellandschaft, see Behnstedt and Woidich 2005: 160–3). One example is that of the ʾaktib/niktibu dialects in the Egyptian Delta. All dialects of the Maghreb are characterised by the prefix n- of the first-person singular of the imperfect verb. This is one of the most frequently cited isoglosses in Arabic dialectology, which divides the Western from the Eastern dialects. Moroccan Arabic has nǝktǝb/nkǝtbu ‘I write/we write’, whereas Eastern Arabic, for instance, Syrian Arabic, has ʾǝktob/nǝktob. The n- prefix is also found in Maltese Arabic and in those sub-Saharan dialects that derived from a North African variety. The borderline between the Western and the Eastern dialects lies in the Egyptian Delta. There are two competing explanations for this development. The first explanation posits a change in the singular nǝktǝb, which is explained as contraction of the personal pronoun with the verb: ʾanā ʾaktubu → naktubu; in this explanation, the plural is regarded as an analogous formation on the basis of the new singular. The second explanation starts from the plural form nkǝtbu, which is explained as an analogous formation to the forms for the second- and the third-person plural tkǝtbu, ikǝtbu, the singular form being a secondary development. The dialect map of the Delta shows that between the two areas there is an area with ʾaktib/niktibu, which makes the latter explanation much more likely (see Map 10.1).

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Another example is that of the pronoun of the first-person singular in Yemenite dialects (Behnstedt 1985: 9, map 38): in one area both the independent pronoun and the suffix are gender-neutral (ʾana/-ni), more to the west there are a few areas where the independent pronoun has a masculine form ʾana and a feminine one, ʾani; finally, in the Tihāma both the independent pronoun and the object suffix have two forms (ʾana/ʾani and -na/-ni); in the latter area the suffix -na was no longer available for the first-person plural, which changed to -iḥna, as in the dialect of the Egyptian oasis of Farafra (cf. below, p. 182; see Map 10.2). When a feature reaches a certain area, it will not affect mechanically every single item that it encounters. In many cases, for instance, an innovation spreading from an urban centre to the countryside will first affect the most frequent vocabulary

Map 10.2  Pronominal suffixes of the first person in the Yemenite dialects (after Behnstedt 1985: map 38)

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items, thus creating a split in the vocabulary. The historical circumstances of the contact between both areas will determine the subsequent development. Lexical variation in the Arabic dialects was used by Cadora (1992) to analyse the ecolinguistic variation, that is, the diffusion of urban variants in Bedouin/rural speech. He distinguishes various stages: first, contrastive lexical items are replaced by adapted urban ones, for example, in Ramallah Arabic ḫūṣa ‘knife’ is replaced by siččīne, with Bedouin affrication, and eventually, the urban form sikkīne is taken over without any adaptation (1992: 111). Cadora sees the rate of diffusion as an index of the speed of urbanisation. When contact becomes permanent, eventually the innovation will spread across the entire lexicon. But when the innovatory influence is withdrawn in mid-course or when loyalty towards the local dialect acts as a counter-influence, the non-affected items are left in their original state, so that from a diachronic point of view the vocabulary gives the impression of a ‘mixed’ nature. In most Arabic dialects, a certain amount of ‘mixing’ took place during the second stage of Arabicisation when Bedouin tribes from the Arabian peninsula spread across the Islamic empire. The resulting contacts between sedentary and Bedouin speakers affected the lexicon in particular. In Uzbekistan Arabic, for instance, the usual realisation of Classical /q/ is voiceless /q/, but there are a few words containing a Bedouin voiced /g/, for example, gidir ‘pot’, giddām ‘before’, galab ‘to turn around’. This phenomenon is widespread over the Arabophone world. In Moroccan sedentary dialects, for instance, that of Rabat, a few lexical items have Bedouin /g/, as in Uzbekistan Arabic, for example, gǝmḥ ‘wheat’ (Classical Arabic qamḥ), gǝmṛa ‘moon’ (Classical Arabic qamar), gǝdra ‘pot’ (Classical Arabic qidr), gǝṛn ‘horn’ (Classical Arabic qarn). It may be added that, inversely, in Bedouin dialects with the realisation /g/, there are usually some lexical items with /q/, for instance, in the Moroccan dialect of Skūra qbǝṛ ‘grave’ (Classical Arabic qabr), qbīla ‘tribe’ (Classical Arabic qabīla), qsǝm ‘to divide’ (Classical Arabic qasama). The city of Marrakech speaks a Hilālī (Bedouin) dialect, but originally this dialect belonged to the sedentary group of the first wave of Arabicisation (see below, Chapter 11, p. 211). This pre-Hilālī substrate is manifest, for instance, in the frequent use of the particle ka- for continuous aspect, along with Hilālī ta-, and the use of the genitive exponent d-, dǝl, along with Hilālī ntāʿ (Lévy 1998: 23). A well-documented case of dialect contact is that of the dialects in the Western oases in Egypt (Farafra, Daḫla, Ḫarga; cf. below, p. 208). According to Woidich’s interpretation of the structure of these dialects (1993), some of the features exhibited by them, such as the prefix n- in the first-person singular of the imperfect verb, may have been introduced in the course of contact with later invading Bedouin from the west, in particular, the Banū Sulaym on their migrations back east. The dialect mixing in the oases demonstrates another result of dialect contact, namely, accommodation and over-generalisation. As an example, we may mention the word-final stress in these dialects, which resembles that in Maghreb

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Map 10.3  Reflexes of /q/ and /j/ in the Egyptian Delta (after Behnstedt and Woidich 1985: 31–2 and map 15)

Map 10.4  Medieval trade centres in the Egyptian Delta (after Behnstedt and Woidich 1985: map 551)

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dialects. Contrary to what happens in the Maghreb dialects, however, the dialects of the oases also have word-final stress when the penultimate syllable is long, or when the final syllable ends in a vowel, for example, in Farafra minžál ‘sickle’, baytsiḥníy ‘our house’. This is probably to be interpreted as a generalisation of the rule in the Maghreb dialects. When the inhabitants of the oases came into contact with dialects in which many words were stressed on the final syllable, they overgeneralised in their attempt to accommodate to these dialects and extended the rule to all words. The development of dialectal koines is a special case of dialect contact. Within the confines of the national states, the new dialect of the capital started to exert an enormous influence on the neighbouring areas. In Iraq, for instance, the dialect of the Muslims of Baghdad has become the prestige dialect, and speakers from the countryside tend to switch from their own local dialect to the dialect of the capital (even when features of their own dialect are closer to the Classical language, for example, in the realisation of the Classical /q/!). A good example is the speech style of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who in his public speeches adapted to the Baghdad Muslim dialect – with g for Classical q – rather than using the rural dialect of his birthplace Tikrit, which has a voiceless realisation of the q. The voiceless realisation is associated with both rural and minority varieties. The latter association is also found in the case of Bahrain mentioned above (p. 176). In Egypt, the dialect of Cairo has spread over a large area in the Delta. The map of the realisation of /q/ and /j/ in the central Delta shows an oblong area leading from Cairo to Damietta, in which the Cairene forms /ʾ/ and /g/ are used, whereas the rest of the Delta has /g/ and /j/ (see Map 10.3). After the decline of Alexandria as the main port of Cairo in the fourteenth century, the principal trade route ran from the capital along the eastern branch of the Nile to Damietta, as is shown by the concentration of trade centres along this route in the Middle Ages (see Map 10.4). Nowadays, the road from Cairo to Alexandria is the main artery in the Delta, and Cairene influence is indeed visible in Alexandria (/g/ and /ʾ/), though not in the surrounding area. The configuration of the dialect map shows that Cairene Arabic influence corresponded to the frequency of trade contacts. A second conclusion that may be drawn from this configuration is that the realisation of /j/ as /g/ is not a recent development, but goes back at least to the flourishing period of the Damietta route. An alternative explanation is advanced by Behnstedt (2006: 589): the ‘Cairene’ realisation may be a relic of the original situation in the Delta dialects, and the ‘Bedouin’ realisation may be a later layer, imposed during the later migrations. In this explanation, too, the Damietta route, retains its crucial role, but this time as a language barrier. The dialects of the capitals themselves often have a complicated history. In the case of Cairene Arabic, Woidich (1994, 1995) has analysed its formation at the end

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of the nineteenth century (see below, p. 207). Many other Middle Eastern capitals, such as Amman and Baghdad, have also gone through a period of rapid urbanisation, in which thousands of migrants flocked to the capital from the countryside, bringing with them their rural dialects. The ensuing mixture of dialects led to the emergence of more and less prestigious varieties, depending on the relative social and political power of the speakers involved. The levelling influence of urban dialects such as Cairene Arabic is manifest in the speech patterns of recent migrants from the countryside to the capital. In a recent survey, Miller (2005) has shown that the first generation of rural migrants has accommodated partially to Cairene Arabic: they replace lexical–syntactic features, for instance, the Saʿīdī genitive exponent šuġl or hinīn with Cairene bitāʿ, but often retain the phonological traits such as the Saʿīdī realisation of jīm /j/ rather than /g/. The pattern of accommodation corresponds to those features of Cairene Arabic that had already been taken over in urban centres outside Cairo. The second generation of migrants adapts entirely to Cairene Arabic and loses all traces of South Egyptian speech. The dialect of the Jordanian capital Amman is a special case. Until the 1950s this city had a mere 100,000 inhabitants, but in forty years it went through a tremendous growth, reaching more than 1.5 million inhabitants in the 1990s, in the first place because of the massive influx of Palestinians who brought their own Palestinian dialect. Because the dialect of Amman did not possess the kind of prestige that the dialects of other capitals held, these newcomers did not feel the need to accommodate to this dialect. Nonetheless, in the recent past, the youngest generations have started to regard themselves as speakers of a newly formed ʿAmmānī dialect, which is part new formation, part mixture of the constituent dialects (Al Wer 2007b). The process of koineisation even extends outside the borders of national states. The Egyptian dialect in particular has become known all over the Arab world, partly as a result of the export of Egyptian movies and television soaps, which are broadcast almost everywhere, and partly as the result of the fact that in many countries Egyptian teachers were hired to help in setting up an education system. In most countries, almost everybody understands some Egyptian Arabic, and sometimes the speakers are even able to adapt their speech to Egyptian if need be. In Yemen, for instance, foreigners who speak Arabic are automatically classified as Egyptians, and in communicating with them Yemenis will tend to use Egyptian words and even take over Egyptian morphology. The Yemenite continuous verbal particle bayn- (first person)/bi- (second and third person) is sometimes used for habitual meaning as well under the influence of the Egyptian use of bi-. Often the Egyptian verbal particle raḥ-/ḥa- is used for the future instead of Yemeni ša-. Many typically Egyptian words have become de rigueur even in normal everyday conversation, for example, kwayyis ‘ok’, muš ‘not’ and kida ‘like this, so’, sometimes Yemenised as kiḏa.

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Within the confines of national states, the net result of processes of koineisation and convergence is such that one might almost conclude that a classification of dialects country by country, although not linguistic in nature, may not even be the worst alternative. Especially after the Arabic-speaking countries gained their independence, the linguistic pull from one centre, mostly the capital, led to a considerable amount of convergence. In Morocco, it was not the dialect of the capital, Rabat, that became the linguistic centre, but that of Casablanca. But the principle remains the same: one city becomes the centre for a nationwide koine. In this sense, one may speak of the Egyptian dialect, the Syrian dialect, or the Yemeni dialect in the sense of the prestige dialect of the capital. Obviously, the influence of the dialect of the capital has its limits, and in each country deviant regional dialects have remained in use. Dialect enclaves within the boundaries of the national states are not necessarily doomed to disappear: factors of local pride may effectively promote the survival of the dialect, as, for instance, the dialect of Dēr iz-Zōr in northern Syria, which is of a Mesopotamian type amid a SyroLebanese dialect area. In some regions, dialect loyalty takes place along denominational lines. In North Africa, special varieties of Jewish Arabic have been recorded in some of the large cities such as Fes and Tunis, which go back to the earliest period of Arabicisation and have not followed later developments. Likewise in the east, the dialects of heterodox minorities, such as the Christians and the Jews in Baghdad and the Shiʿites in Bahrain, were not affected by secondary Bedouinisation, but preserved their original urban features, whereas the language of the Muslim (Sunnite) majority took over a number of Bedouin traits. 10.3  Bedouin and sedentary dialects We have seen earlier that the process of Arabicisation in the Islamic empire took place in two stages (Chapter 8). During the first stage, the sedentary dialects with their high rate of innovation came into being. The second wave of Arabicisation brought the Bedouin dialects of Arabic all over the Arab world. Unlike the urban and rural sedentary dialects, the dialects of these new migrants had not yet changed in the constant interaction between people of different languages. In the early centuries of the Islamic empire the Bedouin dialects were regarded as the only true representatives of the Classical language. The Bedouin were supposed to speak pure Arabic – that is, with the declensional endings, ʾiʿrāb, literally ‘making it sound like true Bedouin Arabic’ – but in the course of time the Arabic grammarians conceded that not even the Bedouin could escape the effects of sedentary civilisation. As early as the time of Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), grammarians could not help but notice the adverse effects of prolonged exposure to sedentary speech. Although some Bedouin tribes maintained a reputation of purity of speech, in reality they spoke a language that was no longer Classical Arabic –

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whether this happened before or after the advent of Islam remains disputed (cf. above, Chapter 3). In modern times, all dialects, regardless of whether they are spoken by the sedentary population or by nomads, are clearly of the New Arabic type, for instance, in that they do not have any declensional endings. Yet in some respects the Bedouin dialects are more conservative than the sedentary dialects. By ‘conservative’ we mean that they did not partake in some of the changes that took place in the early urban centres, which are labelled here as innovative. Underlying this terminology is the assumption that the changes in the sedentary dialects are more recent and represent innovations that took place in areas with high rates of interaction. Obviously, if one regards the changes as the natural result of features already present in the pre-Islamic period, it does not make sense to speak about the difference between these two types in terms of retention and innovation, because they always coexisted. Urban and rural dialects tend to form a continuum that is broken only by natural barriers or sometimes by national borders. Within the sedentary areas, it is difficult to distinguish discrete dialects. There are core areas, around political and cultural centres, from which linguistic innovations fan out in a wavelike pattern. Between adjacent core areas, transitional zones come into being as competing innovations clash. The Bedouin dialects, on the other hand, may be viewed as discrete dialects, which are maintained even when members of the

Map 10.5  Tribal areas in North Arabia (after Ingham 1994c: xvii)

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tribe disperse over a large area. They reflect in their linguistic features the history of their migratory pattern. From the Najd area in Saudi Arabia, for instance, tribes such as the ʿAniza, Šammar, Muṭayr and Ḏ̣afīr migrated to the north and the east over a large geographical area, but their dialects still reflect the original kinship, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the relations between the Indo-European languages in the old family-tree model (cf. above, p. 13, and see Map 10.5). Outside the peninsula and in some regions within it, for instance, the Ḥijāz, the difference between the sedentary population and the nomads takes on a social significance, the Bedouin/sedentary dichotomy usually correlating with linguistic, and sometimes occupational or religious, contrasts. In other parts of the Arabian peninsula, especially in the northern Najd, the linguistic differences are between tribes, regardless of whether the members of the tribes lead a settled life or roam the desert. Some sections of the Šammar, for instance, are nomads, but regularly return to their sedentary kinsmen in the oases, with whom they form one tribe, both socially and linguistically. Bedouin groups have always been involved in migratory movements, long before the advent of Islam. This pattern was continued in the conquests of the first centuries of the Hijra, and it did not stop there. Bedouin tribes continued to migrate from the peninsula in the centuries to follow. The eleventh-century invasion of the Banū Sulaym and the Banū Hilāl in North Africa is one more example of these migrations. In all such cases, the Bedouin immigration set in motion a process of Arabicisation in the countryside. The different linguistic layers in the Arab world that were the result of the migrations are not independent from each other and, although different in origin, the resulting dialects have often been subject to mutual influence. Some of the Bedouin groups eventually settled down and adopted a sedentary dialect. In other cases, as we have seen above, settled areas were Bedouinised secondarily, for instance, Marrakech in Morocco, il-Biḥēra in the western Delta in Egypt, some of the Arabic dialects in Israel, the speech of the Muslims in Baghdad, or the dialect of the Sunnites in Bahrain. As a result, it is impossible to set up a list of canonical features distinguishing Bedouin from sedentary dialects, although it is possible to speak of characteristic Bedouin features. In using these labels of ‘sedentary’ dialects and ‘Bedouin’ dialects, we should keep in mind that they cannot be interpreted as sociological or even sociolinguistic labels. A Bedouin dialect is not necessarily a dialect spoken by nomads, nor is a sedentary dialect necessarily spoken by an urban population. These labels serve solely to distinguish between dialects from the first stage and those from the subsequent stages of migration. The linguistic difference between the two types is confirmed by the history of the settlement. With this proviso in mind, it turns out that the Bedouin dialects do have certain features in common, which distinguish them collectively from the sedentary dialects in the same area. The following features may be mentioned as generally typical of Bedouin dialects:

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• Preservation of the interdentals: almost all Bedouin dialects preserve the Classical /ṯ/ and /ḏ/; the resulting phoneme from the merger of Classical / ḏ̣/ and /ḍ/ is always /ḏ̣/ in these dialects, for example, in Najdī Arabic ḏ̣arab ‘he hit’/ḏ̣ill ‘shadow’ as against Classical Arabic ḍaraba/ḏ̣ill. • Voiced realisation of /q/ as /g/ (cf. above, Chapter 7, p. 120); already in the Classical period, the voiced realisation of the /q/ was regarded as a shibboleth for the Bedouin character of a dialect; it may have been the original pronunciation of this phoneme in Classical Arabic (cf. above, Chapter 2, p.  24). • Preservation of the gender distinction in the second- and third-person plural of pronouns and verbs; thus, for instance, the dialect of the Najd distinguishes between ktibaw ‘they wrote [masculine]’ and ktiban ‘they wrote [feminine]’, where related dialects in Iraq have only ktibaw without gender distinction, as in all sedentary dialects in the Arab world. • The third-person singular masculine of the pronominal suffix in the sedentary dialects is -u, -o; in the Bedouin dialects it is usually -ah, -ih. • The use of the dual in the nouns is much more widespread in the Bedouin dialects than in the sedentary dialects. • In most Arabic dialects, the prefix vowel of the verb is -i-, a phenomenon already found in some of the pre-Islamic dialects (taltala), but some of the Bedouin dialects of North and East Arabia have -a- as prefix vowel; in the Najdī Arabic paradigm the alternation (apophony) of the preformative vowel still reflects the situation in some of the pre-Islamic dialects (cf. above, Chapter 3): in this dialect, a appears before imperfect stem vowel i, and i before a, for example, yaktib ‘he writes’, but yismaʿ ‘he hears’. • There is a tendency in the Bedouin dialects towards a more frequent use of the direct annexation in possessive construction; although all Bedouin dialects have a genitive exponent, they tend to restrict its use both semantically and syntactically to a larger extent than the sedentary dialects do; in North Africa, the Western Bedouin dialects distinguish themselves from the sedentary dialects in the same area by not using the genitive exponent d-, dyal, but ntāʿ. • The agreement with inanimate plurals in the Bedouin dialects is with the feminine singular, as in the Classical language, rather than with the plural. These features are characteristic of almost all Bedouin dialects. In addition, there are specific features characterising the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula, which will be dealt with below (Chapter 11). In general, the distinction between Bedouin and sedentary dialects is made on the basis of a few criteria, the most important being the voiced realisation of the Classical /q/ and the preservation of the Classical interdentals; in morphology, the gender distinction in the plural of the verb is often regarded as an important criterion.

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The conservatism of the Bedouin dialects contrasts with the reduction or simplification of linguistic structure in those areas where there is intensive interaction between Bedouin and sedentary population, for instance, in southern Iraq, along the Gulf coast and even in Mecca, which has a mixed population with many immigrants from outside the peninsula. In comparing the Bedouin dialects in the peninsula with the related dialects outside the peninsula, Ingham (1982) points out that many of the conservative traits of the Arabian dialects, such as the retention of the internal passive and causative, the gender distinction in the second-/ third-person plural of the verb, the indefinite marker -in and the epenthetic vowel in final clusters, as in šift/šifit ‘I saw’, galb/galub ‘heart’, tend to disappear the farther away one gets from the Bedouin heartland, as happens in the Mesopotamian and Gulf varieties of the Central Arabian dialects. Bedouin dialects are found both in the Eastern Arab world and in the West. The Eastern Bedouin dialects are those spoken in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf states, the Syro-Mesopotamian desert, and southern Jordan, the Negev and the Sinai. This area is actually a kind of dialect continuum, in which it is difficult to distinguish discrete dialects. Two migratory movements, one from central Arabia (Najd) to the north, another from southern Mesopotamia to the Gulf, disrupt the geographical partition in this area. There is a large degree of interdependence between the settled areas and the nomadic tribes that are attached to them, even when they originally come from elsewhere. In southern Mesopotamia, the nomads dominated the settled population and took over as rulers when they set up their summer camps in the settled areas instead of going back to the Najd. In the oral literature of these tribes, or rather tribal units, composed of groups of different origin, there are frequent references to earlier dwellings. In Syria, there is a continuous process of migration between the peninsula and the Syrian bādiya. We have seen above (pp. 15–17) that, according to some theories, the Semitic languages developed in just such a permanent process of interchange between desert and settled area. Because of their constant migrations, it is difficult to set up geographically delimited dialect areas for Bedouin dialects; in fact, in most cases it is impossible (cf. Ingham 1982). Only in those cases where there are clear-cut geographical or political barriers is it possible to speak of a discrete dialect zone. The speakers themselves very often have a clear intuition of the differences between dialects, but the problem is that such judgements are usually based on idiosyncratic features or lexical items. When there are no barriers, the dialect zones gradually merge, creating transitional zones for each individual feature between them. For the sedentary groups, ethnic origin is not a determining factor, and their acceptance or rejection of innovations is based on the relative force of attraction of different cultural/political centres. In the case of nomadic groups, the ethnic origin and the tribal relations are of the utmost importance in classifying the dialects, so that it is impossible to define them only geographically. An exception is formed by the

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area of the Jabal Šammar in northern Saudi Arabia, which, thanks to its location within easy reach of grazing grounds, has maintained a stable population with both nomadic and sedentary sections of the tribe of the Šammar. The Western Bedouin dialects are spoken all over North Africa. Usually they are divided into two groups: the dialects of the area in which the Banū Sulaym settled (Tunisia, Libya and western Egypt); and those that belong to the territory of the Banū Hilāl (western Algeria and Morocco). In this entire region, there was a large chronological distance between the early conquests and the later introduction of Bedouin dialects, in the far west more than four centuries. This chronological distance may explain the lesser degree of conservatism in the Bedouin dialects of North Africa: they stem from tribes that, prior to their migration to North Africa, had already long been subjected to influence from sedentary speakers. The chronological distance may also explain why, in spite of the different origin of the sedentary and the Bedouin dialects, it is still possible to speak of a dialect area in North Africa and in Egypt. All dialects of North Africa, for instance, exhibit the central feature of the North African dialects, the prefix n- of the first-person singular of the imperfect verb. These dialects arrived when there were already prestigious cultural and political centres; and although the Bedouin represented the new military power in the region, they could not avoid the centripetal influence of the sedentary dialects. 10.4  The presentation of the dialects The traditional classification of the Arabic dialects distinguishes the following groups: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

dialects of the Arabian peninsula; Mesopotamian dialects; Syro-Lebanese dialects; Egyptian dialects; Maghreb dialects.

In presenting the dialects in Chapter 11, we shall stick to this traditional distinction of five dialect areas. Each area will be presented briefly, with a survey of the most important representative dialects, the most characteristic features and a number of text samples that illustrate the idiosyncrasies of each dialect. Chapter 15 will be devoted to the dialects of the various language islands of Arabic, that is, varieties of Arabic that are spoken outside the Arabophone world in linguistic enclaves in an environment in which other languages predominate. Examples of such language islands are Maltese Arabic, Cypriot Maronite Arabic, the Arabic of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, the Arabic dialects of central Anatolia, Nigerian Shuwa Arabic, and the creolised Arabic of Uganda and Kenya (Ki-Nubi), the latter to be dealt with in Chapter 16. The dialects spoken in the linguistic enclaves

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ultimately derive from dialect groups in the central areas, Cypriot Maronite Arabic being a Syro-Lebanese type of dialect, Maltese being a North African type of dialect, and so on. But their isolation from the Arabophone world and their lack of exposure to the Classical language have contributed to the preservation of features that were lost elsewhere. The contact with the dominant languages of the region has led to borrowings and innovations that are not present elsewhere either. For these reasons, it is preferable to treat the dialects of the linguistic enclaves separately. Further reading An excellent methodological introduction to Arabic dialectology is the German one by Behnstedt and Woidich (2005); also useful is the introduction to ­Behnstedt’s and Woidich’s dialect atlas of the Egyptian dialects (1985: 11–42). Dialect geography used to be one of the poor points in Arabic linguistics, but the situation has improved significantly with the publication of dialect atlases. The first surveys were made by Cantineau (dialect atlas of the Ḥōrān, 1940, 1946) and by Bergsträßer (dialect atlas of the Syro-Lebanese dialects, 1915). Dialect maps of the Lebanese dialects were produced by Fleisch (1974). More recently, an extensive dialect atlas of the Egyptian region was produced by Behnstedt and Woidich (1985, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1999), consisting of an atlas with commentary, two volumes of texts, and an Egyptian–German glossary. Behnstedt also produced a dialect atlas of the North Yemenite region (1985, 1992), and a Syrian dialect atlas (1997). The dialect atlas of Tunisia is an ongoing project; see the presentation by Mejri (2002) and the latest report by Ben Abdessalem Karaa (2008, 2012) and a number of papers in AIDA VI. Elements for a dialect atlas of Lebanon were collected by Kallas (2003). For the initiatives towards a Moroccan dialect atlas, see Caubet (2000–1); the project concerning the dialects in northern Israel was presented by Talmon (2002). Large parts of the Arabophone area are literally terra incognita, in particular, the Arabian peninsula, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. The word atlas in course of publication by Behnstedt and Woidich (2011, 2012) is the first large-scale presentation of lexical data across the Arabic-speaking world; three volumes have appeared so far. Spoken dialect texts are now available online in text repositories. The Department of Semitic Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg hosts the Semitisches Tonarchiv, a website with more than 2,000 audio documents, containing texts from Egyptian, Bedouin, Ḥassāniyya, Yemeni, Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Sudanese and Central Asian Arabic; these can be consulted freely at www. semarch.uni-hd.de. A second repository is the Corpus for Afroasiatic Languages, maintained by the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS); it is smaller in size, but contains fully transcribed and glossed texts in Moroccan, Tripolitanian and Juba Arabic, as well as the corresponding audio documents.

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This site can be consulted after registering at http://corpafroas.tge-adonis. fr/Archives/ListeFichiersELAN.php. The Corpus oral de variedades magrebíes (CORVAM), hosted by the University of Cadiz, is available at: www.unizar.es/ estudiosarabes/CORVAM.htm, and focuses on Arabic and Berber varieties from the Maghreb. Consultation is free. On the older sources for Egyptian Arabic, see Doss (1996). The formation of the Cairene dialect is dealt with by Woidich (1995). On the development of ʿAmmānī speech, see Al Wer (2007b). For the Egyptian influence in the Yemenite dialect, see Diem (1973b: 15–19). On the problem of the /q/~/g/ reflexes in Bedouin dialects, see Behnstedt and Woidich (1982); for a general survey of the realisation of /q/, see Bahloul (2007). The transitional dialect between Western and Eastern dialects in the Egyptian Delta is discussed by Behnstedt (1978); for the contact phenomena in the western oases in Egypt, see Woidich (1993). On mutual influence between Hilālī and pre-Hīlālī dialects, see Lévy (1998) and Miller (2004). The relationship between urbanisation and dialect change is discussed by Holes (1995b). The problem of the representation of Bedouin and sedentary layers is discussed by Ingham (1982), from whom most of the remarks about the distinction between Bedouin and sedentary dialects in Arabia and Syro-Mesopotamia above have been derived. General data about the classification of Bedouin dialects and their features are given by Rosenhouse (1984). Cadora (1992) correlates the data of Arabic dialectology with the way of life of the speakers (his term for this approach being ‘ecolinguistics’).

Chapter 11

The Dialects of Arabic

11.1  Dialects of the Arabian peninsula The Arabian peninsula, the homeland of the Arab tribes, remains the least-known dialect area of the Arabophone world. In pre-Islamic times, there was probably a division into Eastern and Western dialects (cf. above, Chapter 4), but subsequent migrations have changed the geographical distribution of the dialects considerably. All Bedouin dialects in this area now belong to the new type of Arabic, although generally speaking they are more conservative than the dialects outside the peninsula in the sense discussed above (Chapter 10, p. 185). In the urban centres of the Gulf the majority speak typologically Bedouin dialects, whereas the Shiʿite minorities speak sedentary dialects. Recent attempts at classification by Ingham (1982) and Palva (1991) distinguish four groups: 1. North-east Arabian dialects: these are the dialects of the Najd, in particular, those of the large tribes ʿAniza and Šammar. This group is divided into three subgroups: the ʿAnazī dialects (including the dialects of Kuwait, Bahrain (Sunnī) and the Gulf states); the Šammar dialects (including some of the Bedouin dialects in Iraq); and the Syro-Mesopotamian Bedouin dialects (including the Bedouin dialects of North Israel and Jordan, and the dialect of the Dawāġrah, a pariah tribe in the northern Sinai littoral). 2. South(-west) Arabian dialects (dialects of Yemen, Hadramaut and Aden, as well as the dialects of the Shiʿite Baḥārna in Bahrain). 3. Ḥijāzī (West Arabian) dialects: to this group belong the Bedouin dialects of the Ḥijāz and the Tihāma, which are not very well known; it is not yet clear what the relationship is between these dialects and those of the urban centres in this area, chiefly Mecca and Medina. 4. North-west Arabian dialects: these dialects are classified as a distinct group by Palva (1991); it comprises the dialects of the Negev and the Sinai, as well as those of southern Jordan, the eastern coast of the Gulf of ʿAqaba and some regions in north-western Saudi Arabia.

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In Chapter 10 (p. 187) we have seen that outside the Arabian peninsula Bedouin dialects in general are characterised by a number of features that set them off clearly from the sedentary dialects in the same area (e.g., the voiced realisation of the /q/, the retention of the interdentals, and the gender distinction in the second- and third-person plural of the verbs and the pronouns). The Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula are even more conservative than those outside it in the sense that they do not partake of many of the reducing and levelling innovations that are found outside the peninsula. The most conservative type is represented by Najdī Arabic; those Bedouin dialects of southern Iraq and the Gulf states that are related to them exhibit more innovations. In the peninsula, the nomadic–sedentary dichotomy does not function in the same way as outside, since many tribes also have settled members with whom there is frequent interaction both economically and socially. As a result, all dialects including the sedentary ones exhibit Bedouin features. Among the conservative features of the Bedouin dialects in the Arabian peninsula, the following three may be mentioned. First, many Bedouin dialects exhibit a marker -an, -in, -ǝn, mostly as an optional feature, sometimes even as a mere metrical device in oral poetry. This marker clearly derives from the Classical tanwīn, which has lost its function as a case marker of indefinite words as such and has become a marker for indefinite words when they are specified by a modifier. In the dialects of the Najd, the marker is used regularly before modifiers to a noun, whether adjectives, or relative clauses, or prepositional clauses, as in (1a, b, c): (1a) (1b) (1c)

bēt-in kibīr house-INDEF big ‘a big house’ kalmit-in gālō-hā-l-ī word-INDEF say.PERF.3mp-3fs-for-1s ‘a word which they said to me’ jiz-in min-h part-INDEF from-3ms ‘a part of it’.

It also occurs in adverbial expressions that in Classical Arabic would have the ending -an, for instance, maṯal-in ‘for example’, mbaććir-in ‘early’. Second, some Bedouin dialects preserve the causative as a productive form, for instance, in Najdī Arabic fahim/afham ‘to understand/to explain’, wajf/awgaf ‘to stop [intransitive/transitive]’ (Ingham 1994c: 74–9). Third, in some of the dialects, the internal passive is still productive, mainly in the North-east Arabian dialects, for instance, in the dialect of the Ḥāyil kitab/ktib ‘to write/to be written’; ḏ̣arab/ḏ̣rib ‘to hit/ to be hit’ (Prochazka 1988: 28, 116). This feature is not completely exclusive to the Arabian Bedouin dialects, since traces are also found in some of the Bedouin dialects of North Africa.

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Apart from these conservative tendencies there are also innovations, especially in the North-east Arabian dialects. These have the so-called gaháwa syndrome, in which an a is inserted after a pharyngal + consonant, with subsequent stress shift. In Najdī Arabic, for instance, the imperfect of ḥafar ‘to dig’ is *yáḥfir → *yáḥafir → yḥáfir (but kitab ‘to write’, imperfect yaktib). The gaháwa syndrome is also found in other regions, where Bedouin dialects were brought by migration, for instance, in the Egyptian dialects south of Asyūṭ. For the verbal morphology of Najdī Arabic see Table 11.1. kitab ktibaw yaktib yaktibūn ktibat ktiban taktib yaktibin kitabta kitabtu taktib taktibūn kitabti kitabtin taktibīn taktibin kitabt kitabna ʾaktib niktib Table 11.1  The verbal paradigm in Najdī Arabic Most North-east Arabian dialects are characterised by affrication of /g/ (for /q/), and of /k/; this affrication is conditioned by the phonetic environment, since it takes place only near front vowels (for a similar feature in the gilit dialects of Mesopotamia, possibly caused by Bedouin influence, see below, pp.  202f.). In Syria and Mesopotamia, the Bedouin dialects have j [ʤ], č [ʧ], whereas the Bedouin dialects of Arabia usually have more fronted variants: gy [ɡj], ǵ [dz] for g; ć [ts] for k. As examples, we may quote from the dialect of the Rwala Bedouin ṯiǵīl ‘heavy’, ǵilīl ‘few’; ćam ‘how much?’, mićān ‘place’ (Classical Arabic ṯaqīl, qalīl; kam, makān). The West Arabian (Ḥijāzī) dialects are not very well known. They include the dialects of those sedentary centres that already existed before the coming of Islam, for instance, Mecca and Medina. In Islamic times, many tribes from this area migrated to the west, so that some of the Bedouin dialects in the Syrian desert, the Negev and ultimately those in North Africa probably derive from dialects spoken in this area. The dialects of this group are distinguished from the Northeast Arabian dialects by the absence of the affrication of /k/ and /q/. According to de Jong (2000, 2011), dialectologically speaking, the Sinai is a transitional zone between the Arabian peninsula and the Egyptian Delta (see below, p. 208). The dialect of Mecca, although related to the Bedouin dialects in the region, has some of the characteristics of sedentary dialects. It has lost the interdentals and the gender distinction in the plural of verbs and pronouns. Meccan Arabic has a genitive exponent (ḥagg), as well as verbal aspectual particles (bi- and ʿammāl for the continuous aspect and rāyiḥ- for the future), which are not normally used in the Bedouin dialects. The realisation of /q/ in Mecca is /g/ as in the Bedouin dialects. In some respects, the dialect of Mecca seems to be close to the varieties of Arabic found in Upper Egypt and the Sudan.

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The dialect map of Yemen is complicated because the geographical fragmentation of the area has produced a great deal of dialect variation. Behnstedt (1985: 30–2) distinguishes the following main areas: the Tihāma dialects; the k- dialects; the South-east Yemenite dialects; the dialects of the central plateau (e.g., the dialect of Ṣanʿāʾ); the dialects of the southern plateau; the dialects of the northern plateau; and the North-east Yemenite dialects. But even this subdivision is not a complete representation of the entire area: there are many mixed zones, and some of the areas will probably have to be subdivided when more data becomes known. The area of the k- dialects in the western mountain range (see Map 11.1) is characterised by the use of verbal forms in the perfect with -k- instead of -t-, for example, for Classical Arabic katabtu/katabta ‘I/you have written’ katabku/

Map 11.1  The perfect verb in the Yemenite dialects (after Behnstedt 1985: map 68)

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katabka, katabkw/katabk, katubk/katabk, or even katubk/katabk. There is reason to believe that this area has undergone extensive influence from South Arabia. Its settlement may even go back to the period before Islam, when Arab tribes invaded the South Arabian empires and settled there. After this region had come under Islamic sway, its dialect became known as Ḥimyaritic. In al-Hamdānī’s description of the Ḥimyaritic language (cf. above, p. 44) the k- ending is displayed prominently in examples such as kunku ‘I was’, bahalku ‘I said’. The dialects of the Shiʿites in Bahrain, which belong to a sedentary type, are related to dialects in South-eastern Arabia, Oman and Yemen. The linguistic situation in Bahrain is not unlike that in Baghdad. In both areas, the heterodox minorities (in Baghdad Christians and Jews, in Bahrain Shiʿites) speak a sedentary type of Arabic, whereas orthodox Sunnite speech exhibits secondary Bedouinisation. The picture is confused, however, since there are considerable differences between the Baḥārna dialect of the villages and that of the urban centres. In the villages, for instance, Classical Arabic /q/ is realised as a voiceless post-velar stop /ḳ/, whereas in the capital al-Manāma Baḥārna speakers have /g/, just like the Sunnites. This may be due to borrowing from the prestigious dialect or an old trait. The Baḥārna dialects have in common the realisation of the Classical Arabic interdentals as /f/, /d/, /ḍ/, for instance, in falāfah (< ṯalāṯa) ‘three’. They also share the absence of the gaháwa syndrome of the Bedouin dialects (e.g., Baḥārna ʾaḫḍar as against Sunnite ḫaḍar ‘green’) and the formation of the feminine thirdperson singular of the perfect verb (e.g., Baḥārna šarabat or širbat as against Sunnite šrubat ‘she drank’). A characteristic trait of the Baḥārna dialects, linking them with the dialect of Oman and the Arabic of Uzbekistan (cf. below, p. 287), is the use of an infix -inn- in the participle with suffix, which is used for perfect aspect, for example, šār-inn-eh ‘he has bought it’, msawwit-inn-eh ‘she has made it’. Text 1  North-east Arabian, Šammar (after Ingham 1982: 131) 1. haḏōḷa iš-šilgān fa-ḏōḷa ġazwīn 1. These are the Šilgān and they were raiding the Ḥuwayṭāt and when they ʿala ḥwēṭāy u baʿad ma ḫaḏaw had taken the camels, the Ḥuwayṭāt took al-bil nhajaw il-ḥwēṭāt ʿala ḫeil u them on horses, I mean, they took them ḫaḏōham, ḫaḏōham yaʿni ʿugub after a long fight. maʿraktin ṭuwīlih 2. u yōm inn hum ḫaḏōham u 2. And when they had taken them, they fassuḫaw ḥitta hdūmaham, mā stripped them even of their clothes, they ḫallaw ʿalēham hidūm did not leave their clothes on them. 3. hāḏa ḫawiyyam bin aḫīham 3. This was their companion, their cousin jīd ar-rubūʿ iksumōh il-ḥwēṭāy Jīd ar-Rubūʿ, the Ḥuwayṭāt maimed him iksumh miʿrijǝlu miʿfaḫǝḏu u in his foot, in his thigh and he said: ‘O my gāl: yā ḫawāli rūḥu ana rajjālin uncles, go! I am a man who will die; go abamūt wintam rūḥu lahalkam you to your families!’

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Text 2  Meccan Arabic (after Schreiber 1970: 109) 1. hāda kān wāḥid rijjāl wu-hāda r-rijjāl nassāy marra 2. wu-maratu tibġa mušš; gālatlu ḫud hādi z-zubdīya w-hāda l-fulūs rūḥ jibli mušš 3. gallaha ʾiza nsīt; gālatlu lā ʾinšaḷḷa mā tinsa ʾinta ṭūl mā timši gūl mušš ʿašan lā tinsa 4. gallaha ṭayyib; ʾaḫad az-zubdīya w-al-fulūs wu-nadar yigūl mušš mušš mušš 5. laga ʾitnēn biyiḍḍārabu; wigif yitfarrij ʿalēhum ʾilēn ġallagu l-miḍāraba; yifakkir ʾēš maratu gālatlu yištari

1. There once was a man and this man was very forgetful. 2. His wife wanted mušš [cottage cheese]. She said to him: ‘Take this bowl and this money and go buy me mušš’. 3. He said to her: ‘If I forget?’ She said to him: ‘No, by God, you won’t forget; say all the way mušš, so that you don’t forget’. 4. He said to her: ‘Good!’ He took the bowl and the money and kept saying mušš mušš mušš. 5. He came across two men who were fighting. He stood there looking at them until they ended their fight; then he thought: ‘What did my wife tell me to buy?’

11.2  Syro-Lebanese dialects The Arabicisation of the Syro-Lebanese area began during the very first campaigns of the conquests in the seventh century and was no doubt facilitated by the pre-Islamic presence of Arabic-speaking tribes in the Syrian desert and even in some of the sedentary areas. The Arab conquerors settled in the old Hellenistic cities in the area, such as Damascus and Aleppo, and it was there that the first varieties of New Arabic were spoken. These dialects were typical urban dialects with a fast rate of innovation. There was no time-lag between a first and a second stage of Arabicisation as in most other areas: the pre-Islamic pattern of Bedouin migration from the Syrian desert did not stop after the advent of Islam and remained a permanent fixture of the linguistic situation. Because of the abundance of material, there is more or less a consensus about the classification of the dialects between the Mediterranean and the Syrian desert. Usually, all sedentary dialects in the area covering Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine are assigned to this group, the Bedouin dialects of the Syrian desert belonging to the dialects of the Arabian peninsula. In north-east Syria, dialects of the qǝltu group of Mesopotamian dialects are spoken (e.g., the dialect of Dēr iz-Zōr). Across the border with Turkey, in the former district of Iskenderun (Alexandretta), the present-day province of Hatay, a dialect is spoken that is a continuation of the Syrian dialect area. Most dialects in the Syro-Lebanese area exhibit the typically sedentary features of voiceless realisation of q as ʾ, stops for interdentals, loss of gender distinction in the second- and third-person plural of pronouns and verbs. All dialects have

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preserved the three long vowels ā, ī and ū. But the fact that they are all sedentary does not mean that they never have Bedouin features. Most Jordanian dialects, for instance, have /g/ for /q/, reflecting contact with Bedouin tribes. In the entire area, the prestige dialects of the capitals (Damascus, Beirut) are rapidly replacing the countryside dialects. This is an ongoing process that will contribute to the regional uniformity of the dialects. The usual classification distinguishes three groups: • Lebanese/Central Syrian dialects, consisting of Lebanese (e.g., the dialect of Beirut) and Central Syrian (e.g., the dialect of Damascus); the latter group also includes the dialect of the Druzes; the Maronite Arabic of Cyprus (cf. below, Chapter 15, pp. 279–81) is usually assigned to the Lebanese dialects. • North Syrian dialects (e.g., the dialect of Aleppo). • Palestinian/Jordanian dialects, consisting of the Palestinian town dialects, the Central Palestinian village dialects and the South Palestinian/Jordanian dialects (including the dialects of the Ḥōrān). The first group is sometimes distinguished from the other two by the keyword byiktub/biktub (third-person singular and first-person singular of the imperfect of the verb k-t-b ‘to write’); in the other two groups, these forms are biktub/baktub. Thus we have, for instance, in the Central Syrian dialect of Damascus byǝktob/ bǝktob ‘he writes/I write’, but in the dialect of North Syrian Aleppo bǝktob/baktob. A second distinction between the North Syrian and the Lebanese/Central Syrian group concerns the working of the ʾimāla. In the North Syrian dialects, ʾimāla is an historical process that has led to the change ā > ē in the neighbourhood of an i vowel, for example, in the dialect of Aleppo lisān > lsēn ‘tongue’, jāmiʿ> jēmeʿ ‘mosque’. This change usually took place even when the ā followed an emphatic or pharyngal consonant, for example, ṭāleb > ṭēleb ‘striving’. The historical development is to be distinguished from the synchronic rules governing the pronunciation of Classical Arabic /ā/, which ranges from [ɒː] in the neighbourhood of emphatics to [ɑː] in the neighbourhood of gutturals, and to [ɛː] or [æː] elsewhere. We therefore find contrasting pairs such as ṭēleb [eːleb] ‘striving’ as the regular development of /ā/, as against ṭāleb [ɒːleb] ‘student’, or kēteb [keːteb] ‘writing’ as against kāteb [kæːteb] ‘writer’, in which the second member is probably a loan from Classical Arabic, since it did not undergo the change to ē. In the pronunciation, there is a clear distinction between [eː] and [æː]. By contrast, in Lebanese Arabic, /ā/ is realised either as [æː] (ʾimāla) or [ɒː] (tafḫīm), depending on the context, for instance, in the dialect of Bišmizzīn: māt [mæːt] ‘to die’ as against ṣār [ɒː] ‘to become’. But the distribution of these two variants is not always clear, since in some contexts both may occur, for instance, žā [ʒɒː] ‘to come’ as against žāb [ʒæːb] ‘to bring’, which even leads to formal opposition pairs, such as ktāb [ktɒːb] ‘write!’ as against ktāb [ktæːb] ‘book’. In most Lebanese dialects, the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ have been preserved at least

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in open syllables. In closed syllables, they develop into /ē/ and /ō/ and become indistinguishable from the two allophones of /ā/, as in Tripoli. Since the context in which original /ay/ and /aw/ occur is not conditioned (for instance, /ē/ may occur after an emphatic consonant as in ṣef ‘summer’), the contrast between the two allophones of /ā/ has become phonemic. The distinctions between the three groups are not clear-cut, however. The exact boundary between the Lebanese/Central Syrian and the North Syrian group cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. Likewise, there is an isogloss separating the Palestinian and the South Lebanese dialects from the rest, based on the behaviour of the short vowels. Palestinian Arabic and most Lebanese dialects have three short vowels, /a/, /i/ and /u/. The other dialects have preserved the opposition between /i/ and /u/ only in unstressed final syllables (often transliterated as e and o), whereas in all other environments they have merged into one vowel phoneme (transliterated as ǝ). The reduction of the opposition between /i/ and /u/ has been reinforced by their elision in all open, unstressed syllables. Thus, we find, for instance, in Damascene Arabic kǝtob < kutub ‘books’, with stress on the penultimate, but ṭlūʿ < ṭulūʿ ‘ascent’, with stress on the ultimate, and preservation of the long /ū/. Compare also šǝreb < šariba ‘to drink’, with stress on the penultimate, and tʾīl < ṯaqīl ‘heavy’, with stress on the ultimate, and elision of the short vowel. These two words exhibit yet another change: a > i because of the following i (otherwise the resulting form would have been *šareb, *taʾīl, since Damascene Arabic preserves the /a/ in unstressed syllables). Within the group of the Lebanese dialects, a distinction used to be made between those which elide an unstressed /a/ in an open syllable, and those which do not. This distinction between parlers non-différentiels versus parlers différentiels, that is, between those which do not differentiate between the treatment of /a/, /u/ and /i/ and those which do, was taken by Cantineau to be one of the main isoglosses dividing the area. It runs through Beirut and constitutes a distinctive marker within the Lebanese dialects. South of Beirut we find, for instance, samaka > sámake ‘fish’, ḍarabū > ḍárabu ‘they hit’, qataltu > ʾatálet ‘I hit’; whereas north of Beirut we have sámke, ḍárbu, ʾtált. Subsequent research has shown, however, that the details of the transition between the two areas are more complicated, and that there is a large variation in the treatment of the /a/ that is not indicated by this isogloss alone. Within the third group (the Palestinian/Jordanian dialects), the dialects of South Palestine and Jordan are sometimes distinguished from the others by the keyword bǝgūl (first-person singular of the imperfect of the verb gāl ‘to say’). The voiced /g/ marks this group of dialects as former Bedouin dialects (or later Bedouinised). Synchronically, the treatment of consonant clusters in Syrian Arabic contrasts with that in Egyptian and other dialects, since an epenthetic vowel is inserted before the second rather than the third consonant in a cluster -CCC-, for example,

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yǝkǝtbu < yǝktbu < yǝktubu ‘they write’, yǝḥǝmlu < yǝḥmlu < yǝḥmilu ‘they carry’ (these clusters originate as a result of the elision of u and i in an unstressed open syllable). The epenthetic vowel never receives stress. In the entire area, the b-imperfect serves as a verbal marker. In Damascene Arabic, it indicates an intended future and is also used for assumptions, general facts and present actions. In combination with the b-prefix, the first-person singular of the imperfect becomes bǝktob, the first-person plural mnǝktob. We have seen above that in the North Syrian dialects the prefix of the first-person singular has -a- instead of -i- > -ǝ-. The continuous aspect marker is ʿam, sometimes combined with b-; the expected future is expressed with the marker laḥ(a), raḥ(a). The verbal paradigm is as in Table 11.2. katab katabu katbet katabt katabtu katabti katabt katabna

yǝktob tǝktob tǝktob tǝktbi ʾǝktob

yǝktbu tǝktbu nǝktob

Table 11.2  The verbal paradigm in Damascene Arabic

Text 3  Damascene Syrian Arabic (after Grotzfeld 1965: 130) 1. la-nǝḥkī-lak ʾǝṣṣǝt ḥayāti mǝn waʾt li kǝnt bǝnt 2. bǝl-ʾawwal ʾana, waʾt li kǝnt zġīre, kān žǝsmi ḍʿīf ktīr, dāyman ʾana ḍʿīfe

1. Let us tell you the story of my life from the time I was a girl. 2. At first, at the time when I was young, my body was very weak, always I was weak. 3. ʾām waṣaf-li l-ḥakīm šamm ǝl-hawa, ma 3. Then, the doctor prescribed me ʾǝʾder rūḥ ʿal-madrase ktīr fresh air, I couldn’t go to school very much. 4. baʿdēn fi ʾǝli ḫāl b-žabal Lǝbnān, ḫūri, 4. Afterwards, I have an uncle in the ʾām ʾāl: lāzǝm trūḥi la-hunīke, tġayyri Mount Lebanon, a priest, he said: hawa, tǝʾʿdī-lek, la-ʾǝnno l-ḥakīm manaʿ ‘You must go there, change the air, ʾǝnnek trūḥi ʿal-madrase you’ll stay, because the doctor has forbidden you to go to school’. 5. hunīk hǝnne fātḥīn madrase, w-ʿandon 5. There, they have opened a school, ṣǝbyān w-banāt bǝl-madrase and they have boys and girls in the school.

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Text 4  Lebanese Arabic (Bišmizzīn) (after Jiha 1964: 90) 1. kǟn fi marra biz-zamǟn ḥurmi 1. Once upon a time there was a woman ʿumra sabʿīn sini badda titžawwaz, whose age was seventy years, who ̄ ṭifråni wanted to marry, [but she was] without a penny. 2. šǟfit šabb ʿa zawʾa, ʾål:̄ baddi 2. She saw a young man to her taste and ʾǟḫdu, kif baddi ʾiʿmil ta ʾǟḫdu? said: ‘I want to take him, what can I do in order to take him?’ ̄ ̄ 3. She went and brought white earth, 3. ṣår trūḥ tžīb ḥuwwåṛa ṭṭammil wi-tḥuṭṭ bi-has-sandūʾ, ʿašr ṭnaʿšar which she kneaded, and put it in this yawm tʿabbi bi-has-sandūʾ ta ṣår̄ trunk, ten, twelve days she filled the ° ̄ trunk, until it became two in†�r. yiṭlaʿ ʾinṭårayn

4. ḫallit iš-šaḫṣ il bitḥubbu ta 4. She waited until the man whom she ̄ ̄ yumruʾ, ʾålitlu: ʿmǟl maʿrūf ḥdåf loved came by, and said to him: ‘Do me a maʿi has-sandūʾ! favour, move this trunk with me!’ 5. fǟt haš-šaḫǝṣ yḥarrik bi-has5. This man began to move this trunk, he sandūʾ, ma fī yḥarrik is-sandūʾ was unable to move the trunk. ̄ 6. ʾalla: tʾīl aš fī? ʾålitlu: yi tuʾburni ya 6. He said to her: ‘Heavy! What is in it?’ ̄ w-ḥåžǟti ̄ ḥabībi, fī sīġåti She said to him: ‘May you bury me, my dear! [i.e., May you live longer than me!] In it are my jewels and my things.’ 11.3  Mesopotamian dialects Although many of the details about the Arabicisation of this area are still obscure, we know that it took place in two stages. During the early decades of the Arab conquests, urban varieties of Arabic sprang up around the military centres founded by the invaders, such as Baṣra and Kūfa. Later, a second layer of Bedouin dialects of tribes that migrated from the peninsula was laid over this first layer of urban dialects. Since Blanc’s (1964) study of the dialects of Baghdad, it has become customary to regard all dialects of Greater Mesopotamia as belonging to one dialect area. Blanc found that in Baghdad there were three communal dialects, that is, dialects connected with religious communities: Muslim Baġdādī, Christian Baġdādī and Jewish Baġdādī. He concluded that Muslim Baġdādī belonged to one layer of the Mesopotamian dialect map, Christian and Jewish Baġdādī to another, and indicated them with the terms qǝltu and gilit, respectively, after their reflex of the Classical Arabic qultu ‘I have said’. These two varieties were found to be present all over Mesopotamia in a rather complicated pattern of distribution, illustrated in Table 11.3 (Blanc 1964: 6; Jastrow 1973: 1).

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Muslims non-sedentary sedentary

non-Muslims

Lower Iraq Upper Iraq Anatolia

gilit gilit gilit

qǝltu qǝltu qǝltu

gilit qǝltu qǝltu

Table 11.3  The distribution of gilit and qǝltu dialects According to Blanc, the qǝltu dialects are a continuation of the medieval vernaculars that were spoken in the sedentary centres of ʿAbbāsid Iraq. The gilit dialect of the Muslims in Baghdad is probably the product of a later process of Bedouinisation that did not affect the speech of the Christians and the Jews in the city. This has led to the present-day difference along religious lines. It may be added that the Jewish dialect of Baghdad is not spoken in Baghdad any more, since most Jews left Iraq in 1950–1 and are now settled in Israel. The qǝltu dialects are further classified by Jastrow (1978) into three groups: Tigris dialects, Euphrates dialects and the Anatolian group (the latter will be dealt with below, Chapter 15). They all exhibit the typical features of sedentary dialects, such as the voiceless realisation /q/ or /ʾ/ of Classical /q/; the reduction of the short vowels to two, /a/ and /ǝ/, the latter representing a merger of /i/ and /u/; the change of the interdentals into dentals (in the Christian dialect of Baghdad); the loss of the gender distinction in the second- and third-person plural of pronouns and verbs. All qǝltu dialects are characterised by the ending of the first-person singular of the perfect verb -tu, as in the word qǝltu. The close relationship with the gilit dialects is demonstrated by the fact that the Mesopotamian qǝltu dialects have the endings -īn, -ūn in the imperfect verb, for example, in the dialect of Arbīl yǝʿmǝlūn ‘they make’, as do the gilit dialects, for example, in Muslim Baġdādī yiʿimlūn. They also share with these dialects the genitive exponent māl and a future marker derived from rāyiḥ ‘going’, for example, raḥ-. The most common continuous aspect marker in the Mesopotamian qǝltu dialects is some form derived from qāʿid ‘sitting’ > qa-, for example, qa-ykǝtbōn ‘they are writing’, qad-áktǝb ‘I am writing’ in Jewish Baġdādī (Mansour 2006: 239). In the gilit dialects, there are three short vowels, /i/, /u/, /a/, but these do not continue directly the Classical vowels. The vowel /a/ has been preserved in closed syllables, but in open syllables it has changed into /i/ or /u/, depending on the phonetic environment, for example, simač < samak ‘fish’ as against buṣal < baṣal ‘onion’. Short /i/ and /u/ have been preserved only in some environments, whereas in others they are both represented by either /i/ or /u/, for example, ḥāmuḏ̣ < ḥāmiḏ̣ ‘sour’, as against gilit < qultu ‘I said’. In the gilit dialects, the­interdentals have been preserved, and the reflex of both /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ is realised accordingly as /ḏ̣/. Characteristic of all ʿIrāqī dialects is the conditioned affrication of both /q/ > /g/ and /k/ near front vowels (possibly a Bedouin feature; cf. above, p. 194); in

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the Muslim dialect of Baghdad, however, only /k/ is affricated, for example, čān < kāna ‘he was’ as against yikūn < yakūnu ‘he is’. In the pronominal suffix of the second-person singular, this leads to a distinction between masculine -(a)k and feminine -(i)č, for example, bētak ‘your [masculine] house’ as against bētič ‘your [feminine] house’. Where the qǝltu dialects usually preserve consonant clusters -CC at the end of the word, the gilit dialects insert an epenthetic vowel, i or u depending on the environment, for example, čalib < kalb ‘dog’, gaḷub < qalb ‘heart’, and in the keyword for these dialects gilit < qultu. In consonant clusters -CCC-, an epenthetic vowel is inserted after the first consonant, for example, yuḏ̣rubūn > yuḏ̣rbūn [elision of the unstressed u] > yuḏ̣urbūn [epenthesis] ‘they hit’. The verbal paradigm of the Muslim dialect of Baghdad illustrates this phenomenon, as shown in Table 11.4. kitab kitbaw kitbat kitábit kitabtu kitabti kitabit kitabna

yiktib yikitbūn tiktib tiktib tikitbūn tikitbīn ʾaktib niktib

Table 11.4  The verbal paradigm of Muslim Baġdādī In the verbal inflection, the Classical Arabic type of perfect verb faʿala has developed in accordance with the vowel rule given above into fiʿal or fuʿal depending on the environment, for example, ḏ̣urab as against simaʿ. In the inflection of the verb, the endings of the weak and the strong verbs have been levelled to a large degree. In some cases, this has led to the introduction of weak endings in the strong verb, as in many Bedouin dialects, for example, ḏ̣urbaw ‘they hit’, kitbaw ‘they wrote’, in which the ending -aw is derived from the inflection of the weak verb, cf. bičaw ‘they cried’. Some of the qǝltu dialects go even further in this direction and eliminate completely the distinction between weak and strong verbs (cf. above, pp. 135f.). In the Muslim dialect of Baghdad, the continuous aspect marker is dā-, the future marker raḥ-, as in most Mesopotamian dialects. The participle is used for the perfect aspect (as in Uzbekistan Arabic), as in (2) from the Muslim dialect of Baghdad: i (2) wēn ḏ̣āmm flūs-a where put.PART.3ms money-3ms ‘Where did he put his money?’ (Fischer and Jastrow 1980: 155)

Of special interest are the dialects spoken in the Iranian province of Khuzestan (called in Arabic ʿArabistān). Although the political developments of the last few decades have turned this area into a linguistic enclave, relations between the Arabs living there and their co-tribesmen in Iraq have never been completely

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disrupted. The Bedouin dialects in this region continue the Arabian dialect area (p. 192), but the sedentary dialects closely resemble the gilit dialects of Mesopotamia, in particular, the dialects around Baṣra. As may be expected, the Arabic dialects of Khuzestan use many Persian loans, many of them in the administrative domain (e.g., dānīšgāh < Persian dānešgāh ‘university’; ʾɪdāra < Persian edāre ‘office’), but also frequent words, such as hassɪt < Persian hast ‘there is, there are’; hīč < Persian hīč ‘nothing’. In phonology, Ingham notes that in final position two high vowels /i/ and /u/ are distinguished, but in non-final position these have merged into one, transcribed by him as /ɪ/. In the morphology, the presence of a clitic interrogative -man ‘what, who’ may be noted, as in (4) and (5): (4) šɪ́fɪt-man see.PERF.2ms-who ‘Who did you see?’ (5) trīd tíštɪrī-man want.IMPERF.2ms buy.IMPERF.2ms-who ‘Which do you want to buy?’ In some verbal forms, especially before pronominal suffixes, a suffix -an occurs, for example, ʾašūfan ‘I see’; ʾāḫḏanha ‘I shall take her’. Text 5  Jewish Arabic from ʿAqra (after Jastrow 1990: 166–7) 1. ǝzzawāj mālna, ida wēḥǝd kār-rād fad 1. Our wedding, when somebody loved bǝnt, nǝḥne ʿǝddna mā kān aku yǝmši a girl, it was not the case with us that maʿa, yǝji, yǝmši, laʾ he could go out with her, come and go, no. 2. bass kān aṛāha faz-zāye, zāytayn, kān 2. But when he had seen her once, twice, tīqǝlla, kūrrīd nǝji nǝṭlǝbki, mǝn ǝmmki he told her: ‘We want to come and ask w-abūki for your hand, from your mother and father’. 3. hīya tǝqǝllu … ida hīya kān tǝskīm, hīya 3. She told him … if she agreed, they kānǝt rāḍye, kān yǝmšawn ʿǝnd ǝmma went to her mother and father, his w-abūwa, ǝmmu w-abūhu, w-ǝḫtu, mother and father and his sister or w-ḫawātu flān yǝmšawn, yǝʿmǝlūn sisters went, they honoured them, kāvōd, yǝʿmǝlūn qadǝr wēḥǝd šān ellāḫ they paid each other respect. 4. yǝmšawn ʿǝnd ǝmma w-abūwa, yǝqǝl­­ 4. They went to her mother and father, lūlǝm kūrrīd bǝntkǝm, tǝʿṭawna šān and told them: ‘We want you to give ǝ́bǝnna, ǝ́bǝnna kīrīda, w-bǝntkǝm-ǝš your daughter to our son, our son kūtrīdu loves her and your daughter loves him, too’.

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Text 6  Khuzestan Arabic (Khorramshahr) (after Ingham 1973: 550) 1. halmēlām šlōn ɪysawwūna? 2. ʿala šāṭi maṯal šaṭṭ farɪd makān ɪdgūm dgɪṣṣlak ɪssaʿaf

1. This fishtrap, how do they make it? 2. On the bank of for instance a river, a place, you stand and cut off for yourself the palm fronds. 3. ʾɪlḫūṣ māla dgɪṣṣa ʾawwal 3. You cut off their leaves first. 4. hannōḅa dnabbɪč ɪlwɪḥda yamm ɪṯṯānya 4. Then you fix one beside the other lamman ma ṣṣīr hēč mɪṯl ɪlḫɪṣṣ so that it becomes like this, like a woven garden fence. 5. ɪlḫɪṣṣ maṯal mnɪlmadda tɪṣʿad ɪssɪmač 5. Then for instance when the high yɪṣʿad u mɪn yɪnzɪl hāḏa ssɪmač yqɪḏ̣ḏ̣a tide comes, the fish come up, and bhāḏa bɪlmēlām when the fish go down it catches them with the fishtrap. 11.4  Egyptian dialects The early stages of the Arabicisation of Egypt took place right at the beginning of the conquests. After the military conquest of the country and the establishment of a military camp at Fusṭāṭ, the urban population in Lower Egypt soon abandoned Coptic and adopted the new language. In the countryside and in Upper Egypt, the linguistic situation did not change for quite some time, and the Arabicisation of this area was much more gradual than that of Lower Egypt. This part of the country was Arabicised in the course of three centuries by Bedouin tribes that continued to immigrate from the Arabian peninsula to the west. From Egypt, the Arabic language was brought along the Nile to the south, into Sudan and Chad. In the middle of the third/ninth century, the Arab tribes of Rabīʿa and Juhayna in Upper Egypt pressed on southwards and steadily invaded the lands of Beja and Nubia. The present-day Arabic-speaking nomads in Sudan claim descent from the tribe of Juhayna, whereas the sedentary population in the Sudan call themselves Jaʿaliyyūn, after an alleged ʿAbbāsid scion, Jaʿal. In all probability, they are Nubians who were Arabicised at an early stage, right after the conquest of Egypt and before the Bedouin migration. Some of the Arabic varieties in Central and West Africa must have arisen in the course of expansion westwards of the Arab tribes in Sudan. The Arabs called the transcontinental savannah belt lying between the Sahara desert and the forest of Central Africa bilād as-Sūdān ‘lands of the Blacks’. Along this belt, which stretches from Sudan through the Central African Republic, Chad and Cameroon to Nigeria, Arabic and Islam were brought to West Africa, and during this expansion some of the Chadian Arabic dialects and the Arabic of Nigeria arose (see Map 11.2 and Chapter 15).

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Map 11.2  Arab tribes in the central African Baggara belt (after Owens 1993: 17) Although much is still unknown about the Central African varieties of Arabic, it is clear that there are many common features linking Nigerian Arabic, Chadian Arabic and Sudanic Arabic, as Owens (1993) has shown. Within Egypt, the following dialect groups are usually distinguished: • The dialects of the Delta; a further division is made between the eastern Delta dialects in the Šarqiyya and the western Delta dialects; in some respects the latter constitute the link between Egyptian Arabic and the dialects of the Maghreb, for instance, in the use of ni-…-u for the first-person plural of the imperfect in some of these dialects (cf. above, pp. 178f.). • The dialect of Cairo. • The Middle Egyptian dialects (from Gizeh to Asyūṭ). • The Upper Egyptian dialects (from Asyūṭ to the south); these are subdivided into four groups: the dialects between Asyūṭ and Nag Hammadi; the dialects between Nag Hammadi and Qēna; the dialects between Qēna and Luxor; and the dialects between Luxor and Esna. Until recently, only the Cairene dialect had been studied relatively well. Yet, in spite of the wealth of information about the dialect of the capital, its history and its formative period are still unclear. If one compares the present-day dialect of the capital with descriptions of ‘Egyptian’ (i.e., Cairene) from the nineteenth century and with dialect texts from that period, it turns out that there is a considerable difference (Woidich 1994). Cairene from that period exhibits a

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number of features that have disappeared from the modern dialect, for example, the passive with the prefix in- instead of it-; the pausal ʾimāla of the feminine ending to -e instead of the modern ending -a; the form of the pronominal suffix of the third-person singular masculine in forms such as mā šafuhš ‘they did not see him’ instead of modern mā šafuhūš, as well as a number of lexical items, most striking among them maṛa, which used to mean ‘woman’ and did not have the modern connotation of ‘woman of ill repute, slut’. Features such as these are still found in the rural dialects, although not all are connected to the same dialect region. According to Woidich (1994), the Cairene dialect of today must be regarded as a mixed dialect whose formative period was the second half of the nineteenth century, when there was an enormous influx of people from the countryside. As a result of this immigration, a number of features that until then had been current in the capital came to be stigmatised because they were identified with the low prestige rural dialects of the new inhabitants. This process of stigmatisation remained operative in the twentieth century. In the Egyptian movies of the 1920s and 1930s, the elite frequently use forms that nowadays would be regarded as vulgar, for instance, the plural ending of verbs in -um, which is now restricted in educated Cairene speech to the verb ‘to come’ (gum ‘they came’), but in the poor quarters of Cairo can still be heard in other verbs. Another example is that of the interrogative adjective anho ‘which?’, which in educated speech has been replaced by ayy, probably borrowed from the standard language. The process of mixing of dialects in the nineteenth century not only led to the disappearance and stigmatisation of rural forms, but also to the emergence of completely new forms as a result of hyperurbanisation and over-generalisation, for instance, in the case of the loss of the pausal ʾimāla. With the growing influence of the mass media, Cairene speech has spread all over the country. This prestige of the speech of the capital is not a recent phenomenon. We have seen in Chapter 10 (p. 182) that on dialect maps of the Delta the historical influence of Cairene Egyptian can still be traced following the ancient trade route that led from Cairo to the old port of Damietta (Dumyāṭ) in the central Delta along the eastern branches of the Nile. Egyptians themselves usually call all southern varieties of Egyptian Saʿīḍī, in contrast to the prestige dialect of Cairo. One of the distinctive markers between the two groups is the realisation of Classical /q/ and /j/: in Cairene Arabic these are realised as /ʾ/ and /g/, while in Upper Egypt they are pronounced as /g/ and /j/ (or /gy/ or even /d/). Another distinctive feature between the dialects of Cairo and some Delta dialects, on the one hand, and the Upper Egyptian dialects, on the other, is the system of stress assignment. In Cairene Arabic and in the Delta, the last heavy sequence (i.e., a syllable containing a long vowel and ending in a consonant or a syllable ending in two consonants) is stressed, for example, maʿẓū́m ‘invited’, máṭʿam ‘restaurant’, bínti ‘my daughter’. When this sequence is

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followed by more than one vowel, the vowel immediately following it is stressed, for example, madrása ‘school’, bintáha ‘her daughter’. When there is no heavy sequence, the first vowel is stressed, for example, báraka ‘blessing’. This stress system is often called the madrása type, which contrasts with the mádrasa type of the Egyptian dialects south of Cairo. A long vowel before the stress is shortened, for example, ṭāĺ ib ‘student’, but feminine ṭalíba; singular maʿzū́m ‘invited’, ́ Unstressed i/u before or after stress are elided, unless they but plural maʿzumīn. ́ are word-final, thus: ʿāŕ if ‘knowing’, but feminine ʿárfa, plural ʿarfīn. In the Šarqiyya (eastern Delta) and the Sinai, various Bedouin dialects are spoken. Most of the speakers arrived here in the first centuries of Islam, some perhaps even before the Islamic conquests. De Jong (2000, 2011) has shown that the Sinai region functions as a bridge between the Arabian peninsula and the Egyptian Delta. All dialects in the Sinai are of a Bedouin type (except the urban dialect of al-ʿArīš) and belong to the North-west Arabian dialect group, constituting a transitional group between the dialects of the Negev and the Šarqiyya. De Jong’s data show that the Sinai and Šarqiyya dialects have influenced each other mutually: the eastern Šarqiyya dialects have become more Bedouinised, and the Sinai Bedouin are affected by sedentary speakers. The dialect of the Dawāġrah, a small pariah tribe living in the Sinai northern littoral constitutes an exception because it is of a Najdī type. Compare, for instance, Dawāġrah ghāwah ‘coffee’, as against gahwa in neighbouring dialects, which shows the working of the gahawah syndrome (p. 194). The dialects of the western parts of Egypt form the boundary with the dialects of the Maghreb not only in the Delta, but also in the western oases. The dialects of the latter (Farafra, Baḥariyya, Daḫla and Ḫarga) have become known through the publications of Woidich (1993, 2000, 2002). Since they exhibit some West Arabic traits, it has been surmised that they are in some way related to the Arabic dialects of the Maghreb group. In Farafra, for instance, /t/ is pronounced affricated [ts], as in many Maghreb dialects. Both in Farafra and in Baḥariyya, we find the typical pronominal suffixes for the first person of the imperfect verb (niktib/niktibu), that are usually regarded as the hallmark of Maghreb dialects. Besides, there are lexical similarities, for example, the verb dār/ydīr ‘to make, to do’. On the whole, however, the dialects of the oases seem to be much more related to the dialects of the Nile valley, especially the Middle Egyptian dialects. We have seen above (Chapter 10, p. 180) that the structure of these dialects was the result of dialect contact. Originally, the inhabitants of the oases came from the Nile valley, and some of the features of their dialects may be regarded as archaic traits that were once present in the Middle Egyptian dialects, but disappeared as a result of innovations. In the periphery, these traits were retained and not replaced by the later innovations. The features that these dialects have in common with the Maghreb dialects were probably introduced by later invading Bedouin from the west, in particular, the Banū Sulaym on their migrations back east. During this process, too, the oasis

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of Siwa received its Berber dialect: it is the only place in Egypt where Berber is spoken. In spite of the numerous differences, there are some common traits distinguishing the Egyptian Arabic dialects in Egypt from other dialect groups. All Egyptian dialects preserve the three short vowels of Classical Arabic, but /i/, /u/ are elided in open and unstressed syllables. There are five long vowels (/ā/, /ī/, /ū/, /ē/, /ō/), which are shortened in unstressed position, in Cairo even in stressed position before two consonants, as in the form ʿárfa mentioned above. Consonant clusters are treated differently in the various dialect groups; in Cairene Arabic in a cluster -CCC-, an epenthetic vowel is inserted before the third consonant, even across the word boundary, for example, iṣ-ṣabri ṭayyib ‘patience is good’. Historically, the epenthetic vowel sometimes received stress in accordance with the stress rules of Egyptian Arabic, as, for instance, in the verbal form yíktibu → yiktbu → yiktibu → yiktíbu ‘they write’. The position of the demonstratives and the interrogatives in Egyptian Arabic is characteristic of this dialect, as well as of the related Sudanese Arabic dialects. The demonstratives for the near-deixis in the Egyptian dialects are variants of Cairene da, di, dōl, and always occur in postposition, for example (Cairene), ir-rāgil da ‘this man’, il-fellaḥīn dōl ‘these peasants’, sometimes even clitically as in innaharda ‘today’. The position of the interrogatives is remarkable, too: whereas most Arabic dialects front the interrogatives, in Egyptian the interrogative retains its structural position in the sentence, as in (6) and (7): (6) šufti mīn see.PERF.2s who ‘Whom did you see?’ (7) ʾalū-l-ak ʾē? say.PERF.3p-to-2ms what ‘What did they tell you?’ As an explanation for this phenomenon, Coptic substratal influence has been invoked (cf. above, pp. 143–4). In all Egyptian dialects, the imperfect has modal meaning; combined with an aspect marker bi- (Cairo, Delta) it expresses continuous or habitual aspect, combined with ḥa- it expresses future tense. The participle is an integral part of the verbal system. In a few verbs of perception or movement, it has present or future meaning, for example, ana šayfo ‘I see him (now)’ (contrasting with ana bašūfo kull yōm ‘I see him every day’); in the other verbs it has resultative meaning, for example, ana wākil ‘I have eaten, I am satisfied’. The verbal paradigm of Cairene is as in Table 11.5.

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katab katabu yiktib yiktibu katabit tiktib katabt tiktib katabtu tiktibu katabti tiktibi katabt katabna ʾaktib niktib Table 11.5  The verbal paradigm in Cairene Arabic Text 7  Cairene Arabic (after Woidich 1990: 337) 1. iḥna fī lʿīd safirna yomēn wi baʿdēn lamma rgiʿna kunna maʿzumīn ʿala lġada, ṛābiʿ yōm ilʿīd, ʿandi ḫalti

1. During the feast we travelled two days and after that when we returned we were invited for dinner, the fourth day of the feast, at my aunt’s. i 2. We went, my husband and I, in the 2. fa ruḥna ʾana w gōzi ḍḍuhr taʾrīban issāʿa talāta, wi staʾbilūna baʾa stiʾbāl afternoon around three o’clock, and gamīl giddan, bi ttirḥāb baʾa wi ʾahlan they received us, a very beautiful wi sahlan wi ʾanistūna wi šaṛṛaftūna wi reception, with welcome and ‘hello’ lbēt nawwaṛ and ‘you have made us happy’ and ‘you have honoured us’ and ‘may the house be illuminated’. 3. huwwa kida dayman, ilʿaʾilāt ilmaṣriyya 3. It is always like that, Egyptian tḥibbi tʾūl kalimāt kitīr ʾawi li ttaḥiyya families love to say very many yaʿni words, in greeting, that is. i 4. The important thing is, we 4. ilmuhimm ʾaʿadna natabādal baʾa kalimāt ittarḥīb diyyat li ġāyit lamma exchanged those words of welcome ḫalti yaʿni ḥaḍḍaritlina lġada until my aunt brought us dinner. Text 8  Upper Egyptian Arabic (id-Dalawiyya) (after Behnstedt and Woidich 1988: 168) 1. kān fī ṛādil ṣaʿīdi, w ḥabb izūr innabi

1. There was a man from Upper Egypt and he wished to visit the prophet. 2. fa lamma ṛāḥ izūr innabiy, taṛak filbēt 2. And when he went to visit the ibnuw, wu lʿabde, w maṛatu prophet, he left at home his son, and his servant and his wife. 3. w taṛak imʿāhum farrūde 3.  And he left with them a chicken. 4. fa lamma taṛak ilfarrūde, fyōm ṭʾabb ṛādil 4. And when he left the chicken, one takrūni, saḥaṛ ibmáṛatu, w ġaẉẉāha day a Sudanese sorcerer came, bewitched his wife and made her fall in love with him.

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5. ittakrūni da, ṣaʿīdi, ittakrūni miṣ-ṣaʿīd 5. This sorcerer was an Upper Egyptian, min gibli g̣ awi the sorcerer came from Upper Egypt, from the deep south. 6. innáma ṛṛādil da grayyib šwayye, ġēr 6. But this man was somewhat from the duḳha north, not like that one. 7. fa lamma saḥarlhe, ġīwitu, w ġiwīhe 7. And when he bewitched her, she fell in love with him, and he fell in love with her. 8. fa da fyōm w gallha: iḥna ʿayzīn nídbaḥu 8. And he (came) one day and said to her: lfarrūde ‘We want to slaughter the chicken’. 11.5  Maghreb dialects In no other area of the Arabophone world has there been such a marked separation in time between the two stages of Arabicisation. During the Arab conquests in the second half of the seventh century, the sedentary areas of North Africa were overrun by a relatively small group of invaders who settled mostly in existing urban centres, or in some cases in newly established military camps, whence the new, urban varieties of Arabic were spread over the surrounding area. Some of the Jewish varieties of Arabic in North Africa go back to this early period, such as the Jewish Arabic of Tunis and Algiers. The greater part of the countryside remained entirely Berber-speaking. The second stage of Arabicisation took place centuries later in the course of the invasion by the Banū Hilāl (tenth and eleventh centuries; cf. above, p. 186). During this stage, the Arabic language reached the countryside and the nomadic areas of North Africa, although it never managed to oust the Berber language completely (cf. above, pp. 129f., and see Map 11.3). This group of the Maghreb dialects includes the dialects of Mauritania (Ḥassāniyya), Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. In the literature, the dialects belonging to the two stages are often referred to as pre-Hilālī and Hilālī dialects, respectively. All pre-Hilālī dialects are sedentary dialects, spoken in cities and in those areas outside the cities that were Arabicised early on, such as the Tunisian Sahel, and the regions north of some of the large urban centres, Constantine, Tlemcen and Fes. Usually two groups are distinguished: • The Eastern pre-Hilālī dialects, spoken in Libya, Tunisia and eastern Algeria; these dialects are characterised by the preservation of the three short vowels. • The Western dialects of the pre-Hilālī group, spoken in western Algeria and Morocco; these have only two short vowels and have developed an indefinite article from the Classical Arabic numeral wāḥid, for example, in Moroccan Arabic waḥd ǝl-mṛa ‘a woman’, always used in combination with the definite article, possibly in analogy to the construction of the demonstrative with the article.

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The Bedouin dialects of North Africa represent the Hilālī dialects; they are divided into the Sulaym in the east (Libya and southern Tunisia), the Eastern Hilāl (central Tunisia and eastern Algeria), the Central Hilāl (south and central Algeria, especially in the border areas of the Sahara) and the Maʿqil (western Algeria and Morocco). One group from the Maʿqil confederation, the Banū Ḥassān, settled in Mauritania, where the local dialect is still known under the name of Ḥassāniyya (see below, pp. 214f.). Bedouin dialects are spoken not only in the rural areas, but also in some of the cities that were Bedouinised at a later stage, for instance, Tripoli. Libya is largely Bedouin-speaking; even the sedentary dialects of the urban centres such as Tripoli have been influenced by Bedouin speech. This is immediately visible in the reflexes of Classical Arabic /q/, on the one hand, and of the three interdentals, on the other. Thus, the dialect shares with the Bedouin dialects gʿǝd ‘to stay’ (qaʿada), gāl ‘to say’ (qāla), but agrees with other pre-Hilālī dialects in words like tlāta ‘three’ (ṯalāṯa), dhǝb (ḏahab), ḍull ‘shadow’ (ḏ̣ill). In pronominal and verbal morphology, Tripoli Arabic does not have gender distinction in the secondand third-person plural, but it does not go as far as some pre-Hilālī dialects, which have lost gender distinction in the second-person singular as well. Tunisia is a transitional zone; its Bedouin dialects are related to those in Libya. Algeria is heterogeneous: in the Constantinois, both Bedouin and sedentary dialects are spoken, and this area is linked with Tunisia and with the Algérois; the Algérois is predominantly Bedouin; the Oranais has one important sedentary centre in Tlemcen, while the rest is Bedouin-speaking. In Morocco, Bedouin

Map 11.3  Berber-speaking areas in North Africa

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dialects are spoken in the plains and in recently founded cities such as Casablanca; for the sedentary dialects, Rabat and Fes are the most important centres. In Mauritania, as we have seen, a Bedouin dialect is spoken. The dialect that was spoken in Spain (al-ʾAndalus) during the period of Islamic domination belonged to the Maghreb dialects, and so does the language of the linguistic enclave of Malta, which was conquered from Tunisia (cf. below, Chapter 15, pp. 276–9). The long coexistence between Arabic and Berber that is continued in the present countries of North Africa has marked these dialects (cf. pp. 141f.; Map 11.3). There has been much discussion about the degree of interference in the Maghreb dialects, but the presence of loanwords from Berber is unmistakable, sometimes even in the use of certain nominal patterns. Of the latter, the pattern tafǝʿʿalǝt is the most frequent; it serves to indicate professional activities, for example, taḫǝbbazǝt ‘the profession of a baker’. The Ḥassāniyya dialect in particular has taken over a large number of Berber words, some of them together with their original plurals, for example, ärǟgǟž/ärwǟgīž ‘man’, āḏrār/īḏrārǝn ‘mountain’, tāmūrt/tīmūrǟtǝn ‘acacia forest’, with the typically Berber prefixes ä-/ā- (masculine) and tā-/tī- (feminine). In spite of the linguistic diversity of North Africa, it may be regarded as one dialect area because of the common features shared by these dialects, which set them apart from the rest of the Arabophone world. There is one morphological feature in the verbal system that has served to classify the Maghreb dialects as one group: the prefix n- for the first-person singular in the imperfect verb (cf. above, Chapter 10, p. 178), for instance, Moroccan Arabic nǝktǝb ‘I write’/nkǝtbu ‘we write’. The boundary between the n- dialects and the Eastern dialects lies somewhere in western Egypt. All Maghreb dialects (except the Eastern sedentary dialects) have a very simple vowel system, with only two short vowels, /ǝ/ (< /a/ and /i/) and /u/, and three long vowels, /ā/, /ī/, /ū/. In the dialect of Cherchell, this development has gone even further, with only one short vowel remaining. Another striking feature in the phonology of all Maghreb dialects is the stress shift in words of the form faʿal, which among other things function as perfect verbs. Assuming that the original primary stress was on the penultimate, we may reconstruct the development as follows: kátab > katáb > ktǝb ‘he wrote’, and likewise žbǝl < jabal ‘mountain’, ʿrǝb < ʿarab ‘Arabs’, with elision of the short unstressed vowel. The only Maghreb dialect that has not undergone the stress shift is Maltese (cf. Maltese kiteb, ġibel ‘stone, hill [in place names]’, both with stress on the penultimate). With regard to syllable structure, many Maghreb dialects have undergone a restructuring in sequences of the type CvCC, which was changed to CCvC, for instance, in qabr > qbǝṛ ‘grave’; saqf > sqǝf ‘roof ’. Since in many dialects there is a constraint against short vowels in open syllables, when such a sequence is followed by a vocalic ending the vowel ‘jumps’ back one position, for example,

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*ktǝbǝt > kǝtbǝt ‘she wrote’; *ḥmǝṛa > ḥǝmṛa ‘red [feminine]’. The constraint against short vowels in open syllables also operates in forms such as the second-person plural of the imperfect verb, *tǝktǝbu ‘you [plural] write’; in Moroccan Arabic this becomes tkǝtbu. In other Maghreb dialects, the outcome of this rule is different. Some of them, such as the dialect of the Muslims of Tunis, elide the vowel (tǝktbu), or reduplicate the first radical, such as the dialect of the Muslims of Algiers (yǝkkǝ́tbu); other dialects have chosen still other solutions (tǝ́kkǝtbu, tǝ́kǝtbu, tēkǝ́tbu, tḗkǝtbu; cf. Fischer and Jastrow 1980: 254–6). The verbal paradigm of Moroccan Arabic demonstrates the effects of the phenomena mentioned above, as shown in Table 11.6. ktǝb yǝktǝb kǝtbu kǝtbǝt tǝktǝb tǝktǝb ktǝbti ktǝbtiw tkǝtbi ktǝbt ktǝbna nǝktǝb

ykǝtbu tkǝtbu nkǝtbu

Table 11.6  The verbal paradigm of Moroccan Arabic The system of derived measures has achieved a greater symmetry in the Maghreb than in the Eastern Arabic dialects. In Moroccan Arabic, for instance, the most frequent derived measures are the second measure (ʿǝllǝm ‘to teach’), the third measure (qatǝl ‘to fight’) and the eighth measure (štġǝl or štaġǝl ‘to work’). From all measures, including the first (stem verb), a passive may be derived in t-, tt- or n-. Most Moroccan dialects have tt-, for example, ttǝktǝb ‘to be written’, ttšaf ‘to be seen’, ttǝqra ‘to be recited’, from the verbs ktǝb, šaf, qra. Passives with n- occur mostly in the north and in Jewish varieties of Arabic. In some dialects, a wide variety of combinations occurs, for instance, in the dialect of Skūra tt-, n-, ttǝn-, ttnǝ-, so that many forms have variants, for example, ttnǝktǝb/ttǝktǝb ‘to be written’ (from ktǝb ‘to write’), ttǝssǝḥsǝn/nǝssǝḥsǝn/ttnǝssǝḥsǝn ‘to be approved’ (from ssǝḥsǝn ‘to approve’, Classical Arabic istaḥsana). The origin of these new passive formations is disputed. Since they occur not only in the derived measures, but in the stem verb as well, they must be new dialectal formations. They may have been formed on the analogy of the Classical Arabic fifth measure tafaʿʿala (in the case of the t- forms), and from the Classical Arabic seventh measure infaʿala (in the case of the n- forms). But it has also been proposed that these forms represent earlier Semitic categories, since a similar t- form occurs in Ethiopic and Aramaic. There may also be a connection with the Berber passive formation in t-, as Aguadé and Elyaacoubi (1995: 66) suggest. A special position is taken up by the Ḥassāniyya dialect of Mauritania. It has

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all the characteristic features of a Bedouin dialect, but apart from that we find here a series of unique innovations. In the phonological system, the dialect has a voiced /v/ that continues Classical Arabic /f/, for example, vīl < fīl ‘elephant’, tovla < †ifla ‘girl’. The voiceless /f/ is restricted to certain environments: it occurs before a voiceless consonant, for example, fsǝd ‘it was corrupted’, in gemination, for example, wäffä ‘he terminated’, and at the end of a word, for example, ʿṛaf ‘he knew’. Both consonants have an emphatic allophone in certain environments, just like most of the other consonants. As in all Arabic dialects, the two Classical phonemes /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ have merged, and since the dialect is a Bedouin dialect the resulting phoneme is interdental, /ḏ̣/. But in a number of words there is a phoneme /ḍ/ as the reflex of Classical /ḍ/, for example, qāḍi ‘judge’, ṛamaḍān ‘Ramadan’. These examples could be regarded as borrowings from the Classical language, but other words such as vaḍl (Classical Arabic faḍl) ‘favour’, mṛoḍ (Classical Arabic mariḍa) ‘he became ill’ seem to be original dialect words. In that case, Ḥassāniyya would be the only Western dialect to preserve traces of the original distinction between the two phonemes /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/. A third interesting feature is the presence of three palatalised phonemes, /ty/, /dy/, /ñ/ in a small number of words, most of them of Berber origin. Their phonemic status cannot be doubted, but their role in the language is minimal. Examples include käwktyäm ‘to strike with the fist’, kandya ‘syphilis’, Bäññug ‘[proper name]’. In the verbal system of Ḥassāniyya, apart from the usual derived measures there is a special measure with the prefix sa-, for example, sagbäl ‘he went south’, saḥmaṛ ‘he made red’, säktäb ‘he made someone his secretary’. The most probable explanation for this verbal form is a back-formation from tenth-measure verbs, for example, from stäsläm ‘to become a Muslim’ a new form was created säsläm ‘to make a Muslim’. This new measure then spread to all verbs. Another innovation is a new passive form that has developed for the second and third measure of the derived verb, and for the sa- forms (see Table 11.7).

active passive

perfect

bahhar ‘to perfume’

ubahhar ‘to be perfumed’

perfect

gǟbel ‘to confront’

ugabel ‘to be confronted’

imperfect

imperfect perfect

imperfect

ibahhar

igǟbel

sagbäl ‘to go south’ isagbäl

Table 11.7  The formation of the passive in Ḥassāniyya

yubahhar

yugǟbel

usagbäl ‘to be directed south’ yusagbäl

216  The Arabic Language An unusual feature is the presence of a diminutive pattern for verbs, for example, äkäytäb from ktäb ‘to write’, ämäyšä from mšä ‘to leave’. Such forms are mostly used in combination with a diminutive noun subject.

Text 9  Moroccan Arabic (after Caubet 1993) 1. gāl-l-ha: hākda? ēwa glǝs hna! žbǝd 1. He said to her: ‘So? Then sit here!’ ǝl-flūs u-ʿṭā-ha u-gāl-l-ha: hna tgǝlsi! He pulled out the money and gave it ma- tǝmšiw-š ḥǝtta ngūl-l-kum āžīw to her and said to her: ‘You sit here! Don’t go until I tell you: come to me!’ ʿand-i 2. mša där wāḥǝd-ǝl-bṛa ʿand-ǝl-feṛṛān, 2. He went to send a letter to the (attengāl-l-u: dīr ǝl-feṛṛān yǝsḫon, yǝsḫon dant of the) oven, and told him: ‘Heat bǝzzäf, bǝzzäf!, gāl-l-u: waḫḫa! it up, heat it up, very much!’ He said to him: ‘Alright!’ 3. ēwa ʿayyǝṭ l-žūž-d-ǝl-būlīs, gāl-l-hum: 3. Then he called two policemen, and rǝfdu hād-ǝṣ-ṣǝndūq!, rǝfdu hād-ǝṣtold them: ‘Take this box!’ They took ṣǝndūq u-ddāw-ǝh l-ǝl-fǝṛṛān, this box and brought it to the oven, ddāw-ǝh žmāw-ǝh f-bīt-nāṛ they brought it and threw it into the fire-place. 4. ēwa, ya sīdi, bqa ka-yttǝḥṛǝq ḥǝtta 4. Yes sir, it kept on burning until that māt dāk-ǝl-ʿabd slave died. Text 10  Ḥassāniyya (after Cohen 1963: 252) 1. ya qēyr ṛkabnāhöm mʿa ṣṣbāḥ mǝn ʿand lḫyām, madkurānna ḥayya v zǝrr Āfṭūṭ mǝn tall šaṛg; hāḏa nhāṛ, nhāṛ mtīn 2. ṛkabna mʿa ṣṣbāḥ u gǝlna ʿanna lā bǝddānna mǝn ngayyǝlu ḏīk lḥayya vīh ārwāgīž gāʿ aṣḥāb ǝnna u vīh zād ṣadīqāt aṣḥabāt ǝṃṃwalli

1. But we rode in the morning from the tents, a camp site had been mentioned to us near Āfṭūṭ (‘the large plain’) in the north-east; this is a day, a long day. 2. We rode in the morning and we said to ourselves: ‘We have to take a rest in that camp site’. In it were men that were friends of ours and there were moreover female friends, too. 3. We rode from there and we got 3. ṛkabna mǝn vamm u gemna moving; the day became hot; it was the mḥarrkīn, ḥma ǝnnhāṛ; hāḏa vaʿgāb y ǝṣṣayf, ǝnnhāṛāt māhöm ḥāmyīn ya qē r end of the summer, the days were not ǝššams ḥayya hot, but the sun was strong. y 4. When the day became at its hottest, 4. mnē n ḥma ǝʿlīna ǝnnhāṛ, brǝk awṣayrīt, mnayn brǝk tbārǝkna mʿāh u our young animal broke down; when it gām broke down, we took care of it, and it stood up.

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Further reading The most complete handbook of Arabic dialects is that of Fischer and Jastrow (1980); the progress in our knowledge of Arabic dialects is obvious when we compare this handbook with the survey by Brockelmann (1964) conducted sixteen years previously in the Handbuch der Orientalistik. Fischer and Jastrow give a general survey of the structure of Arabic dialects, followed by a discussion of each individual dialect group, with sample texts of the most important dialects. There is a rather short historical introduction. A recent survey is Kaye and Rosenhouse (1997). Short introductions to the Arabic dialects are available in Polish (Danecki 1989) and in Italian (Durand 1995). The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics contains more than fifty dialect sketches from all over the Arabicspeaking world. On dialect atlases, see above, Chapter 10. A few monographs may be mentioned that concern themselves with general features across all dialects: Fischer (1959) on the deictic system; Janssens (1972) on the stress patterns; Eksell Harning (1980) on the genitive construction; Procházka (1993) on prepositions; Czapkiewicz (1975) and Mitchell and El-Hassan (1994) on the aspectual system; Retsö (1983) on the passive voice. Brustad (2000) produced a comparative syntax of four dialects (Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian and Kuwaiti). For each of the dialect groups mentioned in this chapter, we shall indicate the most important grammars, dictionaries and monographs.

Dialects of the Arabian peninsula

The classification and structure of the North-east Arabian dialects is relatively well known, the best survey being that of Ingham (1982); for the dialects of eastern Arabia and the Gulf states, see Johnstone (1967). A reference grammar of Gulf Arabic is Holes (1990). For the Bedouin dialects outside the Arabian peninsula, see the older studies of Cantineau (1936, 1937), Blanc (1970b, the dialects of the Negev) and Rosenhouse (1984, general survey). About the Negev dialects, see Henkin (2010), and about the Sinai dialects, see de Jong (2000, 2011). Palva (1991) proposes a new classification of what he calls the North-west Arabian dialects. About the position of the Shiʿite dialects in Bahrain, see Prochazka (1981), Al-Tajir (1982) and Holes (1983, 1984, 1987). A large glossary of East Arabian dialects (2001) and a collection of ethnographic texts (2005) were published by Holes; a third volume containing a dialect description is forthcoming. The dialect of Oman, which is important because of its expansion to Zanzibar and its contacts with the Swahili-speaking inhabitants of East Africa, is still known primarily through the old description by Reinhardt (1894); and see Brockett (1985). The dialects of Central Arabia are dealt with by Ingham (1982) and Prochazka (1988); a reference grammar of Najdī Arabic was produced by Ingham (1994b), from which the Najdī examples were taken. The dialects of the Ḥijāz are less well known; on the sedentary dialect of Mecca, see Schreiber (1970), Ingham (1971), Sieny (1978) and Bakalla (1979); on the Bedouin dialects, see Toll (1983).

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The dialects of Yemen used to be one of the most neglected topics in Arabic dialect geography; apart from the older literature such as Rossi (1939), there was only a sketch of some of the dialect features by Diem (1973b). Recent publications by Behnstedt include a dialect atlas (1985) and a glossary (1992); there are some monographs on individual dialects (sketch of the dialect of Saʿdah by Behnstedt (1987); syntax of Ṣanʿānī Arabic by Watson (1993); dialects of the central Tihāma by Greenman (1979); Tihāma texts in Behnstedt (1996)). On the whole, the situation in North Yemen has been studied more extensively than that in South Yemen. A learning grammar of Ṣanʿānī Arabic was published by Watson (1996).

Syro-Lebanese dialects Syria and Lebanon are probably the best-researched dialect area in the Arab world. A classic article on the classification of Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian dialects is Cantineau (1938). There are two books on the Syrian dialect of Damascus in the Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series: a reference grammar (Cowell 1964) and an English–Syrian Arabic dictionary (Stowasser and Ani 1964). A comprehensive dictionary of Levantine Arabic is that of Barthélemy (1935–69); a supplement was published by Denizeau (1960). The dialect of Damascus has been the subject of a detailed description by Grotzfeld (1965), who also published a number of texts together with Bloch (1964). A syntactic study of Damascene Arabic was published by Bloch (1965). The dialect of Aleppo is described by Sabuni (1980), from whom the examples were taken. On the dialect of the province of Hatay in Turkey, see Arnold (1996). For the Lebanese dialects, see Fleisch (1974), a collection of dialect geographical studies. An older syntactic study of the Lebanese dialects is that of Feghali (1928). Individual dialects were described by El-Hajjé (1954, the dialect of Tripoli), Jiha (1964, the dialect of Bišmizzīn), Abu-Haidar (1979, the dialect of Baskinta) and Naïm(Sanbar) (1985, 2006, the dialect of Beirut). The data about the isogloss for the treatment of /a/ in unstressed syllables are to be found in Janssens (1972: 108–14). A syntax of Palestinian Arabic was published by Bauer (1909); see also Blau (1960, the dialect of Bīr Zēt) and Piamenta (1966). On the classification of the Jordanian dialects see Cleveland (1963); sociolinguistic studies were published by Suleiman (1985) and Sawaie (1994). A sketch of the dialect of Amman is given by Al Wer (2007b), who also published a study of variation in Jordanian Arabic with the emphasis on women’s contribution to linguistic innovation (2003). Palva (1976, 1980, 1984–6) studied the dialects of various Bedouin tribes in Jordania.

Mesopotamian dialects For the dominant dialect of Baghdad, there is a complete set of materials in the Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series: reference grammar (Erwin 1963), basic course

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(1969) and dictionaries (Clarity et al. 1964; Woodhead and Beene 1967); grammatical sketch in Malaika (1963). The classic work on the communal dialects of Baghdad is Blanc (1964). Our main source for the qǝltu dialects is Jastrow’s two-volume study on these dialects, their classification and their characteristics, accompanied by a large collection of texts (Jastrow 1978, 1981); for a survey, see Jastrow (1994). The same author has also published extensively on individual dialects of this group, for instance, his study on the dialect of Mosul (1979) and on the Jewish Arabic of ʿAqra and Arbīl (1990); for Jewish Baġdādí, see Mansour (1991; a short sketch 2006). A study on the verbal syntax of a Mesopotamian dialect, the dialect of Kwayriš, is by Denz (1971). For the qǝltu dialects of Anatolia, see Chapter 15, p. 282. On the Arabic of Khuzestan, there are three studies by Ingham (1973, 1976, 1994a).

Egyptian Arabic One of the oldest dialect grammars is that of Spitta-Bey (1880) of Egyptian Arabic; it represents an effort to describe the Egyptian (Cairene) dialect as it was actually spoken at the time. Later grammars include Tomiche (1964), a reference grammar, and Mitchell (1962), Ahmed (1981) and Salib (1981), which are intended as learning grammars with conversations and exercises. A complete course developed in the Michigan series is Abdel-Masih et al. (1978–9). The standard reference grammar for Cairene Arabic is Woidich (2006). Woidich (1990) is a learners’ manual for the Egyptian dialect; because of its empirical basis, it contains many aspects of Cairene grammar not included in the reference grammars. A transformational grammar of Egyptian Arabic was produced by Wise (1975). On the phonology of Cairene Arabic, see Broselow (1976, 1979). Monographs on individual dialects are by Abul Fadl (1961, the dialects of the Šarqiyya); Woidich (e.g., 1979, 1980, the dialect of il-ʿAwāmṛa; 1993; 2000, 2002, the dialect of Daḫla); Drop and Woidich (2007; ilBaḥariyya); de Jong (2000, 2011, the dialects of the Sinai). On the history of Cairene Arabic and the formative period of this dialect, see Birkeland (1952), Woidich (1994, 1995) and Woidich and Landau (1993: 49–75). A dictionary of the Cairene dialect was published by Badawī and Hinds (1986). The dialect atlas of Behnstedt and Woidich was mentioned above, p. 176. Sudanese Arabic is much less well known than Egyptian Arabic; on the dialect of Khartoum, see Trimingham (1946); a dictionary of colloquial Sudanese is by Qāsim (1972); there is a monograph on the Bedouin dialect of the Šukriyya by Reichmuth (1983). On the Arabic of Chad, see Kaye (1976), Roth-Laly (1979), Owens (1985) and Tourneux and Zeltner (1986). A dictionary of Chadic Arabic is by RothLaly (1969). Jullien de Pommerol published a grammar (1999a) and a dictionary (1999b) of Chadic Arabic. On the Arabic dialects in Central Africa and Nigeria, see Chapter 15, pp. 288–90.

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Maghrebi dialects A general study of the Maghreb dialects is Ph. Marçais (1977). Most of the available didactic materials concern Moroccan Arabic, that is, the urban koine as spoken in Casablanca. There is a complete set of manuals in the Richard Slade Harrell Arabic Series: reference grammar (Harrell 1962), basic course (Harrell 1965) and dictionaries (Harrell 1966; Harrell and Sobleman 1963). The standard grammar of Moroccan Arabic is Caubet (1993). The Dutch–Moroccan/Moroccan–Dutch dictionary of Otten (1983) deserves special mention because of its consistent orthography, which could be regarded as a step towards standardisation of the dialect. This orthography is also used in a recent course for Moroccan Arabic in Dutch (Hoogland 1996). Other varieties of Moroccan Arabic are described by Singer (1958a, 1958b, the dialect of Tetouan), Aguadé and Elyaacoubi (1995, the dialect of Skūra), Moscoso García (2003, the dialect of Chauen). For Algerian, see Ph. Marçais (n.d., the dialect of Djidjelli) and Grand’henry (1972, the dialect of Cherchell); a sociolinguistic study was published by Boucherit (2002). For Tunisian, see the manual by Singer (1984) and Talmoudi (1980, 1981, 1984b, the dialect of Sousse). For Libyan, there is a reference grammar of Eastern Libyan by Owens (1984); on the dialect of Cyrenaica, see Laria (1996); a reference grammar of the dialect of Tripoli was published by Pereira (2010). For the early history of the dialects of the Maghreb, the study of Andalusian Arabic is of prime importance, see Chapter 17, pp. 315–17. Of special interest are the dialects of the Jewish communities in North Africa, for example, the dialect of the Jews of Tunis (D. Cohen 1964, 1975); the dialect of the Jews of Algiers (M. Cohen 1912); the dialect of Tafilalt (Heath and Bar-Asher 1982); the dialect of the Jews of Tripoli (Yoda 2005); and the dialects of Moroccan Jews (Heath 2002). The Ḥassāniyya dialect of Mauritania is described by D. Cohen (1963) and Zavadovskij (1981); a study on this dialect was published by Taine-Cheikh (1994); there is an extensive dictionary in course of publication by Taine-Cheikh (1988– 98; eight volumes have thus far appeared, containing the letters hamza-gāf). Heath (2004) published a dictionary of the variety of Ḥassāniyya spoken in Mali.

Chapter 12

The Emergence of Modern Standard Arabic

12.1 Introduction In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brief expedition to Egypt brought this province of the Ottoman Empire into direct contact with Western Europe. This marked the beginning of a period in which European culture, at first primarily from France, but later from England as well, began to infiltrate the Arab world. At first, the reception of new ideas was promoted by the government: Muḥammad ʿAlī, who governed Egypt from 1805 until 1848, stimulated the translation of books and articles from French, mostly on technical subjects, but political and cultural topics were also included. In this way, the concepts of the French Enlightenment became part of the intellectual atmosphere of the country. The introduction of new political ideas stimulated the rise of Arab nationalism, which in the second half of the nineteenth century centred around the position of Arabic as the language of the Arab world. At the same time, the confrontation with Western ideas led to a debate about the compatibility of these ideas with the tradition of Islam, and, on a linguistic level, about the capacity of the Arabic language to express the new notions. In this chapter, we shall deal with four topics: the position of Arabic in the nineteenth century; the adaptation of Arabic vocabulary to the modern period; the reform of grammar; and the changes in the structure and phraseology of the language. 12.2  The rebirth of Arabic When the French conquered Egypt, the Egyptian writer al-Jabartī (d. 1825), who witnessed the invasion, wrote an account in which he informed his compatriots about the political situation in Europe and the relations between the European nations. For the first time, political notions and institutions that were alien to the Islamic point of view had to be described in terms that were comprehensible to a Muslim audience. Throughout the nineteenth century, Arabic translators were active as intermediaries who attempted to express the notions of one culture in the language of the other (cf. Ayalon 1987). It was, for instance, hard to find an Arabic equivalent for the European notion of ‘constitutional government’.

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In some translations, ‘constitutional monarchy’ became a malakiyya muqayyada (after the French monarchie limitée), that is, a monarchy that was limited by laws, in the Middle Eastern context almost a contradiction in terms. The notion of man-made laws was equally difficult to grasp. The Middle East knew only a religious law (šarīʿa), sometimes complemented by temporary regulations by the ruler (qawānīn). For a long time, translators hesitated to use the verb šarraʿa for the Western concept of ‘legislation’, but at the end of the nineteenth century this became the current term for the activity of a legislative assembly. The term dustūr became the regular term for ‘constitution’; originally this term had denoted a code, or a collection of laws. Once dustūr had been introduced as a term for the constitution, ‘constitutional government’ could be translated with ḥukūma dustūriyya. It was equally hard to reproduce the idea of ‘citizenship’ in a society that consisted of a ruler and his subjects. Initially, the Arabic translators used the term raʿiyya ‘flock, subjects’ to indicate all people under a government, so that ḥuqūq ar-raʿiyya came to indicate the concept of ‘civil rights’! Because of its connotations, this term was increasingly often avoided by the translators and replaced with the more neutral term šaʿb ‘people’, in combinations such as ḥukūmat aš-šaʿb bi-š-šaʿb ‘government of the people by the people’ and ṣawt aš-šaʿb ‘vox populi’, and also in majlis aš-šaʿb ‘people’s assembly, House of Commons’. Only in the twentieth century, when the concept of waṭan ‘fatherland’ had become familiar, could a term such as muwāṭin for ‘citizen’ gain currency (Ayalon 1987: 43–53). The representative character of the government in many European countries constituted another problem for a translator wishing to explain the structure of European society. One of the first terms to indicate a representative was wakīl, originally a representative of the ruler or a mandatory. At first, this was the term used in combinations such as wukalāʾ ar-raʿiyya or majlis al-wukalāʾ. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was replaced by nuwwāb from nāʾib ‘substitute, replacing’. In some cases, the choice of terms represented a deliberate attempt on the part of the rulers to manipulate the ambiguity of the terminology. When the term šūrā was introduced to indicate the institution of a parliament, it had overtones of a consultative body (cf. the Ottoman meşveret), and in choosing this term rulers could emphasise the limited powers of the body concerned. An alternative term dīwān had the same disadvantage – or advantage – of being closely connected to the sphere of influence of the ruler. In the end, the much vaguer term majlis ‘session’ (or sometimes the European loan barlamān) seemed better suited to express the novel character of the new institution. This last example illustrates the process by which, from a confusion of terms, the best term was eventually selected, that is, the one that was least contaminated with old concepts (cf. Rebhan 1986). A complication in the study of the introduction of political terminology in Arabic in the nineteenth century is the fact that in many cases we have ­insufficient

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information about the exact path by which the terms were introduced. Neologisms invented by writers from the beginning of the nineteenth century such as al-Jabartī played an important part, but they were not the only source for the lexical innovations. In some cases, translators could go back to pre-Ottoman Arabo-Islamic sources, such as the terminology in Ibn Ḫaldūn’s (d. 757/1356) Muqaddima, from which they borrowed words like istibdād ‘despotic rule’ for ‘absolutism’, šūrā ‘council to elect a caliph’ for ‘constitutional government’, and fitna ‘fight between Islamic factions’ for ‘revolution’. Most of these words were replaced later by more neutral, less Islamic terms (for instance, fitna by ṯawra, originally ‘unrest, stirring’). Some of the terms that were introduced into Arabic went through an Ottoman stage. When in the second half of the nineteenth century the Young Ottomans formulated their ideas about government and political structure, they often borrowed words from Arabic that had not been current or did not have a specifically political meaning in Arabic. At a later stage, some of these terms were reintroduced into Arabic together with their newly acquired meaning, for instance, the words for ‘government’ (hükümet, Arabic ḥukūma) and ‘republic’ (cumhuriyet, Arabic jumhūriyya). Other terms that Ottoman Turkish had borrowed from Arabic never became popular in the Arab world, for instance, the term mabʿūṯ (from Arabic baʿaṯa ‘to send’) that was used for the representatives in the Ottoman Heyʾet-i Mebʿūsān in 1876. Another example is the word millet (Arabic milla ‘creed, denomination’) that was applied in the nineteenth century by the Ottoman administration to religious minorities with a legal status, but never gained currency in this sense in Arabic political terminology. Yet another category is constituted by those terms that were created independently in the Arab world to express Western political notions. At first, these notions had been borrowed together with the foreign word, for instance, kūmūnizm or kūmūniyya for ‘communism’, or sūsyāl or sūsyālist for ‘socialist’, but most foreign words were soon replaced by Arabic equivalents. Many of them were derived from existing roots or words through analogy (qiyās), for example, ištirākī ‘socialist’ (from ištaraka ‘to share’), which came to be preferred to ijtimāʿī (from ijtamaʿa ‘to gather’) and šuyūʿiyya, which was coined in the twentieth century for ‘communism’ (from šāʾiʿ ‘common [property]’). In most cases, the original European (English or French) term shone through in the selected root, but inevitably the Arabic equivalents introduced new connotations as well. The term ištirākī, for instance, suggests ‘sharing’, which underscores one aspect of socialism, the shared possession of the means of production. The new role of Arabic as a medium for political ideas naturally affected its societal position as well. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, Turkish had become the language of power and government in the Arab world, and although Classical Arabic had always remained the language of religion and, to a certain extent, of culture, it had lost its function as administrative language of the empire

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(cf. also above, Chapter 5). The official status of Turkish in the Ottoman Empire did not mean, however, that it was universally understood. In the Arab provinces, less than 1 per cent of the population actually knew Turkish. In practice, therefore, the local authorities and the courts had to have recourse to translators in order to facilitate contacts with the local populace. Most of the locally produced documents were either in Arabic or bilingual. When at the end of the nineteenth century nationalism began to emerge in the Arab world, it was invariably linked with the Arabic language, whether this nationalism was pan-Arabic as in Syria, or regional as in Egypt. The linkage between Arab identity and the Arabic language did not call into question the framework of the Ottoman Empire and usually went no further than a request for improvement in the status of Arabic in the provinces. On more than one occasion, complaints were made about the lack of understanding between the local populace and the government’s representatives, and local authorities often stressed the need to send officials who were familiar with the local language. In Egypt, the use of Arabic for administrative purposes had increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century, and at the end of the century most of the official correspondence was carried out in Arabic. Nonetheless, any discussion in the Ottoman parliament by Arab delegates about the position of Arabic immediately led to objections by those who felt that the position of Turkish as the official language of the Ottoman Empire was threatened. In 1909, the use of any language other than Turkish in legal cases was explicitly forbidden, and in 1910 a request to the Ottoman parliament to accept petitions written in Arabic was turned down, even by some of the representatives from the Arab world. The Arab Congress that convened in 1913 in Paris called for a measure of provincial autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and at the same time claimed for Arabic the status of official language, both in the Ottoman parliament and in local government. On the part of the central government, the loss of the Ottoman areas in the Balkans led to a renewed interest in the position of the Arab provinces. In 1913, petitions in Arabic in predominantly Arabic-speaking areas were allowed, and official decrees were published with an Arabic translation. Officially, Arabic was even accepted as the language of education and legal cases, but probably this new policy was implemented only in central areas such as Syria and Lebanon. None of these requests and measures should be construed as signs of disloyalty towards the central government; in most cases they were meant as support for the central government and as a means of strengthening the ties between the provinces and the capital. The reaction to European ideas differed in the various Arab provinces. In Egypt, the period after the Napoleonic conquest was characterised by an emphasis on the special character of Egyptian society, history and culture. Some intellectuals even began to write about the Egyptian nation (waṭan) as something transcending the Muslim community (ʾumma). The keywords of this d ­ evelopment

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were ­modernisation and reform, albeit without a concrete programme, and always within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. At first, these writers did not respond negatively to European culture, but in the course of the nineteenth century the increasing political presence and influence of the European countries (Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, Egypt became de facto a British protectorate in 1882) and their special ties with the Christian minorities altered the attitude towards Europe. Thinkers such as Jamāl ad-Dīn al-ʾAfġānī (1839–97) and Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) opposed British imperialism, while at the same time emphasising the need to reform Islamic thinking and education. In their view, this reform should not consist in the wholesale borrowing of Western notions, but in a revival of the old Islamic virtues: Islam was a rational religion and perfectly capable of coping with the new problems. European ideas could be helpful in some respects, but because of its inherent virtues Islam had nothing to fear from them. The term Nahḍa ‘awakening, revival’ is sometimes used to indicate the spirit of this period, in which some reformers expected Islam to experience a renaissance, after the dark ages of uncritical repetition of established doctrine (taqlīd). In this view, acquaintance with Western culture and ideas could serve as a catalyst for the revival of Islamic and/or Arabic culture. In the Levant, the reaction to nationalism developed in a different way from Egypt. The Arab Christians in Greater Syria had never completely severed their ties with the Christians of Europe, and from the seventeenth century onwards there had been a constant interchange between the Maronites and the learned (often religious) institutions of Italy and France. For these Christians, the problem of a conciliation between Islam and Western ideas did not pose itself, and they could adopt these new ideas without any risk to their own identity. For them as non-Muslims, an Islamic empire held no appeal, and they were apt to stress the separation between Arabic and Islam. While in Egyptian nationalist circles the role of the Egyptian nation was emphasised, Syrian nationalism owed a great deal to Arab Christians, which partly explains its more markedly pan-Arab flavour. In accordance with their views on the unifying role of language rather than religion, Lebanese Christians played an important role in the revival of Arabic studies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (for instance, Nāṣif al-Yāzijī, 1800–71). After the start of the First World War, the political conflicts between the provinces and the central government were phrased increasingly often in terms of the opposition between Arabs and Turks. The Arab revolt of 1916 aimed at the establishment of an Arab kingdom to provide a home for all those of Arab descent who spoke Arabic. Although Arab thinkers often disagreed among themselves about the future form that their nation should take, they all agreed on its being an Arabic-speaking nation. It is true that in spite of efforts to realise a secular state in the Arab world, as Atatürk had done in Turkey, Islam remained the most important binding element. But, for most political thinkers, Islam was intrinsically and

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indissolubly connected with Arabic. Thus, for instance, Šakīb ʾArslān (1896–1946) held that the community was defined by its religion, and since Arabs formed the core of the Islamic ʾumma, Arabic was the true language of Islam, so that every Muslim had to learn Arabic. Arguing the other way round, Sāṭiʿ al-Ḥuṣrī (1880– 1968) asserted that it was precisely language that defined a nation, and therefore, the Arab nation should include all those who spoke Arabic. In this respect, he opposed both the Islamic nationalists, who wished to unite all Muslims, and the regional nationalists, such as the Egyptians, whose first priority was to obtain statehood for a geographically defined nation. 12.3  The reform of the lexicon The nineteenth century witnessed the development of a periodical press in Arabic. The first Arabic periodical was the Egyptian government newspaper al-Waqāʾiʿ al-Miṣriyya (1828), established by Muḥammad ʿAlī. Other newspapers followed, in Egypt and in other countries. The involvement of Arab Christians in the publication of private newspapers ensured the emphasis on its Arabic character. The activities of language reformers in Syria, such as Fāris aš-Šidyāq (1804–87) and Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–83), gave an impetus to the much-needed modernisation of the lexicon. Al-Bustānī, for instance, published the first modern large-scale dictionary of Arabic, al-Muḥīṭ, which borrowed heavily from the Classical dictionaries, to be sure, but nevertheless aimed at the incorporation of all exciting new ideas and concepts in an Arabic garb. This is not to say that there was a consensus among Arab linguists about the best way to deal with the influx of Western notions into the Arabic language. Just as political thinkers differed in their ideas about Islam and Islamic civilisation and its relationship to Western/Christian culture, the language reformers ranged from those who believed that in itself the Arabic lexicon was sufficient to express anything needed in this modern age, to those who strongly advocated the wholesale adoption of Western words and a complete revision of the lexicon. The more careful approach of the moderates mirrored the ideas of some of the political thinkers of this period. They maintained that in itself Arabic was the perfect language, but people had started to corrupt it. What was needed was a return to the purity of the Classical language. In the process of modernisation of the language at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Arab academies played a central part. Modelled after the great language academies of Europe – both the Academy of Damascus and the Academy of Cairo, for instance, were founded with explicit reference to the example of the Académie française – their aim was to implement the ideas about the place of Arabic in the modern world that had become commonplace in the Nahḍa. During his short-lived reign in Syria, King Fayṣal expressed concern about the quality of the educational system and the preservation of the cultural

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heritage in the form of libraries, manuscript collections and museums. The Dīwān al-maʿārif that was installed for this purpose came under the presidency of Kurd ʿAlī (1876–1953), who had been the founder of the National Library (Dār al-Kutub aẓ-Ẓāhiriyya). In 1919, the second task of the council, the cultivation of the Arabic language, was entrusted to what became the first language academy in the Arab world, al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī, nowadays called Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya bi-Dimašq ‘The Academy of the Arabic Language in Damascus’. From the start, the goal of the academy was twofold: to guard the integrity of the Arabic language and preserve it from dialectal and foreign influence, on the one hand, and to adapt the Arabic language to the needs of modern times, on the other. The same two functions appear in the charter of the Academy of Cairo (Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya al-Malikī, since 1955 called the Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya), founded in 1932 by Fuʾād I. In practice, the main function of the Cairene academy since 1960 has been the creation of new Arabic terminology, as well as the reform of both Arabic script and grammar. New terms are introduced through a complicated process of consultation and deliberation: they are proposed in the many subcommittees of the academy, each responsible for a specific field of knowledge, and after approval by the general assembly of the academy they are published in its journal. Usually the introduction of a new term leads to long and sometimes heated discussions in the proceedings of the academy, and it may take years before a proposed term finally finds its way into the dictionaries and technical vocabularies. The academies of Iraq (al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿIrāqī, established in 1947) and Jordan (Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya al-ʾUrdunnī, established in 1976) are of more recent date and are of secondary importance in the process of language modernisation. It appears that the Iraqi academy concentrates more on the edition of Classical texts in an effort to contribute to the ʾiḥyāʾ at-turāṯ ‘resuscitation of the heritage’, whereas the Jordanian academy serves as an instrument in the Arabicisation of education in Jordan. Language academies in the Maghreb are usually more concerned with strengthening the position of Arabic as against French, for instance, the ʾAkādimiyyat al-Mamlaka al-Maġribiyya in Rabat, which was founded in 1981 and whose main office is the Bureau de coordination sur l’arabisation dans le monde arabe (Maktab tansīq at-taʿrīb). There have been some attempts to create a pan-Arabic association of language academies, but the national academies guard their independence and autonomy jealously so that cooperation on a higher level is at most a cherished ideal and does not seem to have led to any concrete results. The most urgent problem of language reform was that of the expansion of the lexicon. In addition to their confrontation with European political ideologies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Arab provinces were confronted by a host of new technical notions and objects, for which names had to be invented. The lexical expansion for political and technical terminology in this period parallels that in another period in which the Arabic language incorporated an entirely

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new vocabulary, that of the eighth/ninth centuries, when the translation of Greek logical, medical and philosophical writings required the invention of many new words (cf. above, Chapter 5). A major difference between the Classical period of the translations and the modern period is the degree of uniformity. At first, the translators of the Classical period had been free to create their own terminology, but, with the establishment of the Bayt al-Ḥikma by al-Maʾmūn, terminology in the ‘Greek’ disciplines such as medicine, philosophy and logic became increasingly uniform. In the twentieth century, even more so than in the nineteenth, the expansion of the lexicon was undertaken simultaneously in many different places. In the nineteenth century, one could say that the major centres, Egypt and Syria, were at least in touch with each other, and some of the people who worked on the modernisation of the language in Egypt had come from Syria. But in the twentieth century, every country undertook its own voyage on the way to the modernisation of the lexicon, and not even the academies were able to unify the ‘national’ terminologies. In some fields, of course, the differences in terminology constituted an acute threat to the cooperation between scholars and scientists from the various Arab countries, for instance, in the field of medicine and physical sciences, and for some of these technical disciplines pan-Arabic word lists were, indeed, compiled. The following methods may be distinguished in the creation of new vocabulary: 1. borrowing of the foreign word; 2. integration of the foreign word morphologically and/or phonologically; 3. analogical extension of an existing root; 4. translation of the foreign word; 5. semantic extension of an existing word. These methods do not represent successive stages in the creation of vocabulary: they are different ways of coping with the introduction of new notions in a civilisation. There is a certain tendency, however, to go through them successively, starting with the wholesale borrowing of foreign words, which are then gradually adapted to the structure of the language. The actual choice of a new word depends on many factors, such as the nature of the notion to be translated and the cultural and political circumstances. Often, a new notion is introduced in the form of a close approximation of the foreign word. Such foreign loans are usually printed in Latin letters between brackets or transliterated and written in quotation marks. Thus, today one may find in popular scientific texts words like ‘laser’ in Arabic transliteration, followed by the same word in Latin letters. A similar procedure is sometimes followed with proper names. Although both in the Classical period and in modern times there were purists who strove for the complete elimination of all foreign loans from the Arabic language, most people were willing to admit them on the condition that they

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were adapted to the structure of Arabic, both in their phonetic shape (no foreign sounds and no combinations of consonants that are not allowed in Arabic) and in their morphological pattern. In the Classical period, this procedure of Arabicisation (taʿrīb) was very successful, the number of unadapted words remaining minimal. In the modern period, the academies adopted a restrictive policy, allowing loans only in scientific terminology. Many nineteenth-century political loans (such as the above-cited kūmūnizm) were replaced eventually by Arabic terms, while purely scientific and technical terms (such as hīdrūkarbūn ‘hydrocarbon’, klūrūfūrm ‘chloroform’) retained their foreign shape. The real controversy arose around the question as to whether or not foreign words could be used as productive roots for new derivations. In Classical Arabic, once a foreign word had been admitted and adapted, it behaved like any other Arabic word, but in the modern period the academies tried to restrict new derivations to scientific terminology. While some people deplored this invasion of the Arabic language, preferring to leave the foreign words in their original shape in order to set them apart from the Arabic stock, others saw in Arabicisation the best solution to preserve the integrity of the language. Once a foreign word was introduced, scientists soon derived words like tamaġnuṭ ‘magnetisation’ (from maġnaṭīs) and mubastar ‘pasteurised’ (from bastara ‘to pasteurise’). But the powerful mechanism of root-abstraction did not stop at scientific terminology. Just as dialect speakers reanalysed foreign words and integrated them into their lexicon, writers did not hesitate to produce new derivations from accepted loans. Numerous examples for this procedure may be cited, for example, the verbs talfaza, talfana from tilifizyūn, tilifūn; or the broken plurals ʾaflām, bunūk from the nouns film, bank. In spite of the resistance of the academies, some of these derivations were commonly accepted. Even those who admitted foreign loans usually conceded that at least in theory the most elegant solution was to replace foreign words with ‘pure’ Arabic words. In this context, the structure of the language was a relevant factor. In Germanic languages, the possibility of building compounds invites the speakers of the language to invent new combinations of existing words to express foreign notions and objects (neologisms). In Arabic, on the other hand, the possibility of using compounds was extremely limited, but the language had another device at its disposal for the formation of new words, the so-called qiyās ‘analogy’, which consisted in the application of morphological patterns to borrowed or existing sets of radicals. In internal qiyās, existing roots were used for this purpose. In its efforts to regulate the formation of new words, the Academy of Cairo declared certain morphological patterns to be productive, meaning that they might be used legitimately to create neologisms (see Table 12.1).

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pattern

meaning examples

mifʿal, mifʿāl, mifʿala instrument mijhar ‘microscope’ minḏ̣ār ‘telescope’ mirwaḥa ‘fan’ -iyya abstract noun iḥtirāqiyya ‘combustibility’ fiʿāla profession qiyāda ‘leadership’ ṣiḥāfa ‘journalism’ faʿʿāl professional sawwāq ‘driver’ ṭayyār ‘pilot’ fuʿāl disease buwāl ‘diabetes’ buḥār ‘seasickness’ Table 12.1  Approved patterns of word formation in Modern Standard Arabic In the examples of qiyās given here, the construction of the new term is original, but in many cases the meaning of the foreign word determines the selection of the radicals. In such cases, we speak of a loan translation (calque, Lehnübersetzung). Combinations of words that serve as set expressions are usually modelled on a foreign example. The Arabic expression for ‘satellite’, for instance, qamar ṣināʿī (literally ‘artificial moon’) is probably a translation from French (or Russian?). Even when the Arabic expression does not have a direct foreign equivalent, the English or French term shines through, for instance, in the term for ‘heading’, laʿiba l-kura bi-r-raʾs (literally ‘to play the ball with the head’), in football terminology. Loan translation also accounts for a large number of idiomatic expressions and metaphors, especially in the language of the media. In the course of time, such translations become part of the Arabic phraseology and are no longer regarded as foreign. The most frequently quoted example of a loan expression is laʿiba dawran ‘to play a role’. Another example of loan translations is a variation in the use of prepositions under the influence of foreign idioms, for example, iltaqā/ iltaqā maʿa ‘to meet/to meet with’, and the development of syntactic calques, such as mā ʾiḏā to translate English ‘whether’, for example, saʾala mā ʾiḏā ‘to ask whether’. The most highly-regarded device for the expansion of the lexicon in Arabic, albeit not necessarily the most successful one, was the semantic extension of an existing word by giving it a modern meaning. Attempts to revive old Bedouin vocabulary in the search for new words were seldom successful, probably precisely because they had fallen into disuse and were therefore unfamiliar to the average speaker. One example of a term that did succeed is that of the word for ‘train’, qiṭār, originally meaning ‘caravan’. But the associated word hādiya ‘lead-camel’ was never accepted for ‘locomotive’ (which became qāṭira instead). Revived words owed their success mostly to the efforts of one author, for instance, jarīda ‘newspaper’ (originally ‘strip of palm-leaf used for writing’) and majalla ‘journal’

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(originally ‘codex, book’), introduced by aš-Šidyāq and al-Yāzijī, respectively. Many of the proposals of the academies, however, never gained general acceptance because they were regarded as too artificial, for instance, jammāz ‘swiftfooted [ass]’ for ‘tram’ (remained trām), or ʾirzīz ‘sound of thunder’ for ‘telephone’ (remained tilifūn, although hātif, a Classical Arabic word meaning ‘unseen man whose voice is heard’, is becoming increasingly frequent). In spite of the extreme productiveness of the nominal and verbal patterns of the Arabic language, the lexicon-builders kept looking for additional means of lexical expansion. In most Western languages, the use of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes provides a powerful means of expanding the scientific lexicon, which is absent in Arabic derivational morphology. At an early stage, combinations with the negations lā- and ġayr- were used to coin equivalents to Greek terms with the privative prefix a-. In modern times, these served as a model for the introduction of prefixes into the Arabic lexicon, at first only with the negations, for example, lā- (lā-nihāʾī ‘infinite’, lā-ʾadriyya ‘agnosticism’), ġayr- (ġayr-šarʿī ‘illegitimate’, ġayr-mašrūʿ ‘illegal’). Later, several prepositions were used in this function, for example, šibh- (šibh-jazīra ‘peninsula’, šibh-rasmī ‘semi-official’), qab- (qab-tārīḫ ‘prehistory’). Morphologically, these words behave as compounds: from lā-nihāʾī we may derive, for instance, the substantive al-lā-nihāʾiyya ‘the infinity’, in which the article precedes the entire combination. In Classical Arabic, there was a limited possibility of deriving new roots from combinations of words (called naḥt), usually delocutive verbs from nominal expressions, for example, basmala ‘to say “in the name of God” (bi-smi llāhi)’, or ḥamdala ‘to say “praise be to God!” (al-ḥamdu lillāhi)’, or adjectives from compound names, for example, ḥanafī ‘belonging to ʾAbū Ḥanīfa’, or ʿabqasī ‘belonging to ʿAbd al-Qays’. In modern times, initiatives to use this method of coining new words in the creation of scientific vocabulary became so popular that in 1953 the Academy of Cairo felt compelled to issue a ruling. According to the academy, the method of naḥt was admissible only in scientific language, and the resulting terms had to be transparent. Words like faḥmāʾiyyāt ‘carbohydrates’ (< faḥm ‘carbon’ + māʾ ‘water’) and ḥalmaʾa ‘to hydrolyse’ (< ḥallala ‘to dissolve’ + māʾ ‘water’) satisfied these conditions. Likewise, combinations with kahra- ‘electro-’, for example, kahramaġnaṭīsī or even kahraṭīsī ‘electro-magnetic’, kahra-riʾawī ‘electro-pneumatic’, kahra-kīmiyāʾī ‘electro-chemical’, and with šibh- ‘pseudo-’ found favour with the academy. Generally speaking, however, the attitude of the academy vis-à-vis compounds was conservative, and most proposals were deemed to be contrary to ‘the spirit of the Arabic language’. Words like ʾarbarijl ‘quadruped’ (< ʾarbaʿ ‘four’ + rijl ‘foot’), qaṭjara ‘laryngotomy’ (< qaṭʿ ‘cutting’ + ḥanjara ‘throat’), or sarmana ‘somnambulism’ (< sayr ‘going’ + manām ‘sleep’) met with disapproval. Even more extreme proposals, such as mutamāṯir ‘polymer’ (< mutamāṯil ‘homogeneous’ + mutakāṯir ‘multiple’) or musjanāḥiyyāt ‘orthoptera’ (< mustaqīm ‘straight’ + janāḥ ‘wing’)

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were rejected outright because of their lack of transparency. On the other hand, adjectival compounds have become relatively common, for example, šarq-ʾawsaṭī ‘Middle Eastern’ (< aš-Šarq al-ʾAwsaṭ ‘the Middle East’), raʾsmālī ‘capitalist’ (< raʾs māl ‘capital’), barmāʾī ‘amphibian’ (< barr ‘(main)land’ + māʾ ‘water’), ʾumamī ‘UN-’ (< al-ʾumam al-muttaḥida), mā fawqa l-banafsajī ‘ultra-violet’ (< fawqa ‘above’ + banafsaj ‘violet’), taḥta l-ʾaḥmar ‘infra-red’ (< taḥta ‘under’ + ʾaḥmar ‘red’). Usually, within one semantic domain all methods to coin new words are used simultaneously, even though there is a tendency to go through certain stages. A few examples from modern vocabulary may illustrate the coexistence of different methods in the creation of a set of terms. In football terminology, all foreign terms have been replaced by Arabic words: calque by extension ḍarba ‘kick’ partial calque murāqib al-ḫuṭūṭ ‘linesman’ compound calques ḍarba rukniyya, ḥurra, ‘corner (kick)’, ‘free kick’ ḍarbat al-marmā, al-jazāʾ ‘goal kick’, ‘penalty (kick)’ ḥāris al-marmā ‘goalkeeper’ neologisms marmā ‘goal’ tamrīr ‘pass’ paraphrases laʿiba l-kura bi-r-raʾs ‘to head’ semantic extension tasallul ‘offside’ (lit. ‘infiltration’) muḥāwara ‘dribble’ (lit. ‘engaging someone in a debate’) This example also shows that it may be difficult to classify a new term. The word marmā ‘goal’, for instance, could be regarded as a neologism (‘place where one throws’), or as the semantic extension of an existing term, meaning ‘target’. In computer terminology, the wish to go with the times and appear sophisticated competes with a tendency to purism that leads to the replacement of the English terms by neologisms. The omnipresent kumbyūtur (or similar transliterations) seems to be on the way out, and it is very likely that the actively promoted ḥāsūb ‘calculating machine’ will, indeed, win eventually. Some Arabic computer terms have already become current, such as munassiq al-kalima ‘word-processor’, šāša ‘computer screen’ and bank al-maʿlūmāt ‘databank’. The example of modern linguistic terminology in Arabic demonstrates the opposition between the purism of the academies and the attitude of modern linguists. There is no consensus on the name of ‘linguistics’ itself. In the Eastern Arab world, ʿilm al-luġa or luġawiyyāt is quite accepted, but linguists in the Maghreb

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object to the traditional term and replace it with ʾalsuniyya or lisāniyyāt. The official Arabic equivalent of two central notions in modern linguistics, ‘morpheme’ and ‘phoneme’, is in the form of a paraphrase, ʿunṣur dāll ‘signifying element’ and waḥda ṣawtiyya ‘phonetic unit’ (word list of ALECSO). But most linguists simply transliterate the English terms, mūrfīm and fūnīm. One linguist (Mseddi 1984) coined completely new terms, ṣayġam (containing the element ṣīġa ‘form’) and ṣawtam (containing the element ṣawt ‘sound’). In the terminology of the social media (wasāʾiṭ at-tawāṣul al-ijtimāʿī), Arabic terms seem to dominate, most of them loan translations, for example, waṣla ‘link’, mawqiʿ ‘website’, aš-šabaka al-ʿankabūtiyya ‘world wide web’ (for which wīb is becoming increasingly popular because of the current translation in Facebook), dardaša ‘chatting’, mudawwana ‘blog’; sometimes, rather complicated descriptions are chosen, for example, milaff taʿrīf al-irtibāṭ for ‘cookie’. 12.4  Standard Arabic in the modern world Both vocabulary creation and regional variation are factors that have contributed to the gradual modification of the language, so that Classical Arabic can no longer be regarded as identical with its modern variety, usually called Modern Standard Arabic. Ideologically, of course, the modern language is still the same as the language of the Qurʾān and the Classical period, but in practice it is easy to see that there are differences, not all of them lexical. On the one hand, this is because many of the idiosyncrasies of the Classical language have become obsolete. Thus, for instance, one seldom finds in a modern text the constructions of a verbal noun with subject and object that are quite common in Classical texts. Similarly, some forms have become obsolete, for example, the energetic yaktubanna. On the other hand, the modern language has developed new grammatical devices, in particular, in the language of the media, which is heavily influenced by European languages. One of the most characteristic features of this language is the extensive use of verbal constructions with the dummy verb qāma bi- as a substitute for active verbs, for example, qāma bi-ziyāra instead of zāra ‘to visit’. In passive constructions, the verb tamma is used as a substitute, for example, tamma tawqīʿ al-ittifāqiyya ‘the agreement was signed’, instead of a passive verb. Real passives are often followed by prepositional clauses introducing the agent, contrary to the rules of Classical Arabic; such expressions with min qibal, min ṭaraf, min jānib, etc. may have been influenced by translations from English or French (Holes 1995a: 259–60). Other characteristics of the language of the media include the limited use of the coordinative particle fa- and its replacement by wa-, and the extensive use of padding expressions like wa-ḏālika ‘and this …, or kull min to introduce a list of two or more names. A frequently cited tendency is that of changed word order, Subject–Verb–Object, especially in newspaper headlines, but also in the body of the text ­(Abdelfattah

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1996). This word order does occur in Classical Arabic, but as a marked a­ lternative to the normal Verb–Subject–Object order. The frequent translation of English texts from foreign press agencies no doubt acted as a strengthening factor in this case, too. In literary prose, the differences between Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic are much less marked because authors tend to classicise their style, both in syntax and in the selection of the vocabulary. In some cases, however, the use of colloquial language, particularly in Egyptian literature, may create a new difference. The choice of informal registers is a further source of variation between the Arab countries as well. Lexical differences are responsible for most of the regional variation in Standard Arabic. In spite of the fact that the Standard Arabic language is regarded as the most powerful symbol of Arab unity, and in spite of the unifying work of the academies, one immediately recognises a Moroccan text from an Egyptian one or one from the Gulf states (Ibrahim 2008). Thus, for instance, when reporting about demonstrations, Egyptian newspapers tend to use the term muḏ̣āharāt, while in Lebanon taḏ̣āhurāt is preferred, and for ‘continuation’ Moroccan and Lebanese newspapers use tatimma, while in Egypt baqiyya is more common. Partly, this variation is caused by local traditions in the creation of new vocabulary. For the new notion of ‘privatisation’, Egyptians use ḫaṣḫaṣa, Moroccans ḫawṣaṣa, and Lebanese taḫṣīṣa, all from the same root ḫ-ṣ-ṣ ‘to be special’. For the omnipresent mobile phone, maḥmūl is preferred in Egypt, jawwāl in the Gulf states, and ḫalyawī (< ḫaliyya ‘cell’) in Lebanon; in the latter case, the lexical choice in the standard lexicon coincides with the choice in the spoken language (cf. above, p. 177). Partly, the lexical variation is also a result of the different colonial history of the regions involved. In North Africa, for instance, there is a natural tendency to look at French examples and model the text, even on the level of syntax and stylistics, on a French example. One finds, for instance, al-wazīr al-ʾawwal (< French premier ministre) instead of the usual term raʾīs al-wuzarāʾ; ḥuqūq (< French droits) instead of rusūm. Stylistic expressions include sāmī l-muwaẓẓafīn (< French hauts fonctionnaires), wuḍiʿa fī l-istiʿmāl (< French être mis en usage), bi-ʿunwān (< à titre de), and the use of prepositions with verbs like taḥādaṯa maʿa (< French s’entretenir avec). In some cases, North African phraseology was not directly inspired by French, yet differed from that in the Arab East, as in the choice of the dummy verb waqaʿa in expressions like waqaʿa našr al-bayān ‘the publication of the declaration took place’, where Eastern Arabic would use tamma or jarā. In Arab countries without a French colonial past, English usually replaced French as a model. In Egypt, for instance, France and French had been the model for most attempts at modernisation in the nineteenth century, but after the First World War, this role was taken over by English. The reintroduction of Arabic as the official language of the Arab countries also raised the question of its role in education. The poor standards of language

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instruction were a constant source of concern, and since the nineteenth century there has been a call for simplification of the grammatical system. Some scholars claimed that Arabic in itself was perfectly well suited to accommodate contemporary needs, if only it was purified from the corruption that had crept in. They believed that the main obstacle to the general use of the standard language in society was the failure of the educational system to reach large parts of the population. There was, of course, a logistical problem because of the lack of schools and teachers, but most specialists agreed that this in itself did not explain the lack of success in teaching Standard Arabic to those children who did attend schools. Even today, hardly anybody after graduation is able to write flawless Arabic, let alone extemporise in speaking, and there is a general antipathy towards ‘grammar’, even among those who advocate the use of Standard Arabic. The two keywords in the discussion were tabsīṭ (taysīr) an-naḥw ‘simplification of grammar’ and tabsīṭ al-luġa ‘simplification of language’, but the distinction between the two notions tended to become blurred. In the 1950s, a grammatical text was rediscovered, which sparked off a renewed interest in the matter of grammar teaching. Ibn Maḍāʾ was a grammarian from Cordova (d. 592/1196) who wrote about the refutation of the grammarians (Kitāb ar-radd ʿalā n-nuḥāt), proposing the abolition of the concepts of ʿamal ‘governance’ and qiyās ‘analogy’ from grammar. Among the scholars who occupied themselves with this text was the Egyptian linguist Šawqī Ḍayf, who maintained that this text was the solution to the problems of Arabic language teaching. With the abolition of ʿamal and qiyās from grammar, he asserted, it should be much easier to teach Arabic. Abstract discussions among the Arabic grammarians, some of which had found their way into the current textbooks for schools, did nothing to enhance the understanding of the language and merely served the theoretical interests of the grammarians. His proposal to replace the Arabic notions of ‘nominal sentence’ and ‘verbal sentence’ (cf. above, p. 112) with the Western concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ could, however, hardly be called a major improvement. Other proposals, too, were terminological in nature only. They involved the introduction of a new notion of ‘complement’ (takmila), and the replacement of the traditional terms muḍāf for the second constituent of the genitive construction by the term majrūr bi-l-ʾiḍāfa. The success of these proposals has been limited. Others concerned themselves with the simplification of the language itself, but in most cases this resulted in nothing more than a general plea for simplification without detailed proposals about the abolition of syntactic or morphological features from the language. Some scholars proposed to leave out the vowels of declension, which, however, leaves the declensional system intact, since in the sound masculine plural a choice must still be made between nominative -ūn and genitive/accusative -īn. Others called for the simplification of the syntactic rules for the numerals by replacing them with the dialectal rules. More extreme proposals, such as those of ʾAnīs Frayḥa and Georges al-Ḫūrī, involved

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the abolition of the feminine plural in the pronouns or the use of the masculine plural instead of the feminine plural in all parts of speech. Since none of these proposals was integrated into a comprehensive didactic concept, they have remained largely unproductive. Nowadays there are very few proponents of this road towards an ‘easier language’ (luġa muyassara). The entire discussion about a simplified language has remained sterile, even when it was moved to a sociolinguistic level. In particular, in Egypt, it has become fashionable to hold that between the level of the standard language (fuṣḥā) and that of the dialect (ʿāmmiyya) there is an intermediate level, variably called al-luġa al-mutawassiṭa ‘the intermediate language’ or luġat al-muṯaqqafīn ‘language of the intellectuals’ (cf. Chapter 13). This variety, many people assert, would fill the gap between the artificial standard and the lower levels of the language continuum. The best that one could say about this sociolinguistic approach is that it legitimises the informal standard speech of many educated Egyptians. More than speakers from other Arab countries, they tend to leave out most of the declensional endings and freely use a number of dialect expressions when speaking the standard language. On the whole, the trend in written Arabic has been towards a stricter regulation of the level of speech, rather than towards an increasing flexibility in the application of the rules. At this point, a distinction should be made between the practice in Egypt and the Levant, on the one hand, and North Africa, on the other. In North Africa, the most pressing problem after independence was how to replace the dominant French language with Arabic, preferably at all levels of society, but at the very least in education. As a consequence, simplification of the Classical language was not an issue. Since Arabic and French had to compete for the status of language of prestige, in the eyes of most language reformers it would be wrong to devalue the Classical language by debasing it with dialect influence or with the abolition of grammatical rules. Discussions in North Africa on Arabicisation (taʿrīb) concentrate on the introduction of Arabic in domains where formerly French used to be the dominant language, whereas in other parts of the Arab world taʿrīb usually means the introduction of Arabic equivalents of foreign words, particularly in scientific language. In recent times, various didactic projects have been set up for the com­pilation of a basic word list for use in primary schools and for the composition of a basic grammar that includes only the most frequent constructions of the standard language. The essential vocabularies from Tunisia and Lebanon do not seem to have had much impact on the various national educational systems. But there is one project that was based on an explicit didactic and linguistic concept, the Arabic version of the American children’s programme Sesame Street (Iftaḥ yā Simsim). In the memorandum prepared by the makers of the programme, three categories of linguistic phenomena in Standard Arabic were distinguished: indispensable features of Standard Arabic that were to be used in spite

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of their absence in the dialect (e.g., the case endings); features that should be used sparingly (e.g., the passive form of the verbs); and features that should be avoided altogether (e.g., the superlative al-ʾafʿalu, the prepositions ka- ‘like’ and siwā ‘except’). In the language of the programme, these principles have been followed rather closely. Moreover, the players, including the small children who play an essential part in the Sesame Street concept, make remarkably few performance errors in their use of Standard Arabic. On the whole, colloquialisms are used very infrequently, and yet there is a certain informal quality in the discourse, achieved mostly by the use of intonational patterns and interjections rather than the introduction of grammatical and/or lexical items from the colloquial language. The Iftaḥ yā Simsim experiment proves that it is indeed possible to use an informal register of Modern Standard Arabic. It is true that in some Arab countries, in particular Egypt, the programme was criticised because it allegedly contained too many colloquial items. But on closer observation it turns out that this criticism was biased: the pronunciation of the jīm as [ʤ] rather than [g] can hardly be regarded as a regionalism, and the selection of lexical items in any pan-Arabic programme will probably never satisfy everybody. The future will have to decide whether or not the introduction of an informal register of Standard Arabic stands any chance. The influence of satellite television throughout the Arab world, in particular al-Jazeera, may be expected to lead to an increased use of Modern Standard Arabic because of the participation of speakers from all Arab countries in the programmes. No study has yet appeared about the language use on this channel, but an analysis of the discussions on al-Jazeera about the Arabic language (Suleiman and Lucas 2012) indicates that most participants in the debates agreed that the position of Arabic is endangered, according to some of them because of an Orientalist or Western plot to weaken the Arab world. Many of them referred to the period of the Nahḍa as an example of how the language could be adapted to the modern age and made more accessible to the people through simplification (taysīr), without giving in to the pressure of the ʿāmmiyya. Suleiman and Lucas make the interesting point that even though the debates were all held on al-Jazeera, most participants did not seem to be aware of the actual linguistic influence of such transnational channels and retained as their point of reference the debates in the nineteenth century. Their discourse made clear, moreover, that there is still a tight connection between language and identity in the Arab world, which is interpreted by most of the participants as a powerful motive to stick to fuṣḥā norms. The influence of social media, too, cannot but affect the future of Arabic, given the intensity of the participation, to which events during the Arab spring contributed significantly. The 2011 report by the Dubai School of Government indicates that the number of Facebook users in the Arab world grew from 11 million to

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21 million in just one year (2010), 22 per cent of them in Egypt alone. The 2012 report by the same institution highlighted the impact of Facebook on societal and cultural change, and pointed at an interesting linguistic side-effect, the interface language choice. While in Saudi Arabia, 60 per cent of the users choose Arabic and 40 per cent English, in the Gulf states less than 10 per cent prefer Arabic as interface language. In Morocco, on the other hand, about 80 per cent prefer French and 20 per cent Arabic. In Egypt, the percentage of those who prefer Arabic is roughly the same as in Saudi Arabia, but according to the report this number is rising swiftly. The same trend is visible in Twitter, where the percentage of Arabic-language tweets rose from 48 per cent to 62 per cent in just six months (September 2011 to March 2012). The increased use of Arabic in social media does not mean that the use of Modern Standard Arabic has also increased. On the contrary, most of the Arabic on Facebook is of a mixed style, and when Arabic is used in tweets, especially when it is transcribed into Latin characters (the so-called Arabish), most of the message appears to be in vernacular rather than Standard Arabic (see Chapter 9, p. 169). Further reading The classic work on the period of the Nahḍa and the new ideas about the Arab nation that were developed in this period is Hourani (1970); on the creation of a new linguistic standard in this period see Glaß (2011). Information about the linguistic question in the Ottoman Empire is in Prätor (1993: 67f., 164–72, 217f.). For the development of modern Arabic lexicography and its historical roots, see Gätje (1985); in his history of Arabic lexicography, Haywood (1965) also deals with the activities of aš-Šidyāq and al-Bustānī; see also Sawaie (1987, 1990). The role of the academies is discussed by Hamzaoui (1965, 1975) and Khafaifi (1985); for a survey of the history and activities of the Arab language academies, see Sawaie (2007); Ali (1987) discusses the various methods of word formation and contains (pp. 146–8) a list of approved patterns of lexical creation. A large amount of material on the methods and activities of the academies may be found in the journals which they publish regularly, Majalla Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya bi-Dimašq (Damascus, since 1921), Majalla Majmaʿ al-Luġa al-ʿArabiyya (Cairo, since 1935), Majalla al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿIrāqī (Baghdad, since 1950). On the development of Arabic vocabulary, see the studies of Monteil (1960) and Stetkevych (1970); a comparison with the translations from Greek in the Classical period is in Bielawski (1956). The examples of the emerging political terminology in the nineteenth century in this chapter have been taken from Rebhan (1986), Ayalon (1987) and Lewis (1988). The examples of football terminology are derived from ʿAbd al-Jawād (1977); for linguistic terminology in Modern Arabic, see Darir (1993) and Shraybom-Shivtiel (1993), as well as the dictionaries of linguistic

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terms by Mseddi (1984) and R. Baalbaki (1990). Regional differences in the lexicon of Modern Standard Arabic are dealt with by Ibrahim (2008, 2009). For the linguistic tendencies in the language of the media, Ashtiany’s (1993) course of Media Arabic contains many interesting examples. A survey of Media Arabic is by Effat and Versteegh (2008). The examples of French influence on Modern Standard Arabic in North Africa in this chapter were taken from Kropfitsch (1977, 1980) and Chaabani (1984). Proposals for the simplification of grammar and/or language are discussed by Diem (1974: 129–36) and in Šawqī Ḍayf ’s introduction to his edition of Ibn Maḍāʾ (1982). The classic article on language choice in the teaching of Arabic as a second language is Ferguson (1962). A collection of articles on the problem of setting up a curriculum in Western departments of Arabic was edited by Agiùs (1990). Mahmoud (1982) published a report on the development of an essential vocabulary, selected by Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian linguists. Specifically on the subject of the language of Iftaḥ yā Simsim, see Abu Absi (1990). For the penetration of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab world, see the reports issued by the Dubai School of Government in 2011 and 2012; for the general impact of the social media in the Arab world see also Ghannam (2011). On the language policy of al-Jazeera see Suleiman and Lucas (2012). The role of language as identity marker and the link between language and nationalism are discussed by Suleiman (2003). On the possibility of composing transfer grammars of Arabic, see Kouloughli (1979). Ryding (1990) may be cited as a practical attempt at a mixed grammar; her solutions include the introduction of frequent lexical items from the colloquial (rāḥ, jāb, lāzim), the elimination of case and mood inflection, and the use of function words from colloquial speech (lissā, šū, miš, and so on); cf. also Alosh (1994). Another approach is that of Woidich and Heinen-Nasr (1995), who aim at an integration of the two language varieties by starting with the colloquial language (Egyptian Arabic), but introducing from the beginning lexical items from the standard language, and gradually mixing the two varieties, so that at the end of the first year the student has spoken skills in colloquial Arabic and reading skills in Standard Arabic. A similar division of tasks is found in the language course ʿArabiyyat al-naas (Younes et al. 2013), with Levantine Arabic being introduced in the form of videoclips and exercises, and Modern Standard Arabic being used for the acquisition of reading skills. Within the range of strictly standard grammars and manuals for Arabic, a number of courses may be mentioned: Ziadeh and Winder (1957); Krahl and Reuschel (1980, 1981), a comprehensive course, covering not only grammar but also stylistics, aiming at the training of interpreters of Arabic, Eastern European style, but available now in a revised non-socialist version; Fischer and Jastrow (1977), Fischer (1986) and Woidich (1985), intended for traditional departments of Arabic in Europe; Abboud and McCarus (1983; first published 1968), an audio-

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lingual approach with a large number of drills, intended for departments of Arabic in the United States. An older reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic is Cantarino (1974–5), which is based on a predominantly literary corpus. The standard grammar for the modern language is Badawi et al. (2004). The syntax of Modern Standard Arabic is dealt with in the handbook that is being published by El-Ayoubi et al. (2001, 2011); two volumes of the scheduled four have appeared thus far; the syntactic terminology is somewhat idiosyncratic, but when completed, this will be the most complete treatment of Modern Arabic syntax. Smaller surveys of the structure of the language are Beeston (1968), Pellat (1985) and Kouloughli (1994); a sketch of the modern language is given by Wild (1982) and McCarus (2008: 238–62). A comprehensive handbook on all aspects of Modern Standard Arabic is by Holes (1995a); although it is not a grammar in the strictest sense of the word, its systematic treatment of the structure of the language with extensive references to the existing literature makes this a very useful introduction to Modern Standard Arabic. As regards dictionaries of Modern Standard Arabic: the Arabic–Arabic dictionaries, most of which were published in Lebanon, lean heavily on the Arabic lexicographical tradition. Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s Muḥīṭ al-muḥīṭ, which was compiled in the nineteenth century, is still available in modern printings (e.g., Beirut, 1987); under the auspices of ALECSO, ʿAlī al-Qāsimī edited al-Muʿjam al-ʿarabī al-ʾasāsī (Beirut: Larousse, 1989). Bilingual dictionaries were also published in Lebanon: English– Arabic (M. Baalbaki 1991); Arabic–English (Rohi Baalbaki 1988); French–Arabic (Hajjar 1983); Arabic–French (Munjid 1990). The number of Western dictionaries of Arabic is considerable, the best-known being Wehr’s (1952, 1959) Arabic–German dictionary, which was based on a corpus of literary and journalistic texts. Wehr’s dictionary was translated into English and expanded by Cowan (1961; approximately 28,000 items; the fourth edition of 1979 contains more than 40,000 items). The fifth edition of the original Arabic–German dictionary appeared in 1985 in a thoroughly revised version, containing approximately 50,000 items. Dictionaries with Arabic as target language include: German–Arabic: Schregle (1974; 45,000 items; also Arabic–German 1981–6); French–Arabic: Reig (1987; also Arabic– French); English–Arabic: Doniach (1972). The Dutch–Arabic dictionary that was published in 2003 by Hoogland et al. deserves special mention because it is one of the first attempts to include collocations in the dictionary, that is, fixed combinations of verb–object, noun–adjective, etc. (see Hoogland 1993).

Chapter 13

Diglossia

13.1  The nature of diglossia In written Arabic, the choice between the standard norm and the colloquial language at first sight appears to be relatively uncomplicated: in writing, Standard Arabic is always used. But even here, problems of selection may arise. One complication derives from the fact that many people possess only a limited knowledge of the standard norm. For these people, Standard Arabic remains the target, but in writing it they make many mistakes. This results in the so-called Middle Arabic texts that have been discussed above (Chapter 9). A further complication may arise when, for ideological or literary reasons, writers decide to compose their literary writings in an approximate version of the colloquial language. Even these authors usually mix their colloquial language with elements from the standard language. In spoken Arabic, the situation is far more complicated. Perhaps the best analogue to the situation in the Arabic-speaking countries would be that of a hypothetical modern France, where all newspapers and books are written in Latin, speeches in parliament are held in Latin, and in churches the only language used by the priests is Latin. On the other hand, people talking in a cafe use French, people at home or among friends use French. In school, the official language of the classroom is Latin, but during the breaks between classes students use French among themselves, and so do the teachers. We know, of course, that the situation in France is not like this; but things could have been different, had the standard norm not switched from Latin to vernacular French in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Arabic-speaking countries, the actual situation is very much like the hypothetical situation sketched here for France. At first sight, there appear to be two varieties of the language, the Classical standard, usually called fuṣḥā, and the colloquial language, usually called ʿāmmiyya or (in North Africa) dārija, and in Western publications, ‘dialect’ or ‘vernacular’. These two varieties divide among themselves the domains of speaking and writing: the standard language is used for written speech and for formal spoken speech, whereas the colloquial language is used for informal speech. The colloquial language is everybody’s mother tongue;

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people learn the standard only when they go to school. In 1930, William Marçais called such a linguistic situation ‘diglossia’ (French diglossie), a term that he had borrowed from the literature on the linguistic situation in Greece and which gained general currency after the appearance in 1959 of an article by Charles Ferguson with the title ‘Diglossia’. Ferguson compared the linguistic situation in the Arabic-speaking countries to that in Greece, in German-speaking Switzerland, and in Haiti. In all four areas, there is a similar functional distribution between two varieties of the same language (fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya, katharévousa/dhimotikí, Hochdeutsch/Schwyzertüütsch, français/créole). In Ferguson’s terminology, these two varieties are called ‘high variety’ (H) and ‘low variety’ (L). The terms ‘high’ and ‘low’ reflect the standing of the two varieties in the linguistic community. The low variety is held in very low esteem, and the name by which speakers refer to it normally implies a humble position: ʿāmmiyya literally means ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’, while other names are sūqiyya ‘language of the market’, munḥarifa ‘deviant’, and so on. The high variety, on the other hand, is prestigious: it is the language of a cultural, and often religious, heritage. Speakers may even deny the existence of the low variety and claim that they only speak the high variety. In reality, the low variety is the mother tongue of all speakers, whereas the high variety is a second language that is almost never used in improvised speech. The theoretical framework of Ferguson’s model for the linguistic situation in the Arabic-speaking countries has been refined by subsequent studies in three important respects. In the first place, Ferguson’s model restricted the notion of ‘diglossia’ to situations where the low variety was genetically related to the high variety, of which it was a reduced version. In later publications this restriction was lifted, and the notion of ‘diglossia’ was expanded to include any functional distribution of linguistic varieties, whether these were languages or dialects or registers. The functional distribution in the Arabic-speaking countries is merely a special case of a general phenomenon of sociolinguistic variation in all speech communities. In the second place, the existence of a functional distribution between varieties does not imply that all speakers have an equal command of these varieties. In extreme cases, most speakers know only one variety, a non-prestigious colloquial kind of language, whereas a small elite uses a stilted variety of a cultural language, mostly an imported one. In the Arab world, an example of such a situation is Algeria just before independence: the majority of people in the speech community knew only Arabic and at the most a smattering of French, but a small group of intellectuals had been raised and educated in French, and had lost the ability to speak Arabic (see Chapter 14, p. 263). Several linguists, among them Fishman (1967, 1972) and Gumperz (1962), therefore proposed to distinguish between a sociolinguistic and a psycholinguistic approach. In their terminology ‘diglossia’ is reserved for the sociolinguistic notion of a functional distribution of linguistic

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varieties. For the psycholinguistic notion of the speakers’ command of these varieties, they adopted the term ‘bilingualism’. In the literature, the specification ‘societal bilingualism’ is sometimes used to refer to Ferguson’s use of the term. A third modification of Ferguson’s model concerns the distinction of two discrete varieties. In his framework, the two varieties are mutually exclusive, and the speaker has to choose one or the other by a process of code-switching. In reality, the speaker never opts for one variety or the other, but moves along a continuum of speech, of which the two varieties are only the extremes. In such a situation, code-switching does not imply selecting a discrete variety, but positioning one’s utterance along a scale of linguistic variation. A better term to describe this kind of speech behaviour would perhaps be ‘code-mixing’, since there is no actual switch from one variety to another. Extralinguistic factors determine the position on this scale. Obviously, the span of the continuum that individuals control depends on their linguistic proficiency, which in its turn is determined to a large degree by their education and upbringing. The use of the term ‘diglossia’ (or its Arabic synonym izdiwājiyyat al-luġa) in the literature on the linguistic situation in the Arabic-speaking world has created some confusion. In Ferguson’s model, ‘diglossia’ is used only for the relationship between fuṣḥā and ʿāmmiyya, whereas the functional division between French and Arabic in North Africa was termed by him ‘bilingualism’. In this chapter, the term ‘diglossia’ will be used in the sense of a linguistic situation in which several speech varieties divide among themselves the domains of verbal communication. The term ‘bilingualism’ will refer to the individual’s proficiency in more than one speech variety (note that in Chapter 14, on the linguistic situation in the Maghreb, the term ‘bilingualism’ will be used in a slightly different way). In a speech community that is both diglossic and bilingual, there is a well-defined distribution of domains between more than one variety and all speakers are able to vary their linguistic behaviour between these varieties. We shall first look at code-mixing and the factors determining language choice in discourse, then at language attitudes and associations in the speech community, and finally at the correlation with intrapersonal variables. 13.2  Code-mixing and the middle variety Various efforts have been made to subdivide the continuum between the two extremes of Standard Arabic and dialect into intermediary varieties. Ferguson already referred to the emergence of a mixed middle form in the diglossia situations he described. This middle level is often mentioned in publications about the sociolinguistics of Arabic. Arab linguists refer to it as ‘the middle language’ (al-luġa al-wusṭā), or as ‘the colloquial of the intellectuals’ (ʿāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn); other terms that refer to this phenomenon are ‘Educated Standard Arabic’, ‘arabe médian’, etc. This middle language is supposed to be a form of Standard Arabic

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that does not use case endings, follows the colloquial pronunciation and freely introduces colloquial words, while retaining the general structure of the standard language. In his study of the sociolinguistic situation in Egypt, Badawī (1973) rejects the strict dichotomy of Ferguson’s model with its two varieties, H and L, which in his view does not correspond to the Egyptian situation (and presumably not to other regions of the Arabic world, either). Instead, Badawī sets up five different levels, each with its own characteristic set of features setting it apart from the other levels of the continuum (see Table 13.1). I

fuṣḥā at-turāt ‘Classical Arabic’ only used in Qurʾānic recitation

II

fuṣḥā al-ʿaṣr ‘Modern Standard Arabic’ the standard form of the language used in writing and sometimes on formal occasions in speaking

III

ʿāmmiyyat al-mutaqqafīn ‘colloquial of the intellectuals’ the formal spoken language of educated people

IV

ʿāmmiyyat al-mutanawwirīn ‘colloquial of the literate’ the informal spoken language of educated people

V

ʿāmmiyyat al-ʾummiyyīn ‘colloquial of the illiterate’ the language in which the illiterate talk

Table 13.1  The five levels of Egyptian Arabic according to Badawī (1973) It is obvious that Ferguson’s model cannot be applied without modification to the actual linguistic situation in the Arab world. But the association with socioeconomic groups that Badawī proposes is doubtful. There is not much empirical research on the social distribution of speech levels in Egypt, or for that matter in any Arab country. Elgibali (1985) shows that in accordance with Badawī’s predictions there is a continuous flow in the distribution of sociolinguistic markers, such as the realisation of /q/ and /ṯ/, the use of aspectual markers in the verb, and word order and declensional endings. Yet only the upper and lower level (Ferguson’s H and L, Badawī’s level V and I) could be called discrete levels with a characteristic set of features. The middle part of the continuum cannot be divided into separate levels. In Elgibali’s test results, the informal register of each level has the same distribution as the formal level of the second lowest level. For instance, the distribution of the /q/~/ʾ/ variable among the five levels of spoken Egyptian turned out to be as in Table 13.2. The same distribution applied to the other sociolinguistic markers in his study.

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oral level source material

/q/ percentage

informal msa

e.g., newscasting, university lectures (arts)

45

informal educated colloquial

e.g., intra-group conversations among professors

35

formal educated colloquial

formal literate colloquial

informal literate colloquial formal illiterate colloquial

informal illiterate colloquial

e.g., university lectures (science)

44

e.g., popular television programmes

34

e.g., conversations between employers and employees

23

e.g., intra-group conversations among shopkeepers

e.g., intra-group conversations among workers

22

0

Table 13.2  Distribution of /q/ in spoken Egyptian (after Elgibali 1985) This means that Arabic speech production is always characterised by a high degree of code-mixing. Various efforts have been made to discover constraints governing this speech behaviour. Two approaches may be distinguished: a global and a local analysis of discourse (Eid 2007: 433–4). Global analysis of hybrid texts, that is, texts combining elements from different levels of speech, focuses on the correlation between code-mixing and such factors as identity and group membership (see below, section 13.3); this allows us to draw conclusions about the manipulation of language for various purposes (see section 13.4). Local analysis of hybrid texts identifies specific reasons for switches within a stretch of discourse. In her account of the search for constraints in diglossic speech, Mejdell (2012b) points at the basic asymmetry between a dominant language, usually the first language of the speakers, and a standard language. In this connection, she formulates the Dominant Language Hypothesis, which states that lexical items of the dominant standard variety may be combined freely with grammatical markers from the non-dominant dialect variety, but not the other way round: standard markers are almost never combined with dialect items. The hypothesis was tested by Mejdell (2006) in an investigation of the mixed style in an academic context. The variation patterns in her data confirm the hypothesis. Forms like bi-yuktab ‘it is written’, in which the colloquial aspectual particle bi- is used with a standard passive, frequently occur, while a hypothetical *yuʾāl ‘it is said’ does not. According to Mejdell, this principle is also behind the directionality constraints found by Eid (1988) in her study of code-mixing. A standard relative pronoun, for instance, may not be followed by a dialect word, while a dialect relative pronoun

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may be followed unproblematically by a standard form. In other words, combinations like *allaḏī ṛāḥ ‘the one who went away’, are disallowed, whereas combinations like illi ḏahaba are perfectly acceptable. Likewise, a standard negation may not be combined with a dialect verb (*lan ḥa-tuʾaf ‘she will not stop’), whereas a dialect negative marker may be combined with a standard verb, as in the form ma-sa-taqif-š ‘she will not stop’ with dialect negative circumfix ma- … -š and standard future marker ḥa- (Boussofara-Omar 2003: 40). The Dominant Language Hypothesis also seems to operate in the Matrix Language Frame Model proposed by Myers-Scotton (1993). This model distinguishes between content (lexical) morphemes and system (grammatical) morphemes and introduces a strict rule that only one language involved in the code-switching provides the system morphemes; this is the matrix language. The other language involved, the embedded language, provides (some of) the content morphemes. The examples quoted above contain system morphemes from both languages, as in ma-sa-taqif-š, which appears to invalidate the rule. Subsequent versions of the Matrix Language Model have tried to explain these problematic examples (Boussofara-Omar 2003). According to Myers-Scotton (2010), these newer versions still provide the right predictions about the way code-mixing takes place in Arabic diglossia, but she seems to acknowledge that in a situation of diglossia, code-mixing has special properties. According to some scholars, diglossic mixing or switching should be differentiated therefore from ‘normal’ code-mixing (Boussofara-Omar 2006b). 13.3  Language choice When hybrid texts are analysed at a global level, the focus shifts from the syntactic constraints to the extralinguistic factors determining language choice, that is, factors that are not linked to the structure of the language, but to the speech situation. The most relevant factors in the speech situation are the interlocutor, the topic and the setting. These factors can be ordered along a scale that goes from the private to the public domain. At one end of the scale, we might have officials, talking on a public topic in a formal setting, for instance, in a radio interview: they will be forced to use a variety approaching Standard Arabic as much as possible. At the other end of the scale, friends talking in a pavement café about private affairs will use colloquial language, with a minimum of interference from the standard language. The influence of these factors manifests itself when in a given situation one of them changes. When the minister in the radio interview is asked about private matters (rather unlikely in the Arab media!), the speech pattern will change ­accordingly into the direction of the dialect. When the friends talking in the cafe switch from private matters to a discussion about politics, their speech will immediately betray interference from the standard language. Since language

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choice takes place on a continuum, these changes do not take the form of codeswitching from one variety to another, but manifest themselves in a larger percentage of features from the opposite variety. One of the characteristics of the diglossia situation is the effect that speakers have on each other. Hardly any data are available on this topic, but in Diem’s (1974) transcription of radio dialogues an impression can be formed of the way in which speakers accommodate to each other’s level. In one conversation, for instance, a reporter is interviewing the secretary general of the Cairene Language Academy. At the beginning, he still uses phrases like yaʿni, nifham min kida ʾinnu ʾabl ʾinʿiqād l-muʾtamar is-sanawi bitibʾa fīh ligān bitabḥaṯ qarārāt ‘that means, we understand from this that before the opening of the yearly conference there are committees that investigate proposals’, in which colloquial /ʾ/ for /q/, continuous marker biand colloquial expressions like min kida are freely used. But when his interviewee keeps talking using more or less Standard Arabic, within the space of one minute this same interviewer ends up saying things like law ʾaradna ʾan naʾḫuḏ namūḏajan li-zālik ‘if we might take example of this’ (Diem 1974: 76), which is almost absurdly Classical in its phonology and morphology. A reverse example may be found in a Lebanese interview between a reporter and a literary critic, in which the reporter stubbornly uses colloquial Lebanese, whereas the critic says things like bi-ṣūra ʿāmmah ʾal-mawsim kǟn ʾ ižābī – ižābī ʾawwalan min ḥays il-kammiyyi wa-sāniyan min ḥays ʾan-nawʿiyyi ‘generally speaking the season was positive, in the first place positive as to quantity, in the second place as to quality’ with exaggerated Classical style (note the glottal stop in the article and the realisation of the Classical interdental /ṯ/ as /s/). But in the end he cannot resist the colloquial style of the reporter, and after a few minutes he talks like this: fī taʾrīban ši miyyit maʿriḍ bi-s-sine ‘there are approximately one hundred expositions each year’, with /ʾ/ for /q/ and dialectal ši and fī (Diem 1974: 77). These two examples show that the level of speech of each of the participants in a discourse event affects the speech of the others: speakers have a tendency to accommodate to the other’s level and feel obliged to upgrade or downgrade their speech. One difference between most Western speech communities and the Arabic-speaking world is the much larger linguistic distance between colloquial Arabic and the standard language, which forces the speakers to make decisions much more frequently than in Western speech communities. Since the colloquial and the standard language are not discrete varieties, but abstract constructs at the extremes of a continuum, linguistic choice does not involve a two-way selection, but rather a mixture of variants. The discourse factors that determine language choice do not operate mechanically: in conversations, people may talk to each other on a different level for an extended period of time, without bowing to the level of their interlocutor. To a certain extent, they select the variety that one uses in a specific speech situation by correlating the formality of the situation with the choice of linguistic

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variants. But it is equally true to say that the speakers’ linguistic choices also reflect their own evaluation of the speech situation. With their choice of variants, they indicate to the other participants how they see their role, what they think about the topic, what kind of setting they wish to take part in. In a larger context this means that the speakers can use their choice to manipulate their audience. They can do so because people are exposed to linguistic variation, and on this basis they form certain associations between language choice and the outside world. Skilful speakers can use these expectations in manipulating their audience, be it for political, ideological or religious purposes. In many cases, the selection of a few markers suffices to convey the attitude of the speaker. In radio programmes, for instance, the speakers usually start from a written text in Standard Arabic, but in reading it they let themselves be influenced by the target group. In programmes for housewives or farmers, the structure of the Standard Arabic text remains unchanged, but at irregular intervals colloquial markers are inserted, such as the realisation of the standard /q/ as /ʾ/, the possessive particle bitāʿ, the indeclinable relative illi, the use of the continuous marker bi-, and so on. Al Batal (2002) studied the linguistic style of the largest Lebanese radio channel, LBCI. In their programmes, too, written documents are at the basis of the discourse. The speaker transforms this written text into informal speech by inserting colloquial markers. For this type of discourse the basis is Standard Arabic, into which colloquial elements are inserted, for instance, by replacing the future particle sa- with colloquial raḥ-, or the standard demonstrative hāḏā with ha-. The majority of replacements takes place in phonology, for instance, by replacing /q/ with /ʾ/. There is a large amount of variation between speakers, and one speaker may alternate between variants within the same stretch of discourse. These colloquial markers in a standard text signal to the audience the speaker’s intention to create an atmosphere of intimacy and warmth (as in the text quoted above in Chapter 9 from a radio programme for an audience of housewives, p. 167). In the case of the radio programmes of LBCI, the base is fuṣḥā both lexically and syntactically, in which colloquial phonology and a number of morpho­syntactic markers are inserted. Inversely, in the case of Educated Standard Arabic of the type studied by Mejdell and Bassiouney there is a strong colloquial base, in which fuṣḥā lexical and morphological elements are inserted. The difference between the two styles has to do with the medium: in radio Arabic the point of departure is a written text, which is modified by the reporter in oral delivery; Educated Standard Arabic, on the other hand, is spoken Arabic, which is being ‘upgraded’. The procedure of upgrading when used by educated speakers does not lead to hypercorrections, but if someone attempts to speak in an elevated way without proficiency the result may look different. In such a case, the use of Standard Arabic markers, such as the use of the coordinative particle fa-, the use of passive forms, or in general the insertion of case endings, may be practiced by speakers when they wish to impress upon their audience the importance of the occasion

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or the topic. Hypercorrections are then likely to occur, because of their lack of training in the structure of fuṣḥā. In the radio style, on the other hand, there will be no hypercorrections because the discourse is based on a written text, but there might occur some hypercorrection in dialect structure, emanating from the speaker’s wish to make the text sound dialectal. An example is the use of a b-imperfect after modals, e.g., lāzim bniftikir ‘we have to consider’ (Diem 1984: 71). Markers, both standard and colloquial may also be used for rhetorical intratextual purposes. Hamam (2011) mentions the fact that because the high variety (H) is more prestigious, it somehow counts as more objective, while the low variety (L) is more personalised. Therefore, an utterance in L may serve as a comment on a text that has been pronounced in H. The effect works particularly well if there is a real switch of codes (as between two completely different languages). But because of the continuum between H and L, it is often not a matter of complete switching, but of an upward or downward movement, which is better referred to as code-mixing. The value of the markers, both colloquial and standard, may differ: some of them are more salient than others (Mejdell 2012b: 163–4). In phonology, for instance, consonantal switches are much more salient than vocal ones. The use of the attributive demonstrative hāzā/hāḏā or the negative lam or lan immediately marks the discourse as standard. Inversely, the use of vernacular demonstratives or the negative ma- … -š indicates a shift to the colloquial. On the other hand, the use of the colloquial relative illi does not seem to carry a similar value and may be used freely without marking the discourse in any significant way. 13.4  Language associations and attitudes The complicated interaction between extralinguistic factors and linguistic choice is controlled by the associations that the speakers attach to the varieties of speech current in their community. The low variety of the language is associated with low education, since the standard language is taught and learnt at school, and hence with illiteracy and poverty, since people with a low education are not expected to make a career. The standard language, on the other hand, is associated with higher education, success in society and a high socioeconomic class, even though the colloquial language is also used by people from a higher socioeconomic class as an informal language. Looked at from a different perspective, the colloquial language as the language of family and home is associated with the in-group, with intimacy and friendship, whereas the high variety is associated with social distance and official relationships. The use of Standard Arabic may thus be a sign of respect, but also of creating a distance between speakers. The use of colloquial language may be derogatory, but also a sign of intimacy or modesty, somewhat in the way that the use of first names in English may signal either familiarity or social contempt.

250  The Arabic Language

The choice of linguistic markers takes place partly on a conscious level and may be manipulated, for instance, for commercial reasons. In the language of the media, and especially in advertisements in Egypt, the level chosen correlates with the nature of the product that is being sold and with the target group. Important public commodities such as loans and insurance policies are ‘sold’ to a predominantly male audience by the use of high varieties of the language, but producers of food and detergents mainly cater to housewives and accordingly advertise their products in colloquial language. The advertisers have to strike a fine balance between the intimacy and familiarity of the colloquial language and the prestige and intellectual level of the standard language (Bassiouney 2009b) On the political level, a rather spectacular case of this manipulation of linguistic variation is to be found in the political speeches of the late President Nasser (1918–70). He used to begin his speeches at an elevated level, spoken slowly and rhythmically, because of the formality of the situation. But then his sentences would become gradually more and more colloquial, spoken in a faster tempo, until he reached a purely colloquial level. At the end of his speech, he would conclude with a few sentences in pure Standard Arabic. Such a mixture reflects the inherent problem for politicians in the Arab world: on the one hand, by identifying with colloquial speech they wish to involve their audience, who for the most part do not use or even understand the higher levels of Standard Arabic; on the other hand, they cannot simply switch to colloquial language, since this would be regarded as an insult to their audience. Nasser was certainly not unique in using this oratory style, nor was he the last to use this liguistic device. In fact, modern Islamist politicans use a similar style: in their speeches Arab nationalism has been replaced by the daʿwa to true Islam, but the way they convey this message is similar. El Houri (2012: 77–113) explicitly mentions the similarity between Nasser’s speeches and those of Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah (b. 1960) in the way the latter mixes Standard Arabic with, in his case, Lebanese Arabic. In some respects, Nasser’s linguistic rhetoric looks similar to the style of radio programmes of the Lebanese channel LBCI that was mentioned above (p. 248). This brings us to the political associations connected with the choice of varieties. Since the standard language is regarded by most Arabs as the most significant unifying factor of the Arab world, it also serves as a symbol of Arab unity. Most political parties in the Arab world at least officially propagate this unity, so that politicians are under severe pressure to use standard language, even though their constituents do not understand it. We have seen above (p.  224) that from the end of the nineteenth century the Arabic language played a central role in the emergent nationalist movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. After independence, each country officially declared its adherence to pan-Arab nationalism (qawmiyya), with the Arabic language as the national language of all Arabs. From this point of view, the use of dialect stands for regionalism (ʾiqlīmiyya),

Diglossia  251

which is regarded as detrimental to the unity of the Arab world. On the other hand, in some countries the vernacular came to be valued as an important ingredient of the national identity (waṭaniyya). Not surprisingly, of all Arab countries, Egypt is the one with the most marked tendency towards the use of the dialect. Egypt has always been characterised by a large degree of regional nationalism aimed at the establishment of an Egyptian identity, and the Egyptian dialect is certainly an important component of this identity. Speeches in the Egyptian parliament are often given in something approaching the colloquial language, which would be unheard of in other Arab countries. An interesting example is the last speech given by the late President Sadat (1918–1981) in parliament in 1981. The day after his assassination, it appeared in the newspapers in a colloquial version, with a note by the publisher that there had been no time to ‘translate’ it into standard language. Nasser’s speeches have been mentioned above; it is remarkable that the pattern described there does not occur in any of the speeches which he gave abroad. The reason is obvious: any suggestion of Egyptian nationalism would have endangered the already tense relations with Syria in the United Arab Republic. There is one domain that has always been regarded as the exclusive domain of Classical Arabic, that of religiosity, at least as far as the public domain is concerned. In private situations religion does have an upgrading effect on language choice, but, at least in Egypt, even religious scholars find it perfectly acceptable to speak in colloquial language about religious matters. Increasingly, inroads are being made into this exclusive use of Classical Arabic. In religious instruction in the form of public sermons, colloquial language is often used to clarify and explain the text of the Qurʾān or ḥadīṯs, not unlike the way vernacular languages are used for religious instruction in non-Arabic-speaking parts of the Islamic world (see Chapter 5, p. 81). Nonetheless, traditional sheikhs, even in Egypt, tend to use a higher variety of the language, for instance, when they are delivering a sermon. The use of Classical Arabic then comes to mark the boundary of the sacred, as Haeri (2003: 1) calls it. The Islamic revival in Egypt in the 1990s has changed the language choice in the religious domain. Popular preachers like Sheikh Kishk (1933–96) started to attract crowds with their simple language, even though they still used Classical Arabic to create a solemn atmosphere. A new phenomenon is that of the media preachers. Wise (2003) has depicted the difference in setting and even in clothing (modern clothes instead of the traditional garb) of these preachers. In this connection she has also drawn attention to their different language choice. Soliman’s (2008) study of language use in the sermons of the media phenomenon Amr Khaled (b. 1967), has shown that his use of Classical Arabic remains restricted to recitation of the Qurʾān, quotations from the Ḥadīṯ, or formal prayers at the beginning and the end of a sermon. In the rest of the sermon, Amr Khaled uses Egyptian Arabic, even when he speaks abroad to non-Egyptians. Soliman connects this pattern with

252  The Arabic Language

the change in targeted audience, middle-class affluent Muslims, and explains the use of the colloquial language as motivated by a wish to connect with younger generations. But even middle-aged people in the audience regard this form of religious instruction as riwiš ‘cool, hip’. In this pattern it is entirely appropriate that the preacher from time to time even inserts English loanwords in his speech. The example of religion once again shows that it would be too simple to regard the dialect as a purely negative variety. We have seen above that dialects stands for familiarity and, on a political level, for loyalty towards one’s country rather than to the distanced ideal of the Arab nation. Egypt is a prime example of this attitude towards one’s own dialect. The relatively favourable attitude towards the dialect in Egypt is visible in all social contexts. In interviews on television, even in speeches in parliament, colloquial elements are freely used. There is a lot of public interest in the colloquial language, somewhat comparable to the way in which Schwyzertüütsch is cultivated in German-speaking Switzerland. Literary works regularly contain colloquial elements, especially in the dialogues; and theatre plays, even when they were written originally in Standard Arabic, are often staged in dialect. People proudly commented on the publication of Badawī’s and Hinds’ (1986) dictionary of the Egyptian ʿāmmiyya. Many language schools offer courses in Egyptian dialect for foreigners. Debates about the language question did take place in Egypt (cf. above, Chapter 11), but the point is that in Egypt such debates did not create a scandal, whereas elsewhere in the Arab world experiments involving the use of dialect were regarded with much more suspicion. The initiative of the Egyptian version of Wikipedia, which was established in 2008 (see Chapter 9, p. 169), raised a few eyebrows, to be sure, but Panović (2010) shows that in spite of its rather radical ideas about Egyptian as an independent African language, and in spite of its association with Christian authors, some Egyptian Muslims feel positive about this initiative and are willing to act as contributors. The Egyptian attitude towards the use of dialect is also very much in evidence in international pan-Arab conferences, where Egyptian delegates unhesitatingly use colloquialisms in their speech while delegates from other Arab countries do their best to avoid such colloquialisms at all costs. Private interviews with Egyptian politicians and even with religious authorities, after a start in obligatory standard formulae, often switch to colloquial Egyptian. This attractive force of Egyptian Arabic is also at work outside the Egyptian borders. One of the explanations for the use of colloquialisms by Egyptians in a pan-Arabic context may be that their dialect is universally known in the Arabophone world on account of the numerous Egyptian movies and soap operas that are exported to all Arab countries. This has led to a situation where most people can understand the Egyptian dialect at least partly, but not the other way round. A second reason is the large number of Egyptian teachers working abroad: thousands of Egyptian teachers were invited to come to the North African countries after independence because of the shortage of people who could teach

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in Arabic (see below, Chapter 14, p. 263). A large number of Egyptian teachers worked in Yemen during and after the Nasser period, so much so that nowadays any Arabic-speaking foreigner in Yemen is automatically regarded as an Egyptian teacher. In the Yemenite dialect, Egyptian colloquialisms have gained a position as prestige variants (cf. above, p. 183). In recent times, many Egyptians have been working temporarily in the Gulf states and in Saudi Arabia. 13.5  Variation and intrapersonal variables In the preceding paragraphs we have looked at variation from the point of view of extra-personal factors, such as topic, setting and interlocutors, which determine language choice in a situation of diglossia. We have also looked at the resulting language attitudes and the possibilities of manipulating language choice for political or religious purposes. While there are some studies relating the use of certain speech variables to such extra-personal variables, there is much less material on the correlation between linguistic variables and intrapersonal variables, such as socioeconomic class, education, religious affiliation, gender and age. The discussion thus far has focused on the relationship between the high and the low variety and the influence of the (written) standard on the speech behaviour of the speakers. This influence of the standard has always been a feature of the linguistic history of Arabic, but at the same time the spoken dialects have generated their own dynamic. Processes like urbanisation and koineisation have led to the emergence of prestige varieties, whose features are not necessarily identical with those of Standard Arabic. We have seen above (Chapter 11, p.  196) that in Bahrain the Sunnite dialect exhibits features that are non-standard, whereas some features of the Shiʿite dialect are identical with those of Standard Arabic. Nonetheless, the Sunnite dialect represents the prestige variety (see also below). This has led some researchers to maintain that language change in the Arab world is never related to the influence of Classical Arabic. Al Wer (2002: 46) goes so far as to state that: linguistic change in Arabic is determined by the relative status of native spoken varieties (which is determined by the relative status of their speakers); in this domain, the status of the linguistic features vis-à-vis Classical Arabic is irrelevant.

Identifying those variables that lead to a prestigious status in the Arabicspeaking world is still in its infancy. Since we do not have enough data to set up full-scale correlations between socioeconomic class and the use of H/L variants, it would be premature to try to define sociolectal varieties with some measure of independent status. In her study of linguistic variation in two neighbourhoods in Damascus, Ismail (2007) attempted to set up a social class index, but she conceded that the situation was too complicated to reach a satisfactory result. In the end, residence in a certain neighbourhood with its own social network turned out to

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be the most reliable variable to correlate with linguistic variation. The importance of social networks is also underscored by Al Wer (2002), who points out that we need to look at the interdependence of the variables. ‘Level of education’ or ‘literacy’, for instance, cannot be regarded as independent variables, but are indicators of the speaker’s social network. Al Wer (2002) investigated the variant /t/ ~ /ṯ/ in the Jordanian provincial town of Sult, 25 km north-west of the capital Amman. From her research, it became clear that the highest educated (female) speakers predominantly (59 per cent) opted for /t/, while the lowest score (7 per cent) was exhibited by those who had the lowest level of education. In this case, /t/ represented the urban variety of Amman, while /ṯ/ represented the rural lifestyle of Sult, in spite of the fact that it is the variant of Standard Arabic. Education in this case correlated with contact with a larger urban social network, which resulted in the adoption of the variant /t/. In Al Wer’s research, all informants were female and there is a chance that this may have influenced the preference for the urban forms. A similar result is given by Gibson (2002) in his investigation of levelling in Tunisian Arabic. Gibson found that speakers of Bedouin dialects with the variant /g/ tend to adopt /q/, which looks like a change towards Classical Arabic. But he concludes that it is more likely that the change is caused by the attraction of urban Tunisian Arabic (which also has /q/), since in other variables Bedouin speakers adopt the urban variant even if it is less similar to Classical Arabic, for instance, when they switch from ninsu ‘we forget’ to urban ninsāw, which is even farther from Standard Arabic nansā. The results of both Al Wer and Gibson demonstrate that linguistic change in spoken speech does not (always) go into the direction of Classical Arabic. Yet the influence of the standard language may well be visible in other domains than everyday colloquial speech, for instance, in public speaking, as we have seen above (pp. 246ff.). This means that Standard Arabic retains a certain role in upgrading processes, as in the case of Bahrain. Religious affiliation has long been known to be an important factor in language variation in Arabic. In his classic work on the correlation between religious affiliation and dialect variety in Baghdad, Blanc (1964) described the communal dialects of Muslims, Christians and Jews. More recently, Holes (1987) has analysed the communal varieties in Bahrain, where a Sunnite Bedouin dialect represents the standard variety, whereas the Shiʿite minority, the Baḥārna, speak a sedentary dialect. Holes emphasises the different social meanings which variants obtain in this community (see also Holes 1995b), and rightly assumes that an adequate account of the sociolinguistic situation should include the entire range of styles that people have at their disposal. In his survey he arrives at the relevant variables by setting up implicational scales, that is, by observing the co-occurrence of certain variants in the speech of his respondents. The most important outcome of his analysis is the interdependence between linguistic form and social meaning. This is especially manifest in those cases where Baḥārna forms agree or disagree

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with the Standard Arabic form. In the case of the word for ‘fish’ (Standard Arabic samaka), both Baḥārna and Sunnites have smiča; accordingly, when upgrading their speech they will turn both to the Standard Arabic form. In the case of the word for ‘sunset’ (Standard Arabic maġrib), the Baḥārna have maġrib, while the Sunnites say mġarb; in this case, Baḥārna literates tend to switch to the Sunnite form, whereas the Sunnites upgrade by turning to the Standard Arabic form (Holes 1987: 170ff.). A third intrapersonal variable is that of gender. The study of male–female speech variation has become increasingly popular in Arabic sociolinguistics. In Western sociolinguistics, there is a generally accepted dictum that on average women tend to conform to standard/prestige variants more than men, and that they are more conservative with regard to linguistic change. This rule has been called into question for non-Western societies, where some claim that men tend to use the standard variants more than women. Actually, it is not always true that women use less Modern Standard Arabic than men, but this depends on the context. Bassiouney (2009b: 162–85) studied the use of Arabic in television talk shows with male and female participants, and she found that in such a competitive context women use just as much Modern Standard Arabic as men do, possibly even more, because of its association with expertise and authority. In this context the language use serves to assert one’s authority. Parkinson (2003) found that when knowledge of fuṣḥā was tested formally, women scored higher than men. These results are more in line with the pattern in Western countries. Perhaps a better way to formulate this tendency is by concluding that both men and women tend to veer towards a prestige variety, but they sometimes differ as to which prestige variety they select. One of the examples mentioned by Bassiouney (2009a) is that of gender-related variation in Damascus, which was investigated by Daher (1997). Men prefer /q/, but women prefer /ʾ/. Daher explains this by pointing out that /q/ as the Standard Arabic realisation belongs to the realm of education, which traditionally is a male domain. The women’s choice of /ʾ/ may be explained by the fact that it stands for urbanisation and modernisation. A similar case of gender-related variation is that of the female Jordanian students whose speech was studied by Suleiman (1985: 45). They switch from rural to urban dialect varieties to a much larger degree than male students. Yet men tend to use more Standard Arabic, which is the variety for public appearances, in which women participate less than men. We have seen above that the higher educated women from Sult in Al Wer’s study (2002) preferred the urban variants of Amman. The contrast between Western and non-Western speech patterns disappears when we realise that the standard variety should not be identified automatically with Modern Standard Arabic. In the case of the Jordanian students, it is the urban dialect that is regarded by most speakers as the prestige variety. Modern Standard Arabic, on the other hand, has a prestige of its own, but is seen as part of the male domain.

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Gender-related variation is often combined with other variables, for instance, social class and age. In her study of male and female speech in Cairo, Haeri (1996) observed that strong pharyngalisation is associated with the speech of lower-class men, and avoided by women. Yet one finds that some women adopt this feature in order to project a certain image: the stereotypical baladi woman may be heard to use strong pharyngals in line with her image as an independent, self-sufficient personality. An interesting case study showing the relation between gender and other variables is Walters’ (1991) extensive survey of linguistic variation in the small town of Korba in Tunisia. One of the variants he investigated is that of final /-ā/, which in Tunisian Arabic becomes [ɛː] by ʾimāla. In the dialect of Korba, this variable is realised by three variants: the standard variant [ɛː], and two raised variants, [ɪː] and [ɨː], which are regarded by the speakers as local and non-prestigious. Walters shows that the Tunisian standard variant is used most by young male speakers, followed by young females, then older males and then older females. His results are important for several reasons. In the first place, they demonstrate that the use of the standard variant correlates with a combination of gender, age and education rather than gender alone: those female speakers who used the variant [ɛː] had studied in Tunis. In the second place, most young speakers, both male and female, still use the raised variants with some speakers when they are back in the village, thus showing that these variants have become a marker of group identity. In the dialect of Korba, age plays an important role in the patterns of language choice. As an independent variable, however, age remains an understudied topic in Arabic sociolinguistics, and most studies on youth language remain impressionistic and focus on lexical items. Presumably, processes of urbanisation lead to the kind of speech community in which young speakers may congregate and develop their own style of speaking and their own specific youth culture. In the age of social media, such in-group markers stand a much greater chance of spreading, not only in the in-group, but also in society at large. Typical teenager expressions quickly find their way to the general public (and are then, of course, replaced by newer expressions in teenage in-group culture). In Egyptian Arabic, words like riwiš ‘cool’, ṭaḥn ‘extremely’ and ʾišṭa ‘good, fine’, which used to be limited to youth language and are still regarded as typical of their jargon (Rizk 2007), have become common expressions. A particularly apt example is the comment by middle-aged fans, who regard Amr Khaled’s sermons as riwiš (above, p. 252). Further reading A general introduction to Arabic sociolinguistics was published by Bassiouney (2009a); it deals with diglossia, code-switching, language variation and language policy; a large section is devoted to language and gender. A literature review on variation in urban vernaculars is in Miller (2004).

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The term ‘diglossia’ became current in studies on Arabic after Marçais (1930); most of the sociolinguistic literature starts with Ferguson (1959), which provoked a large number of reactions: see, for instance, MacNamara (1967), Kaye (1972), McLoughlin (1972), El-Hassan (1977), Eisele (2002), Boussofara-Omar (2006a) and others. A diachronic study of diglossia in Classical Arabic is Corriente (1975). Theoretical discussion of Ferguson’s model is in Gumperz (1962), Fishman (1967, 1972) and Britto (1985). Hudson (2002) argues that the original notion of ‘diglossia’ in Ferguson’s study is still useful. For a general appraisal of Ferguson’s model, see the introductions to the various sections in Belnap’s and Haeri’s edition of Ferguson’s papers (1997). Fernández (1993) is a comprehensive bibliography on diglossia, in which the number of items on Arabic diglossia is substantial. One of the first studies in which the notion of ‘diglossia’ was applied to the linguistic situation in an Arab country (Iraq) is Altoma (1969). For the linguistic situation in Egypt, Badawī (1973) is a classic and also one of the very few publications in Arabic about a sociolinguistic topic; for an empirical evaluation of Badawī’s model, see Elgibali (1985). Diem’s (1974) study of radio Arabic has been mentioned in the text; the book contains transcribed texts that were taken from speeches, interviews and conversations; a more recent analysis of radio Arabic is in Eid (2007). The asymmetry between the varieties involved in code-mixing is analysed by Mejdell (2012a, b). On the Matrix Language Model see Myers-Scotton (1993, 2010), and the critical analysis by Boussofara-Omar (2003, 2006b). Syntactic constraints on code-switching are discussed by Eid (1988). On Educated Standard Arabic see Al Batal (2002) and Parkinson (2003), and the large-scale studies of the mixed style used in an academic context by Bassiouney (2006) and Mejdell (2006). Not much is known about the use of classicisms in colloquial speech, but the radio texts in Diem provide many examples of people upgrading their speech. There is no analysis of the range of classical markers actually being used; on this topic, see also above, Chapter 9, and Palva’s (1969a) study of the use of classicisms in Bedouin speech in Jordan. Language and politics: on the structure of Nasser’s speeches, see Holes (1993) and Mazraani (1996). Language and religion: see Haeri (2003); on new forms of Islamic preaching see Wise (2003) and Soliman’s (2008) analysis of language use in Amr Khaled’s sermons. In their written production, in spite of individual differences in style and rhetoric, all Islamic preachers adhere to the norms of the standard language; a comparison of the written styles of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Amr Khaled is drawn by Høygilt (2008). Language and nationalism: Suleiman (2003, 2004). Attitudinal research in the Arab world remains poorly represented; attitudes towards foreign languages have been studied by Bentahila (1983; French–Arabic in

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Morocco, see below Chapter 14), Zughoul and Taminian (1984; English–Arabic in Jordan), Suleiman (1985; English–Arabic in Jordan), Abu-Haidar (1988a; English– Arabic in Iraq) and Amara (1999; Hebrew–Arabic in the West Bank and Israel). Theoretical aspects of linguistic variation in contemporary Arabic speech communities are discussed by Holes (1987) in his study on the sectarian variation in the dialects of Bahrain; valuable methodological remarks may be found in Owens’ (1998) study of variation in Arabic in Nigeria, and in Haeri’s (1996) study of variation in Cairene Arabic. On socioeconomic class and education as variables: see Ismail (2007) and Al Wer (2002). Religion as a variable: Blanc’s (1964) study on Baghdad was mentioned above; see also Jastrow (2004) on communal dialects in Mosul, and Holes (1983, 1984, 1987) on Bahrain. Gender as a variable: see Bassiouney (2009b: 128–97). A survey of recent research in male–female differences in Arabic dialects is in Rosenhouse (1996), see also Vicente (2009). There is a number of studies on the relation between gender and language use from a different perspective, that of the effects of gendered language on the position of women in society; for this aspect, see Sadiqi (2003). The linguistic variation between male and female speech in Tunisia is discussed by Walters (1989, 1991), and in Egypt by Haeri (1992, 1996); they both emphasise the methodological need to distinguish between Western and non-Western speech communities. On male–female speech in Jordan, see Al Wer (2003). Ismail (2007, 2008) analyses variation in Damascus, including male–female differences. For the effects of urbanisation processes, see the articles in Miller a.o. (2007); specifically about youth language, see Rizk (2007).

Chapter 14

Bilingualism

14.1 Introduction The diglossic situation sketched above in Chapter 13 also obtains in North African countries, but there the situation is complicated by the presence of a second prestigious language, the language of the former colonial power, France. In the literature on the Maghreb, this situation is often described as one of ‘bilingualism’. In the original version of Ferguson’s model this term referred to the coexistence of two unrelated languages within one speech community (cf. above, p. 242). In more recent literature, ‘bilingualism’ is used as a psycholinguistic term referring to a speaker’s proficiency in two or more languages. Yet the bulk of the literature on the linguistic situation in the Maghreb uses ‘bilingualism’ (or its French equivalent bilinguisme) in Ferguson’s original sense. It seemed, therefore, best in the present chapter to retain the term ‘bilingualism’ for the coexistence of Arabic and French (and to some degree of Arabic and Berber/Tamazight) in the Maghreb. In this chapter we shall first look at the French colonial policy in North Africa (and Lebanon) and its effects on the linguistic situation in these regions (section 14.2). Then, we shall discuss the various ways in which these countries implemented a policy of Arabicisation after independence (section 14.3). After that, we shall investigate the attitudes towards French, and the patterns of code-mixing and borrowing between Arabic and French (section 14.4). Finally, we shall deal with the language policy with regard to Berber (Tamazight, Amazighe) and the present situation of this language in Morocco and Algeria (section 14.5). Whatever the term that is used to describe the present linguistic situation in the Maghreb (and in Lebanon), its roots lie in the colonial period, in which the French language became indissolubly connected with this region. Unlike British colonial policy, the French authorities aimed at the assimilation and integration of the indigenous population. The official point of view was that France did not colonise other countries in order to exploit them, but in order to bring them French civilisation. French officials presented the colonial policy as France’s mission civilisatrice, and some of them may even have believed in this, but this attitude was certainly not shared by most French colonists (colons), who opposed any effort to educate the indigenous population.

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During the long years of French occupation (Morocco 1912–56; Algeria 1830–1962; Tunisia 1881–1956), the population of the ‘colonies’ was constantly exposed to the French language and French culture. Even though the official aim of educating the indigenous population as inhabitants of the French empire with equal rights was rarely, if ever, put into practice, it remained the framework in which relations between French and Arabs were defined. In practice, only a small elite of the Arab inhabitants of the colonies got the chance to learn French. These individuals became Gallicised to such a degree that they adopted the French language, and French literature and culture as their own; when it turned out that even with this education and attitude they would never be accepted as real French citizens, this small class of French Arabs became the core of the opposition movement to French domination. For the population at large, some knowledge of French was indispensable in their dealings with the French administration, but most people were denied any formal education in the language. 14.2  Independence and Arabicisation During the colonial period, some half-hearted efforts had been made by the colonial administration to introduce bilingual education for Arabic-speaking children, but in the few schools that provided this system Arabic was relegated to the position of an extracurricular curiosity. In the first period after independence, this situation was more or less perpetuated. In bilingual schools, French remained the language of instruction for ‘important’ subjects, such as mathematics, physics and economics, whereas Arabic was used in classes on literature, history and religious education. Although for political reasons Arabic was declared the national language, initially French remained the main language in education and administration. In all three Maghreb countries, campaigns for Arabicisation were set up at an early stage to change this linguistic situation. While the background to these campaigns was similar, there were noticeable differences in the course that they took in the three countries involved, analysed in detail by Grandguillaume (1983). These differences can be explained by several factors: the length of the French presence; the number of French colonists; and the presence of a Berber minority. In Tunisia, the French left behind a sizeable bilingual elite; Berber did not play a role here, since it was spoken only in the south by no more than 0.5 per cent of the population. After independence, Arabicisation became the official policy of the government, but at a slow pace. Although certainly dedicated to the introduction of Arabic himself, Bourguiba, who was the first president of Tunisia from 1957 to 1987, was not in favour of a hasty transfer. In his own public speeches, he tended to use an intermediate register, and on several occasions he declared that Classical Arabic was not the language of the Tunisian people. This became one of the key notions of the language debate in Tunisia: Arabicisation should not aim

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at the wholesale introduction of a standard form of the language, but allow for a considerable amount of bilingualism and, at least according to some people, proper attention to the Tunisian dialect. Although in the public debates the importance of Arabicisation was stressed, many intellectuals feared the reintroduction of orthodox Islam in the thoroughly secularised society of Tunisia as the result of exaggerated Arabicisation. In the administration, Arabicisation was not carried out systematically, even though some ministries were Arabicised completely, for instance, the Ministries of Justice and Interior Affairs in 1970. At the same time, however, many people still professed their preference for a bilingual approach and did not want to lose what they regarded as an achievement of Tunisian society. Besides, many people agreed with Bourguiba that the proper Arabic language of Tunisia was the Tunisian dialect. In the Tunisian schools, a revolutionary reform was started in 1958. It aimed at the Arabicisation of the school system by setting up a two-track curriculum that gave parents the option of sending their children either to a monolingual Arabic stream (section A) or to a bilingual French/Arabic stream (section B). The problems were predictable: lack of teaching materials; lack of teachers proficient in teaching in Arabic; and, most of all, lack of interest on the part of parents, who wished to provide their children with the best chance of succeeding in society, which meant sending them to a bilingual school. After ten years, the project was officially abandoned and the sections A disappeared. Some measure of Arabicisation was carried out, however, and the first three years in primary education remained completely Arabic, as did some of the disciplines in secondary education (philosophy, geography, history). In the years after Bourguiba, the situation in Tunisia started to change in favour of Arabic. Even at university level, there was constant pressure on teachers to adopt Standard Arabic for their classes, and even those teachers who believed that it was impossible to teach their specialised subject in Arabic by and large abandoned the exclusive use of French. At present, teaching in primary schools takes place in Arabic, but from the third grade onwards French is introduced as a foreign language at a rate of 9–11 hours per week. In secondary schools, the humanities are taught in Arabic and the ‘hard’ sciences are taught in French (Daoud 2007: 267–70). In the 1990s, emergent Islamic fundamentalism became a powerful factor. On the whole, the fundamentalists were against any form of education in French and wished to give Arabic its rightful place in the curriculum. This meant that the language question was increasingly linked with religious issues. After the Jasmine Revolution and the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, this link was once again underscored by Rached Ghannouchi (b. 1941), leader of the Ennahda Party. After the historic victory of his party in the 2011 elections, Ghannouchi stated in an interview with Middle East Online (26 October 2011) that Arabic–French bilingualism represented a ‘linguistic pollution’ of Tunisia’s

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identity. It is obvious, then, that the future of Arabicisation versus bilingualism in Tunisia will depend to a great deal on the political development. One interesting side-effect is mentioned by Daoud (2007: 277ff.), who claims that the position of English in Tunisia may not represent a direct challenge to French, but still, English is gradually becoming more important and visible in public life. This may be rather a surface phenomenon, but it is true that serious efforts are being made to introduce it in the curriculum of the schools at an early grade. One of the reasons for this popularity may be that English does not bring with it the kind of resentment that French still does, so that it might be acceptable not only to secularists, but also to Islamists who are firmly opposed to French influence. The linguistic situation in Morocco is determined by several factors. First, the country has the largest Amazigh minority of all Maghreb countries, some estimates going as high as 50 per cent. Second, the French language played an important practical role because of the commercial relations between Morocco and Europe. Third, the language question was always closely connected with the political situation because of the connection with the throne: after King Mohammed V’s return to an independent Morocco in 1956, the monarchy, Islam and the Arabic language became an unbreakable triad. In the colonial period, the degree of schooling was very low. The overwhelming majority of the pupils in the French schools were French, and only a very small number of Moroccan children actually went to these schools. In 1945, for instance, the number of French pupils was 45,000, that of Moroccan pupils 1,150. Contrast this with the total number of pupils in primary and secondary schools in 1957, just after independence: primary 530,000; secondary 31,000; and in 1965: primary 1,000,000, secondary 130,000 (Grandguillaume 1983). To put these figures in perspective: according to UNESCO statistics, in 2002, 4.1 million children were enrolled in primary and 1.7 million in secondary schools. The only alternative for Moroccan pupils in the colonial period was that of the traditional schools, starting with the kuttāb and culminating in the traditional university of the Qarawiyine in Fes. In the period after independence, several attempts were made to Arabicise the schools. But plans for a complete Arabicisation of primary schools and at a later point of secondary schools in 1959 were postponed because of the practical problem of actually introducing Arabic education in the sciences. At the present time (Ennaji 2005: 105–7), all public schools at the primary and secondary level are completely Arabicised, with a progressive number of hours dedicated to the teaching of French as a foreign language. In higher education, the language choice depends on the subject: technical disciplines are taught in French, humanities in Arabic. In addition, there is a large number of private schools, which are free in their language choice. Some of these offer a completely French-based education.

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The campaigns to Arabicise the administration were mostly half-hearted. As a political issue, Arabicisation was important, especially in the context of establishing Arabic as the only language of the country to counter the influence of Berber. In practice, even after more than fifty years, several departments have retained the use of French as a working language. According to many reports, the employees in the Bureaux d’arabisation, whose express aim was to support and guard Arabicisation, continued to use French among themselves when discussing the language problems of the country! It is small wonder, then, that the outward appearance of the larger cities, at least as far as the ‘European parts’ are concerned, remains French to a large degree. Bookshops still sell French newspapers and books, signs and advertisements are in French, and in the French-style cafés one orders one’s coffee in French. The third Maghreb country, Algeria, knew the longest period of French presence and harboured the largest number of French colons. The country was virtually a French province from 1830, and independence was fought for in a bitter war that ended in 1962. The situation of Arabic in French Algeria was precarious. There was constant pressure to prohibit instruction in Classical Arabic, culminating in the edict of 1936 that declared Arabic a foreign language. Whatever education existed in a language other than French was in dialectal Arabic or in Berber. When, in 1961, de Gaulle made Arabic compulsory again in the écoles du 1er degré, this was much too late to change the situation. Like the other Maghreb countries, after independence Algeria made Arabic the national language and Islam the national religion, but this did not change the fact that many Algerians were not proficient in Standard Arabic, and sometimes not even in dialectal Arabic. In 1963, for instance, there was a proposal in the National Assembly to translate the proceedings of the meetings into Arabic. Apparently, most of the debates were held in French, since many of the delegates would have been unable to speak in any kind of Arabic. The proposal met with general approval, but, as the prime minister pointed out, it would be impossible to find enough trained translators to do the job, so for the time being the proceedings had to remain in French! Benrabah (2007: 112) estimates that in 1990 there were still around 150,000 monolingual speakers of French in Algeria. Right from the start, it was recognised that Arabicisation should begin in education; but the beginnings of the Arabicisation programme were altogether modest (7 hours in Arabic in primary education). Because of the almost total absence of teachers, 1,000 Egyptian teachers were imported right away, later to be followed by another 1,000 from Syria. After the coup d’état of 1965, in which Boumediene became president, Arabicisation and Islamisation became ­cornerstones of a centralised policy. In about ten years, most primary e­ ducation had been Arabicised, there had been a lot of progress in secondary education, and even at the universities the pressure to switch to Arabic became more intense.

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In the period just before independence, the French had created a corps of Algerian state employees to take over the administration when they had to leave. These 100,000 or so employees jealously guarded their privileged position and were loath to accept any change in the linguistic situation. In 1968, the government decreed that state employees had to take an exam within three years to prove their proficiency in Arabic, but this measure turned out to be futile. In 1980, the edict was repeated, however, and this time it was enforced, aiming at total Arabicisation by 1985. The introduction of Arabic in the Algerian mass media and in the public domain was very much connected with the dominant Islamic movement. In fact, some people believe that the forced total Arabicisation was one of the causes of the growth of fundamentalism and the present polarisation in Algeria, with large numbers of people opposing Arabic–French bilingualism, and other people opposing, just as vehemently, total Arabicisation. Whereas in Morocco Islamic feelings were usurped by the monarchy, and Tunisia chose a largely secularist way, in Algeria the Islamic movement was eventually co-opted by the socialist government, and supported by a popular movement, which actively supported the struggle for the replacement of French with Arabic. In 1976, within the course of one night, all French street names, billboards, advertisements and so on disappeared from the streets of Algiers, and other towns followed suit. Probably these measures were not always taken by officials, and in some cases the popular movement acted autonomously. In the civil war that tore the country apart in the 1990s the language question was not an issue. When, in 1991, complete Arabicisation in all domains was prescribed in a law that forbade the use of any language other than Arabic, it looked like monolingualism was there to stay. Yet there were some cracks in this apparent success. The Arabicisation campaign in public life and education had been successful, but it had led to a deterioration in educational standards. The Arabicisation in administration was certainly not complete: Benrabah (2007: 101) estimates that about 70 per cent of all written interaction between local administration and the public is still in French; at higher levels of government documents are often written first in French and then translated into Arabic. Things took a different turn in the late 1990s, when the new president Bouteflika started to use French in public and to project an image of Algeria as a bilingual country. In his view, modernising and opening up the country economically meant that educational standards had to be improved drastically. New reforms aim at the re-introduction of French as the most important foreign language. With these reforms the pressure of strict Arabicisation has been eased and it now appears that French or a combination of French and Arabic will remain the language of instruction in most higher education in Algeria. For some Algerian writers who had opted for French in their literary work, the new direction in language policy in the 2000s felt like a liberation, which removed the guilt they

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felt when using French (Benrabah 2007: 65, 114–15). Recent surveys among secondary school students show that for the younger generation the new future quite naturally includes French (Benrabah 2007: 55). Thus far, we have spoken only about the linguistic situation in North Africa. In the eastern Arab world, Lebanon and Syria also belonged to the French sphere of influence. In Syria, most traces of French presence have been wiped out. Lebanon is a special case because of the presence of a large number of Arab Christians (Maronites). From a very early date onwards, Lebanese Christians established contact with the Christian Church in Europe: Maronites studied in the Vatican, and later in Paris, thereby strengthening the ties between Eastern Christianity and Europe. After the troubles of 1860 between Maronites and Druze, the European powers intervened and signed an agreement with the Ottoman Porte on the status of Lebanon, which was to become a mutasarrifate (a district with a special administrative status in the Ottoman Empire) rather than belong to the province of Syria. In this area the Maronites were in the majority, and Christian missionaries became highly active (in 1866 the Syrian Protestant College was founded, later to become the American University in Beirut, and in 1875 the Catholic Université Saint Joseph). The interference of the Western powers, especially France, led to the adoption of French as a cultural language by educated Christians before the turn of the century. In the turmoil of the Mandate period in which France dominated Lebanon (1918–43), the Maronites were constantly striving to establish a Greater Lebanon, independent of the Arab nation. When France finally conceded independence, Maronites continued to dominate in spite of the fact that they no longer c­ onstituted the majority due to the inclusion of large Muslim areas, such as the Biqāʿ and the south. Their only chance was, therefore, a special form of Lebanese nationalism, which emphasised the bicultural and bilingual character of the Lebanese nation. In pre-civil war publications by Lebanese Maronites, the coexistence between French and Arabic in Lebanon used to be viewed in a favourable light. Abou (1961, 1962), for instance, published a survey of language use and a study in which he showed himself to be an enthusiastic proponent of the bicultural entity that Lebanon should remain. In such publications, the historical role of Lebanon as an intermediary between Europe and the Levant was emphasised and the advantages of bilingual education in general were extolled. At the same time, the statistics in Abou’s book demonstrate the difference between the Muslim and the Christian population with regard to proficiency in French. It goes without saying that, since the civil war, much has changed, and it is safe to say that the linguistic landscape will never be the same again. Unfortunately, nothing much is known about the present situation, but so much is certain: French has lost a great deal of its dominant position. In Beirut itself, there is a growing contrast between east Beirut, where French is still used, and west Beirut, where it has been replaced to some extent by English in its role as a channel to the international community.

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The American University in Beirut has always used English as the language of instruction. The recent popularity of English may perhaps be explained in the same way as in Tunisia by its more neutral position between the factions. The civil war in Lebanon has rearranged the linguistic market, especially in the media. One of its effects may be a greater public presence of dialect Arabic. We have seen above that in political discourse the Hezbollah leadership alternates between Standard Arabic and Lebanese Arabic in a way that is highly reminiscent of the Egyptian President Nasser’s political speeches (p. 250). The largest television channel in the country, LBCI, uses a mix of Standard and Lebanese Arabic that seems to be quite unique in the way that it combines the two varieties rather than alternating them (Al Batal 2002). 14.3  Language choice and language attitudes in North Africa During the French period, the French language had acquired such a symbolic value in the Maghreb countries that even though it was the language of the former colonisers, and even though officially Arabic became the new national language, knowledge of French was still regarded as an essential key to success. In spite of the official policy of introducing the Arabic language (taʿrīb) into domains that had formerly belonged to French, it has taken people a long time to get used to the idea that Arabic can serve just as well as French as an official language. As a cultural language, French continues to play an important role, and one still overhears well-educated Moroccans and Tunisians switching in midstream from one language to the other. As far as proficiency in French is concerned, the linguistic situation has changed, too. During the colonial period, only a very small proportion of the people received an education in a school system which was based entirely on French. As a result, this elite became bilingual in French and in the vernacular, and in some cases, depending on the situation at home and the degree of schooling, French even became their dominant language. In extreme cases, particularly in Algeria, this led to virtual monolingualism in French. Most members of the elite, whether they continued using the vernacular at home or switched to French completely, had virtually no knowledge of Standard Arabic and were unable to read or write in that language. After independence, this situation became unstable, and with the introduction of Standard Arabic in the school system it disappeared. A few older individuals in the Maghreb countries may still refuse stubbornly to learn Standard Arabic, but on the whole the pressure on them to use Standard Arabic in their professional life has become inescapable. Apart from the elite who had most access to the French school system, anyone who came into contact with the French language during the colonial period acquired at the very least the minimal knowledge of (informal) French that was needed for dealings with the authorities or French colonists. These people devel-

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oped a kind of bilingualism in which French was definitely subordinate, since for them the primary language was their vernacular. The degree of knowledge of French depended on the amount of exposure and the nature of the contacts with the French authorities and colonists. After independence, a similar type of bilingualism continued to exist, but nowadays its degree is a function of the amount of schooling. In contrast to the colonial period, in the post-colonial period anyone who goes to school has to learn Standard Arabic as well. The development of proficiency in French and Standard Arabic may be estimated on the basis of a few statistics that are available. In Table 14.1 an estimate is given for 1968 on the basis of numbers of graduates from various types of schools. Recent statistics by the Organisation internationale de la fracophonie (2007) give figures of 13.5 per cent complete francophones and 19.5 per cent partial francophones for Morocco, and a total of 63.6 per cent francophones for Tunisia. According to Benrabah (2007: 112), the number of French speakers in Algeria was around 60 per cent in 2004. A recent survey shows that most people still feel that their proficiency in spoken and written Standard Arabic is less than their skills in French: about 25 per cent of students, and about 35 per cent of teachers assess themselves as (very) good in Standard Arabic, as against 55 per cent and 70 per cent in French (Ennaji 2002: 78–9).

Tunisia Morocco Algeria

Arabic only

300,000

400,000

100,000

French only

100,000

100,000

900,000

bilinguals 500,000 total

700,000

300,000

900,000 1,200,000 1,300,000 20 per cent 10 per cent 12 per cent

Table 14.1  Language proficiency of literates in North Africa (after Gallagher 1968: 148) Although these figures do not match exactly, they do reflect a reality that still obtains in North Africa. There are two prestige languages that compete for the same domains: Standard Arabic and French. The colonial past has strongly influenced speakers’ attitudes towards the two languages. Bentahila (1983) studied these attitudes with the help of a matched guise technique that has been designed to bring out people’s reactions to the use of language varieties. He observed that French was generally regarded more favourably than Arabic, provided that it was of high quality. Speakers of French were perceived as modern, sophisticated, educated and important, whereas the same speakers, when speaking in Arabic, were rated higher on features such as sociability and friendliness. Interestingly, most of the respondents regarded the use of mixed codes very negatively. Asked

268  The Arabic Language

about the advantages of bilingualism, that is, proficiency in both languages, two-thirds of the respondents maintained that it is advantageous for both individuals and society, especially in education. Yet most respondents favoured Arabicisation, provided that it was carried out in Classical Arabic, while at the same time supporting the continuation of bilingualism. Likewise, almost all respondents asserted that Arabic was an appropriate language for the teaching of science, but at the same time they preferred the teaching of science in French. Such reactions illustrate the deep conflict between people’s attitudes and their ‘official’ point of view in a post-colonial bilingual society. With respect to language choice, the respondents in Bentahila’s study, all of whom were bilingual, stated that they spoke predominantly Arabic with elderly people, poor people and family, and predominantly French with doctors and employers. When ranking the domains of the language varieties, Bentahila found that Moroccan Arabic was used least in education and most at home, while French was used least among friends and most in education. Among friends, the preferred variety was a mixture of Arabic and French. An interesting contrast is provided by the respondents’ reactions to questions about their preferred variety in the written and the spoken media (see Table 14.2). The comments that accompanied these reactions show the kind of associations that people have with the two varieties: French is preferred because of the content of messages in French, whereas Arabic is preferred out of a sense of duty towards the nation. s=87 newspapers read newspapers preferred books read books preferred radio listened to radio preferred television preferred films preferred

French mixed Arabic blanks 37 58 45 62 25 54 55 79

53 13 54 14 60 14 26 13

15 26  7 20 19 27 20  6

4 12  3 13  5 14  8 11

Table 14.2  Preferred language varieties in the media in Morocco (after Bentahila 1983: 68, 70) A more recent survey of language attitudes in Morocco (Ennaji 2002) shows that not much has changed in the intervening period. When asked about the use of Arabic and French in the sciences, the majority (about 60 per cent) name French as the preferred language in (higher) education (as against 25 per cent Standard Arabic). About two-thirds of the informants favour Arabic–French bilingualism. For most of the informants, Arabic is a language of the historical legacy

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and for the humanities, whereas French represents technology and progress. None of the respondents was a proponent of full Arabicisation, and the current bilingualism turned out to be the preferred option. Almost no one in this survey felt that vernacular Moroccan Arabic could replace either of these two standard languages. Some linguists, like Abderrahim Youssi (1995) feel that the best solution would be to introduce vernacular Moroccan (dārija) in the educational system because of its accessibility for much broader circles of the population, but they are a minority. The few attempts to use Moroccan Arabic in writing have thus far remained without follow-up (see pp. 168f.). The relative prestige of Standard Arabic is perhaps also visible in the tendency on the part of speakers to use hypercorrect standard language. In the media, speakers using Standard Arabic pronounce the article in juncture as ʾal-, with full realisation of the glottal stop, apparently in an effort to avoid the dialect form l-; they also tend to supply declensional endings even in pausal position, where no speaker in the eastern Arabic-speaking world would ever use them. Consequently, switches in speech are characterised by sharp contrasts, as in the following utterance taken from a Moroccan radio programme: wa-ḥaqīqa ʾanna l-mutafarrižīn k-tašfu ʿunṣur mǝn ʿanāṣir l-masraḥ lli ġad-ikun ḥaqīqa fǝ-l-mustǝqbal fī mīdān l-masraḥ nažāḥan bāhir ‘Really, the audience discover one of the elements of the theatre that in future will have a resounding success in the field of theatre’. (Forkel 1980: 93)

or in the following utterance: ʾaškuru l-ʾaḫ ʿla had l-furṣa lli tutāḥ lī baš nʿǝbbǝr ʿan raʾyī ḥawl dawr l-ʾiḏāʿa ‘I thank my colleague for this opportunity granted to me to express my opinion about the role of the media’. (Forkel 1980: 85)

The juxtaposition of high-standard expressions and dialect utterances (ġad-ikun with aspectual marker; nažāḥan with accusative ending; lli dialect relative; tutāḥ passive verb) is typical of media speech in North Africa. 14.4  Code-mixing and borrowing The lengthy period of coexistence with French naturally left its traces in the linguistic structure of Arabic. We have seen above (p. 234) that in the form of Standard Arabic that is current in North Africa, French idiomatic patterns can be detected. In the vernacular, too, a host of French borrowings have been integrated. According to Heath (1989), the integration of loanwords from another language must necessarily be preceded by a period of intensive code-switching. Yet, judging from other situations of code-mixing, it appears more likely that the most integrated loans from French date back to a period in which most people had only a superficial knowledge of French. Only at a later stage, when there was a larger number of true bilinguals, did the number of ad hoc borrowings increase.

270  The Arabic Language

Heath pays special attention to the pattern of integration of French loans into Moroccan Arabic. At an earlier stage, Spanish loans had been integrated into the language on the basis of the Spanish infinitive (e.g., fṛinaṛ-t ‘I braked’, n-fṛinaṛ ‘I brake’ < Spanish frenar). But for French loans, the basic form seems to have been a generalised stem ending in a vowel. In the -er conjugation in French, many forms end in a vowel sound (e.g., déclarer ‘to declare’, déclaré, déclarez, déclarais); according to Heath, these forms provided the canonical pattern for loanwords, imperfect y-ḍiklaṛi, perfect ḍiklaṛa, analogous to the Moroccan weak verbs in -a/-i. As we shall see below (Chapter 15, p. 278), in Maltese, too, the category of the weak verbs provided a suitable pattern for foreign loans. Other examples of French loans include blisa/yblisi ‘to wound’ (French blesser); kuṇṭṛula/ykuṇṭṛuli ‘to supervise’ (French contrôler); ṣuṭa/yṣuṭi ‘to jump’ (French sauter). From most of these verbs, a passive and a participle may be formed, for example, ttblisi ‘to be wounded’, mblisi ‘wounded’. With regard to loan nouns, it may be noted that their gender is determined by the presence or absence of an end-vowel; thus, for instance, duš ‘shower’ (French la douche) is masculine in Moroccan Arabic, whereas aṇṭiṛṇa ‘campus’ (French internat) is feminine. Many nouns borrowed from French have a plural in -at (e.g., dušat, gaṛat, plural from gaṛ ‘station’, French gare). But broken plurals for borrowed nouns are fairly common, for example, gid ‘tourist guide’, plural gyad (French guide), mašina ‘train’, plural mašinat or mwašǝn (French machine), tǝnbǝr ‘stamp’, plural tnabǝr (French timbre). A special case of code-switching between French and vernacular Arabic is that of the so-called Franco-Arabe, a mixed code that is used predominantly by students and completely bicultural families in Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon. As an illustration, we may quote a sentence in which French and (Lebanese) Arabic alternate even within conjunctions (avant mā): yā laṭīf kīf ed-dine b-titġayyar, c’était en été avant mā ṣāret el-mašēkil, imagine-toi inno les X: kil ši ils ont fait, mā ḥadan qallon un seul mot ‘My dear, how the world is changing! It was in the summer before the problems began, imagine that the X family, whatever they did, nobody said a single word to them’. (quoted by Abou 1962: 67)

Most users of Franco-Arabe would not call this a language in its own right, and when used by students it is generally frowned upon. Nevertheless, speaking with a constant mixing of French and Arabic is highly popular in certain circles, especially with youngsters in peer groups in certain intimate settings. Its maintenance is dependent on the status quo: as soon as the linguistic situation changes, as it did, for instance, in Lebanon after the civil war, the use of Franco-Arabe becomes marginalised. Because of its ad hoc character, it cannot be regarded as a new code, since the speakers seldom use it at home and they do not themselves feel that it is a separate language. The general attitude towards the mixing of codes is negative, most people viewing this mixed register as a sign of insufficient linguistic proficiency and as being detrimental to the social development of children.

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The study of Franco-Arabe with its frequent use of code-switching is of importance for our knowledge of the nature of bilingualism. In spite of its seemingly improvised and haphazard appearance, it seems that it obeys certain syntactic constraints: in other words, speakers avoid certain combinations and seem to favour others. Abbassi (1977: 162–3) notes, for instance, that it is perfectly acceptable to use combinations such as mšina l-dak la salle de cinéma ‘we went to that movietheatre’, al-lawwal dyal le mois ‘the first of the month’, saknin f-une grande maison ‘they live in a big house’, umm kaltum kanet une chanteuse mumtaza ‘ʾUmm Kalṯūm was an excellent singer’, in which Arabic demonstratives, genitive exponents, prepositions or nouns are combined with French nouns and adjectives. The reversed combinations (*cette qāʿat as-sinima; *le début du šhar, *dans waḥǝd ḍ-ḍaṛ, *une excellente muġanniya) would, however, be less acceptable. Similar constraints are found in research in the Netherlands about the language of Moroccan youngsters who use a mixture of Moroccan Arabic and Dutch (cf. below, Chapter 15). The current coexistence of the two languages is also shown in the lexicon, where hybrid formations in French have become highly popular in the parlance of Algerian youths. Benmayouf (2008) mentions cases like infehmable ‘incomprehensible’, inšarḥable ‘inexplicable’, tarbiyation ‘education’ and even kariṯastrophe, a contamination of kāriṯa and catastrophe. With this last form we have definitely crossed the limit of ordinary word formation and reached the domain of word play. It remains to be mentioned that with the growing acceptance of French as a natural ingredient in the linguistic profile of the Maghreb, the local character of French has become more pronounced as well. In the colonial period several levels of French were in use. The French colonists contributed to the emergence of a basilectal level by addressing their servants on a foreigner-directed register (see Chapter 16); the resulting variety was called Pataouète. Some traits of this basilectal French are still found today in the French of those without formal training, for instance, the use of à le instead of au, the use of a pronominal support in sentences like ta mère y t’appelle ‘your mother is calling you’, or the resumptive pronoun in relative sentences, such as un enfant que je connais son frère ‘a child whose brother I know’ (Lanly 1970: 213, 215, 228). 14.5 Tamazight/Berber Most studies of language choice in the Maghreb focus on Arabic–French codeswitching and ignore Tamazight, in spite of the fact that a large minority of the population are bilingual in Arabic–Tamazight. The general Arabic term for the language and the people is barbarī ‘Berber’, which remains the normal designation in Western literature. In actual fact, this is not one language, but a series of mutually incomprehensible varieties spoken over a large area (see above Map 11.3, p. 212). In the two countries that will occupy us here, the main varieties are Kabylian (Taqbilit) in Algeria, and Tarifit, Tachelhit and Tamazight in Morocco.

272  The Arabic Language

The self-designation of the people in Morocco and Algeria is Amazigh (plural Imazighen), and Tamazight is often used as a collective name for all varieties; even though Tamazight was never used for Kabylian in Algeria, it is becoming increasingly popular in that region as well. Recently, in Morocco the term Amazighe has become current as a collective name for the Moroccan varieties. Since the earliest period of the Arab conquests Berbers and Arabs have been in close contact. The conqueror of al-ʾAndalus, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, was a Berber commander who in 711 ce led the Islamic troops across the Strait of Gibraltar, which was named after him. Berbers took part in some of the most important Islamic movements in North Africa. Their language was not a written language, but just as in the East it was sometimes used in religious instruction. In some cases this led to the codification of the language with the help of the Arabic script. At least from the sixteenth century onwards, the Moroccan Sous became a centre of Islamic learning where hundreds of manuscripts were produced both in Arabic and in Berber. The linguistic effects of this centuries-long coexistence are ­significant. As we have seen above, a number of traits of the Arabic dialects in the Maghreb can be explained by the influence of a Berber substrate (see above, pp.  141f.). As a large proportion of the population in Morocco and Algeria retained their Berber language, there are strong patterns of interference, of Arabic in Berber, and the other way round. In spite of the close contacts, and in spite of the large percentage of the population that is bilingual in Arabic and Tamazight, until fairly recently anything connected with Tamazight language and culture was strictly taboo in Morocco and Algeria. One of the reasons for this marginal position has to do with the effects of the French colonial period. In 1930, the French issued an edict (Dahir berbère) about legal proceedings in Berber-speaking regions. These regions were placed under the jurisdiction of customary law tribunals rather than Islamic courts. The text of the Dahir does not mention Berber culture or language, but it did not fail to be interpreted as an attempt by the French to sow dissension between Arabs and Berbers, and to put an end to the teaching of Arabic in Berber-speaking areas. It is true that in these areas education in both French and Berber was promoted, and several measures were taken to create a distance between speakers of Berber and speakers of Arabic. Later nationalist discourse accused the Berbers of complicity in this policy, and although there was never any evidence of actual collaboration with the French authorities, the association of the Berber cause with French imperialism remained strong in both Morocco and Algeria. In both countries, public support for Berber culture and language was strictly forbidden; in Algeria, all Berber publications were prohibited in 1976. The campaigns for Arabicisation were no doubt also directed against the large number of Tamazight speakers, who were forced to send their children to Arabic schools. As a result, almost all Tamazight speakers, except in remote regions of the Rif, are at least partly bilingual in Arabic and Tamazight.

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In Morocco, an astonishing volte-face was introduced by King Hassan II in 1994, when he publicly announced that the Tamazight language and culture were an important factor in Moroccan society. He therefore ordered the introduction of Tamazight as a language of instruction in primary schools. Yet it took quite some while before this policy change led to actual change. In 2003, the Institut royal de la culture amazighe was established, whose task it was to develop and coordinate all Amazigh cultural activities, but which was widely perceived as a means for the state to keep the Amazigh movement under control. In 2011, the new constitution stated that Arabic was the official language of Morocco, but it added that Amazigh was an official language. Clearly, then, Arabic has a different status, but Amazigh – the collective term for all three varieties spoken in Morocco – cannot be ignored anymore. Officially, Amazigh should be taught in all primary schools, but in reality only very few schools manage to include the language in their curriculum. Much to the dismay of some Amazigh linguists, Tifinagh script has been chosen to represent Tamazight in writing in Morocco, creating a distance between the varieties spoken in Morocco and in Algeria. In Algeria, too, the state at first tried to incorporate Amazigh aspirations within its own policy. Official institutes for the study of Tamazight were established in Bougie and Tizi-Ouzou, but the aspirations of Kabylian activists continued to be viewed with suspicion by the central government, and they were opposed by religious fundamentalists and pan-Arabic nationalists alike. During the 1990s, the fundamentalist factions on the whole viewed the Amazigh as possibly heterodox Muslims. The official policy towards Tamazight changed with the new reform policies of the Bouteflika government. At present, Tamazight is the second national language of Algeria, although it has not (yet) received the status of official language. Perhaps the most amazing development, after many decades in which anything connected with Tamazight was regarded as controversial, is the fact that in 2003 a Tamazight translation of the Qurʾān was published in Casablanca by a Moroccan scholar Jouhadi, Tarurt m wammaken n Leqran. It is too early to say what the impact of this translation will be, but according to Benrabah (2007: 101), sermons in mosques in Kabylia are regularly given in Kabylian, so it seems that even the domain of religion is now open to Tamazight. Further reading The French colonial policy that led to the present-day linguistic situation is discussed in Bidwell (1973) and Gallup (1973); specifically on the language ideology of the French, see Hoffman (2008). The older literature on Tunisia and Morocco provides an interesting point of comparison with the present-day situation; since these publications originated in the period just after independence, the writers were very much involved in what was happening; see, for example,

274  The Arabic Language

Gallagher (1968), Garmadi (1968) and Maamouri (1973). On linguistic policies in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in the period after independence, see Grandguillaume (1983, 2004) On Tunisia: a general study of diglossia in Tunisia is by Talmoudi (1984a); Hamzaoui (1970) sketches the Arabicisation of the traffic police in Tunisia; Riguet (1984) analyses the Arabicisation of the schools in Tunisia. A recent survey is by Daoud (2007). On the position of the tiny Berber minority in Tunisia, see Belgacem (2007). On Morocco: an older study on standard–vernacular diglossia in Moroccan radio Arabic is Forkel (1980), which has the same design as Diem’s study on Egyptian (and Syro-Lebanese) radio Arabic; on Arabicisation in Morocco see Ennaji (2002, 2005); on Moroccan Arabic–French code-switching, see Ziamari (2007); a personal view about the language question in Morocco is expressed by Laroui (2011). On Algeria: a recent survey with an extensive bibliography is by Benrabah (2007); a personal view on the role of French as the only way towards modernity in Algeria is expressed by Benmayouf (2009). On Lebanon: Haddad (1970) deals with the contacts between Maronites and Western Europe in the seventeenth century; on the linguistic situation in Lebanon after independence, some older publications (such as Abou 1961, 1962) are available, which are interesting from an historical point of view; the mixing of dialect and standard Arabic in radio programmes is analysed by Al Batal (2002). Abbassi (1977) includes a sketch of the syntactic constraints in Franco-Arabe; for an older study on the use of Franco-Arabe among students, see Ounali (1970). On the variety of French spoken in North Africa during the colonial period, see Lanly (1970). On French–Arabic code-switching, see Bentahila and Davies (1983). On French loanwords in Moroccan Arabic, see Heath (1989), with extensive lists of borrowed words; on Arabic–French linguistic contacts in general, see Benzakour et al. (2000). On French loanwords in the Algerian vernacular, see Hadj-Sadok (1955). Benmayouf (2008) analyses French–Arabic hybrid formations in Algeria. The Berber literary tradition is dealt with by van den Boogert (1997). On Berber substratal influence, see Chapter 8. The influence of Arabic in Berber is dealt with by Aguadé and Behnstedt (2006). The Dahir berbère is analysed by Hart (1997) and Hoffman (2010). On the Berber question in Morocco and Algeria, see Willis (2012: 203–30). Information about the Tifinagh script is in Elghamis (2011), who deals with its use for the writing of Touareg in Niger; on the introduction of Tifinagh as the writing system for Amazigh in Morocco, see Pouessel (2008). In this chapter we have dealt exclusively with the situation in North Africa and Lebanon, and with Arabic–French and Arabic–Tamazight bilingualism. These are not the only cases of bilingualism in the Arabic-speaking world. We have seen that English is encroaching on some of the domains of French in Tunisia and perhaps in Lebanon; on Arabic–English code-switching, see Atawneh (1992). It is obvious that English loanwords are becoming more and more important. For an

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early case study of English loanwords in the dialect of al-Ḥasā (Saudi Arabia), see Smeaton (1973). On English and Ivrit loanwords in Palestinian Arabic, see Amara and Mar’i (1986). Other situations of bilingualism occur in the linguistic enclaves, for example, Arabic–Uzbek–Tajik trilingualism in Uzbekistan (see Chapter 15, p. 284) and Arabic–Turkish–Kurdish trilingualism in Anatolia (see Chapter 15, p. 281). For Arabic–Ivrit bilingualism in the state of Israel, see Amara (1999). The situation of Arabic in the migration will be dealt with in Chapter 15, pp. 290–6 with discussion of code-switching.

Chapter 15

Arabic as a Minority Language

15.1 Introduction In the course of history, some speakers of Arabic have become isolated from the central area. Living among people who speak a different language and in order to function in society they have to use the dominant language of their neighbours, while continuing to speak Arabic among themselves as a home language. Usually, in such linguistic enclaves (called in German Sprachinsel) the home language has little prestige, and the speakers depend on the official language in their everyday dealings. Because of the frequent code-switching and the many integrated loans, their language is subject to all kinds of linguistic pressure from the dominant language (adstratal influence). The linguistic enclaves therefore present an area of general interest for the study of language contact. The study of the Arabic linguistic enclaves also contributes to our knowledge of the history of Arabic. The classicising influence of the standard language was considerably weaker here than in the central empire. In some respects, therefore, the structure of these dialects reflects an earlier form of spoken Arabic in the areas to which they were exported without the pressure from the Classical language, which in the core area acted as a target for most speakers (cf. above, pp. 146–9). There is, however, no direct correlation between the date of cut-off and the present structure of these dialects. Hardly any linguistic enclave, with the possible exception of Maltese, was ever completely isolated from the central area, and in most cases the speakers maintained some form of contact with the prestigious centres of the Islamic empire, be it only because of their adherence to Islam. In this chapter, we shall briefly discuss the linguistic situation of a number of linguistic enclaves in which Arabic is spoken, and we shall also deal with the linguistic situation of the many Arab immigrants in Western Europe and America. 15.2 Maltese When in 256/870 the Tunisian Aghlabids conquered the island of Malta, the inhabitants were Christians who probably spoke some kind of Romance dialect. During the period of Muslim domination, the entire population took over the Arabic

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language. If we believe the report by the eighth/fourteenth century-geographer Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Ḥimyarī in his Kitāb ar-rawḍ al-miʿtār, for some 180 years after the conquest there were no inhabitants at all and the island was repopulated with Arabic-speaking people afterwards (Brincat 1991). In any case, the language of the original inhabitants did not leave any traces in the Maltese language. In 445/1054, the Normans conquered the island of Malta, but in the thirteenth century two-thirds of the inhabitants were still Muslims according to a contemporary source. In the following centuries, these Muslims must have been either banished or converted to Christianity, and with their religion the Classical Arabic language disappeared as well. Their vernacular language remained in use, and, even though Latin and Italian were introduced as the languages of religion and culture, the Maltese vernacular was accepted as the language of contact between the priests and their flocks. The official language was Italian. The earliest Maltese text that has been preserved dates from the second half of the fifteenth century, the Cantilena of Pietro de Caxaro. The first two lines of the text are as follows: Xideu il cada, ye gireni, ta le nichadíthịcum Mensáb fil gueri uẹ le nisáb fọ homórcom ‘Witness the situation, my neighbours, about which I am speaking to you. There wasn’t one like it in the past, nor in your lifetime’. (text and translation in Brincat 2011: 171–2)

Yet it was not until 1796 that Maltese was accepted as a language in its own right with Mikiel Vassalli’s grammar, Ktyb yl klym Malti (Book of the Maltese Language). After 1814, when Malta became part of the British Empire, English replaced Italian as the official language, but Maltese was introduced in the curriculum of the schools. In 1933, Maltese was recognised as the second national language, and after independence it became the official language of the Republic of Malta, written in a Latin orthography, and with around 400,000 speakers. Despite efforts in the 1970s and 1980s by the Maltese government to emphasise the Arabic character of Maltese and to introduce Arabic in schools as a compulsory subject, most Maltese do not like to be reminded of the Arabic provenance of their language. They do not wish to be associated with the Arab world, and prefer to call their language a Semitic language. Older theories about the Punic origin of the language are no longer taken seriously, but at the University of Malta in Valletta the study of Arabic is part of the Department of Oriental Studies and is not included in the Department of Maltese Studies. A number of Arabic consonantal phonemes have merged in the language, but are still distinguished in the orthography: /q/ has become /ʾ/, for example, qagħad [Ɂaːt] ‘to sit’ (Arabic qaʿada); /ʿ/ and /ġ/ have disappeared in most positions, but are still written as għ, for example, bogħod [boːt] ‘distance’ (Arabic buʿd); /ḥ/ and /ḫ/ have merged in /ḥ/, written as ħ; /h/ has disappeared in most positions, but

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is maintained in the orthography, for example, deher [deːr] ‘to appear’ (Arabic ḏ̣ahara). All emphatic consonants have become non-emphatic. Yet, in spite of the fact that most Maltese regard their language as different from Arabic, almost all proposals for the orthography of the language were historicising: they attempted to restore the Arabic structure in writing in those cases where it had been obscured by phonetic developments. Thus, the combinations għa and agħ are distinguished in the orthography, but pronounced similarly [aː] in words such as għamlu ‘they did’ (Arabic ʿamilū) and jagħmlu ‘they do’ (Arabic yaʿmalū). The most striking feature of the language is the enormous amount of Italian and Sicilian loans, which have become completely integrated in the structure of the language. Although examples may be quoted from other dialects which accommodated foreign loans, Maltese Arabic is exceptional both in the amount of loans from Italian (and in recent times from English) and in the effect which the influx of loanwords had on the morphology of the language. The usual process of integration of loanwords in Arabic dialects is by root-abstraction (cf. above, p. 229), and this is the way in which older loans were incorporated in Maltese. In root-abstraction, the consonants of the foreign word constitute a new root in Arabic, to which Arabic morphological patterns may be applied. Italian serpe ‘snake’, for instance, was borrowed as serp and received a broken plural sriep; from Italian pittore ‘painter’ > Maltese pittur a new verb pitter was coined. As Mifsud (1995) demonstrates, the influx of foreign loans in Maltese was so massive that it led to a change in the morphological structure of the language, from a root-based to a stem-based morphology. The procedure of root-abstraction ceased to be productive, and foreign words were integrated in a different way. Most Italian verbs were borrowed on the basis of their imperative or the third-person singular of the present; in Maltese, these verbs end in -a, for example, Maltese ċeda ‘to give up’ from the Italian verb cedere, or falla ‘to fail’ from the Italian verb fallire. This process was facilitated by the fact that a large category of verbs in Maltese, that of the weak verbs, also end in -a. Thus, Italian loans such as ċeda (ċ representing č) and falla became indistinguishable from Arabic Maltese verbs such as mexa ‘to walk’, mexxa ‘to lead’ (x representing š). The same pattern also accommodated other verbs with more complicated stems, for example, sploda ‘to explode’, sofra ‘to suffer’. The accumulation of Italian loans in this category led to a reinterpretation of the inflected forms: mexxeyna ‘we led’, falleyna ‘we failed’ were interpreted not as the second measure of the radicals m-š-y with the ending -na (root + verbal pattern + suffix), but rather as a stem with a suffix, that is, mexx-eyna. The Italian verbs received a Maltese imperfect, from one of the two categories of Maltese Arabic, in -a or -i, for example, salva/ysalva ‘to save’ (Italian salvare); solva/ ysolvi ‘to solve’ (Italian solvere), probably on the basis of their conjugation in Italian: verbs in -are received a Maltese imperfect in -a, those in -ere, -ire an imperfect in -i. The inflection of such loan verbs is entirely in line with that of the Maghrebi dialects, including the n- prefix for the first-person singular (Table 15.1).

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kanta kantaw jkanta jkantaw kantat tkanta kantajt kantajtu tkanta tkantaw kantajt kantajna nkanta nkantaw Table 15.1  The verbal paradigm of the loan verb kanta ‘to sing’ () and serves to indicate a topic/comment relationship, as in (7): (7) bas ana rūhi > sīde but 1s go PRED new ‘But (when) I go (back to Sri Lanka): (we shall go to the) new (house)’ (Bizri 2010: 135) There is a high degree of variation in Pidgin Madame. Some women stay for years, but they live an isolated life, having few opportunities to speak with fellow Srilankans or speakers of Arabic other than the members of the household. There is no community of speakers who may use the pidgin as a common means of communication. Consequently, there is no development: the speakers stay at the low level of proficiency permitted by their employers and seldom get the chance to improve their language skills. The few girls who obtain work in a different environment on a more open contract learn to speak in a more advanced way, for instance, by introducing verbal forms that do not derive from an imperative. Text 1 Pidgin Madame (after Bizri 2010: 175–6) 1. ana kel yom þäyye soboh bakkir rūh 1. Every day, I get up in the morning, I þäyyik get up early. 2. sway, esit matbah sūþi þi säle > gasle sale 2. Later I go to the kitchen, I look, if kalas there are dishes: I finish washing the dishes.

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3. badēṃ ana srabi neskaþe hēke, sāy u 3. Then I drink a Nescafe so, tea or neskaþe Nescafe. 4. badēṃ iso misʈer, rāha istogol hēke 4. Then, Mister comes, he goes to work so. 5. säwi ahwe, yane hēk, badēṃ atik ahwe, 5. I make coffee, like so, then I give the badēṃ huwe rāha coffee, then he goes. 16.3  Arabic pidgins Trade jargons and work jargons are a special case of the general process of interaction between native speakers and new learners; they are sometimes referred to as proto-pidgins. At any rate, they are ephemeral in the sense that they exist just as long as the situation in which they are used exists. There is no speech community using the pidgin as a more or less conventional means of communication, and there is a large amount of variation because of the circumstances in which they live and because there is a constant stream of newcomers. We have seen above that as early as the eleventh century a trade jargon based on Arabic may have been in use in Africa. Full-blown Arabic pidgins in Africa date from a later period. At the end of the nineteenth century an Arab trader called Rabeh was probably responsible for bringing a pidginised variety of Arabic to southern Chad, which became known under the name of Turku (Tosco and Owens 1993). Chad must have been an area where several trade languages were in use in the so-called Baggara belt (Chapter 15, p. 288), which stretches across the savannah to Lake Chad and northern Nigeria. Some of these varieties may have become established means of communication in the region. In modern Chad, pidginised varieties of Arabic are employed as vehicular language chiefly in urban centres such as N’Djamena and Abbéché. Along with these pidginised varieties there are also native varieties of Chadian Arabic, which are related to the Western Sudanic Arabic of Cameroon and Nigeria (Chapter 15, p. 288). A modern offshoot of Turku is the variety called Arab aná Bongor or Bongor Arabic, which is used in south-west Chad, in the city of Bongor (Luffin 2008). In its phonemic inventory a number of mergers may be noted. Apart from the expected changes, such as /ḥ/ > /h/, for example, lahása ‘up to now’ (Arabic ḥattā) and /ḫ/ > /k/, for example, kámsa ‘five’ (Arabic ḫamsa), it may be noted that /f/ is often realised as [p] and /t/ as [d], for example, índi árpu ‘you [sg.] know’. Bongor Arabic uses high and low tones, high tones mostly corresponding to Arabic long vowels. In a few words this tone is distinctive, for example, ána ‘I’ versus aná genitive exponent. Singular and plural nouns may be distinguished by a postposed marker, deriving from a demonstrative and functioning also to mark definiteness, for example, dérib dá ‘the road, this road’, mér dólda ‘the mayors, these mayors’. The genitive exponent is aná, for example, nádum aná sar ‘a man from Sarh’.

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We have seen above that in Arabic trade jargons there is only one verbal form, which is used for all tenses and persons. In Bongor Arabic a new distinction has developed. In stative verbs, like árpu ‘to know’, the bare verbal stem has the default meaning of present, while in non-stative verbs, like mási ‘to go’, it denotes past tense. For the latter category of verbs, the present continuous is indicated by the marker gáy (probably derived from gāʿid ‘sitting’), for example, hú mási ‘he went’, hú gáy-mási ‘he is going’. The distinction is not an absolute one, since the marker gáy- may be used with stative verbs as well, for example, ána gáy-dóru ‘I want’. Negation is indicated by sentence-final mapí, for example, ána gáy-gáta mapí ‘I don’t cut’. The best-known example of an Arabic pidgin is the Sudanese Juba Arabic. In the nineteenth century, when the Egyptian, later the Anglo-Egyptian, army attempted to ‘pacify’ the Sudan, many soldiers from the indigenous people were recruited in Upper Egypt and in the Sudan. These included young men from the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Luo and Nuba, most of whom spoke Nilotic (Eastern Sudanic) languages. Probably, the Nuba were the largest group among these recruits. In the garrison camps around Edfu in southern Egypt, the usual means of communication was a pidginised form of (Egyptian–Sudanese) Arabic, used by the subalterns in their contacts with the recruits. From its use in the army camps it became known as Bimbashi Arabic (bimbaši being a subaltern rank in the army). Since the Arabicisation of the Egyptian army was not carried out before 1860, the pidginised variety probably goes back to an earlier Arabic pidgin that had been current in the area for centuries in commercial contacts, in particular the slave trade, between Egypt and the Sudan. After the Mahdist revolt in 1882, the pidgin variety of Arabic remained in use as the lingua franca of the area. It became known locally as Juba Arabic (arabi juba), after the capital of South Sudan, where it is often used as a means of communication between speakers of different languages. An interesting aspect of the history of this variety is the later development in southern Sudan. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the increase in bilingual marriages in the capital led to the emergence of a group of native speakers of Juba Arabic, who spoke a creole that in many respects resembled the Arabic creole Nubi spoken in Uganda and Kenya (see below). These speakers became increasingly familiar with Standard Arabic and Khartoum Arabic. Eventually, this could have led to a restructuring of Juba Arabic in the direction of a ‘normal’ Arabic dialect. Mahmud (1979) explains that Juba Arabic has only one verbal form that is used in combination with aspectual markers, such as bi- or gi-, as in (8): (8) kul yom ana gi-suf ita every day 1s CONT-see 2s ‘Every day I see you’ (Mahmud 1979: 90)

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When speakers of Juba Arabic were exposed to Standard Arabic and Khartoum Arabic in the media and became acquainted with both the prefix and the suffix conjugation of Arabic, they at first re-analysed the personal prefixes of Arabic imperfect verbs ya-, ta-, na- as aspectual markers and started using them instead of, or in combination with, the aspectual markers in Juba Arabic, without regard to personal agreement. In one example given by Mahmud (1979: 187), a speaker uses the forms bi-kutubalu, ta-kutubalu and ya-kutubalu in one stretch of speech to refer to a third-person plural, ‘they care’ (Arabic ḫud bāl ‘pay attention’). At a later stage, they became aware of the pronominal function of the personal prefixes and learnt how to use them correctly. Diachronically, this means that in their speech they had introduced a new opposition between perfect and imperfect verbs, thus making their dialect structurally similar to the ‘normal’ dialects of Arabic. This development in Juba Arabic only took place in the speech of some speakers, but it shows that it is possible for an Arabic pidgin to lose the distinction between perfect–imperfect and then recover it later through the interference of a prestige variety. If we had no knowledge of the previous structure of the language of these speakers, we would probably regard their speech as just another regional variety of Arabic. Obviously, the independence of South Sudan in 2011 and the introduction of English as the official language, may put a stop to the process of interference from Khartoum Arabic. Since only about 18 per cent of the population is Muslim, continued influence from Standard Arabic is not very likely either. Because of the multilingualism of South Sudan, with more than sixty languages being spoken, theoretically Juba Arabic could still serve as a national language and a new identity marker. Although most speakers of Juba Arabic are second-language speakers, in the course of time the language might acquire native speakers, especially in urban centres with the greater frequency of mixed marriages. To some extent, Juba Arabic is indeed expanding its domain, for instance, in the courtroom (Miller 2007c) and in popular music. 16.4  An Arabic creole The one example of an Arabic pidgin that was creolised is that of Nubi, which developed out of Juba Arabic. After the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, the German commander of the Anglo-Egyptian army, Emin Pasha, became isolated in the south from the military bases in Upper Egypt. He decided to join the English army in Kenya and Uganda, followed by many of the Nubian soldiers, who eventually settled down in these British colonies. Some of them took indigenous wives, who spoke Bantu languages, Swahili or Kikuyu in Kenya, and Luganda in Uganda. In these mixed marriages, the language of communication was the Arabic pidgin, which the soldiers had learned in the army camps in Egypt. The children who grew up in these mixed marriages started to creolise the language, and the result

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was a new variety of Arabic. After the largest ethnic group among the soldiers, it became known as Nubi or Ki-Nubi (with the Bantu prefix for names of languages). It continues to be spoken in Uganda by 26,000 speakers and in Kenya by 15,000 people (according to the Ethnologue). In the 1970s, during the rule of Idi Amin, the Nubi-speaking community in Uganda enjoyed a certain prestige because their military strength was regarded as an asset for the regime. After the fall of Idi Amin in 1979, some of the Nubi speakers started to take steps towards the preservation of their language in order to maintain their social and political position in the country. Nubi exhibits many of the features of ‘classic’ creolised languages, such as Jamaican English or Haitian Créole. Its phonemic system has undergone a drastic restructuring compared with the source language from which it derives, ultimately a form of Upper Egyptian. The emphatic consonants have merged with their non-emphatic counterparts; /ḥ/ and /ʿ/ have disappeared; /ḫ/ and /ġ/ have merged and become /k/. The reflexes of Classical Arabic /q/ and /j/ in Nubi correspond to the Upper Egyptian origin of the language: /g/ and /j/. Word-final consonants have in many cases been dropped. A few examples may demonstrate to what extent Nubi words differ from their Arabic source: rági ‘man’ (Arabic rajul; Egyptian Arabic rāgil), sondú ‘box’ (Arabic ṣandūq), sokolá ‘things’ (newly formed plural *šuġūlāt from Arabic singular šuġl). Many words were taken over by Nubi together with the Arabic article, for example, láádum ‘bone’ (Arabic al-ʿaḏ̣m), lasía ‘evening’ (Arabic al-ʿašiyya), lifíli ‘elephant’ (Arabic al-fīl). A newly developed trait in Nubi is the distinction between a high (H) and a low (L) tone, as in Bongor Arabic (Wellens 2005: 54–5). It might be added that the dominant language, Luganda, has a tonal system, too. In Nubi, the distinction seems to have grammatical relevance as well. According to Wellens, tone in addition to stress plays a role in the verbal system. The bare stem of the verb is marked by stress on the first syllable and a distinctive tonal pattern, for example, kásulu HLL ‘to wash’. Three other verbal forms have been developed with a different stress and tone pattern: the infinitive kásulu HHL, the gerund kasúlu LHL and the passive kasulú LLH. The gerund and the infinitive are used as verbal nouns, as in (9) and (10): (9) (10)

wonúsuLHL gílibu ítokum discuss.GERUND be.difficult 2p ‘Discussing is difficult for you’ (Wellens 2005: 186) nyerekú tím ámsukuHHL mulódo child be.old hold.INF hoe ‘The child is old enough to hold the hoe’ (Wellens 2005: 191)

An example of the use of the passive is in (11):

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(11) dakulúLLH íta fi turá enter.PASS 2s in earth ‘You were buried’ (Wellens 2005: 179) If this analysis is correct, it would make Nubi a rather special case among creolised languages, which rarely develop tones. An alternative analysis interprets these data in terms of accent, the tones being secondary (Gussenhoven 2006). Nubi nominal forms do not usually distinguish between singular and plural, although there seems to be a marker for plurality -á, as in lájer/plural lajerá (Arabic al-ḥajar) ‘stone’. Sometimes groups of human beings are indicated with a collective prefix nas-, derived from the Arabic word nās ‘people’, as in nas-babá ‘fathers [collective]’; nas-yalá ‘children [collective]’. Adjectives sometimes have a form in -in to denote the plural. The genitive exponent ta clearly derives from Egyptian Arabic bitāʿ; it is used both with nouns and with pronominal suffixes (tái ‘my’, táki ‘your [singular]’, to ‘his/her’, téna ‘our’, tákum ‘your [plural]’, tóumon ‘their’). Like most other creole languages, Nubi has only one verbal form, for example, ábinu ‘to build’ (Arabic banā), álabu ‘to play’ (Arabic laʿiba), ángulu ‘to remove’ (Arabic naqala), árija ‘to return’ (Arabic rajaʿa). The most likely etymological source for many verbs is the Arabic imperative, as may be seen in verbs like gúm ‘to stand up’ (Classical Arabic perfect qāma, imperfect yaqūmu, imperative qum). The bare verbal stem is used for all persons and in non-stative verbs by default denotes past tense. It may be expanded with a number of aspectual particles: rúa ‘to go’ (< Arabic rāḥ; imperative ruḥ) ána rúa ‘I went’ (punctual past) ána bì-rúa ‘I shall go’ (future) ána gí-rúa ‘I am going’ (continuous) ána bi-gí-rúa ‘I shall be going’ (future continuous) ána kán-rúa ‘I had gone’ (pluperfect) ána kán-gí-rúa ‘I was going’ (past continuous) ána kán-bi-rúa ‘I would go’ (hypothetical) In non-stative verbs, the verb stem denotes present tense; with kán it indicates past tense, for example, kán íta féker ‘you were thinking’ (Wellens 2005: 57). Many verbs end in a suffix -u, which is used with transitive verbs, such as dúgu ‘to hit’, róbutu ‘to tie’, ákulu ‘to eat’, but not with intransitive verbs, such as gúm ‘to stand up’ and núm ‘to sleep’. In some verbs, there is an opposition between forms with and without -u, for example, wónusu ‘to tell something’ and wónus ‘to talk’. This ending is probably a remnant of the object pronoun -hu, which through re-interpretation has become a marker of transitive verbs (Wellens 2005: 337–45). Nubi has developed a focalising particle yá (probably derived from Arabic vocative yā), which serves to contrast or highlight a sentence constituent, as in (12):

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(12) mamá tá-ki yá má gi-dúgu mother POSS-2s FOC NEG CONT-hit íta 2s ‘It was not your mother who was hitting you’ (Wellens 2005: 237) Negation is expressed by má or mafí, which usually occurs sentence-finally, as in Bongor Arabic, as in (13): (13) bé tó-umon kwéis má house POSS-3p good NEG ‘Their house is not good’ (Wellens 2005: 251) The lexicon of Nubi is built on an Arabic basis, but contains a large number of Swahili and recently acquired English loans. In some cases, pairs of synonyms exist that are indicative of the close relationship between the Nubis and the Bantu-speaking environment, for example, áseti (Arabic ʾasad)/símba (Swahili simba) ‘lion’; béda (Arabic bayḍa)/mayái (Swahili mayai) ‘egg’; gemís (Arabic qamīṣ)/ šáti (Swahili shati < English shirt). There is one frequent verb that has been taken over from Swahili, wéza ‘to be able’, although there is an Arabic equivalent ágder (Arabic qadira). Text 2  Ki-Nubi Arabic (after Heine 1982: 50) 1. núbi kúlu má anás ta béle alí úmon 1. The Nubi are not people of the country fógo dé íla wazée yá já wéledú where they are now, except for the elders, they came and got children. 2. yalá kamán wéledú, úmon alí 2. The children, too, got children; those kubarín dé mútu, yalá al fádul dé who were old, died; the children who kúlu anási jedidín were left behind, they were all new people. 3. gén ta núbi, úmon gí gén bakán 3. The stay of the Nubis, they are staying in wái, gén fu kámbi one place, they stay in a village. 4. úmon áju bádu, úmon gí lébisí 4. They like each other; they wear clothes, gumási, kánzu, bóuzá tróúz, šátí, gowns, knickerbockers, shirts, jackets and kóti ma tóróbús, dé sáfa fi sáfa ta hats. This concerning the men. rujalá 5. nuswán gí lébis kurbába, gemís, 5. The women wear a gurbaba, shirts, upper tób, fi kurá úmon gí lébis borotús cloth; on their legs they wear clogs and ma ndála sandals. 6. úmon gí másatú rásu, úmon gí 6. They plait their hair, they pierce their gídu adán ma nyangáratu ta kipín ear and nose with ear-rings and nosema kisáfu rings.

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Further reading General surveys of Arabic-based pidgins and creoles in Owens (1996) and Manfredi and Tosco (2013); on the relevance of the study of Arabic pidgins and creoles, see Miller (2002). For critical discussion of Versteegh’s (1984) model of the emergence of the Arabic dialects, see Ferguson (1989), Owens (1989), Diem (1991), Fischer (1995), Holes (1995a: 19–24) and al-ʿAjamī (1997); see also Versteegh (2004). Thomason and Elgibali (1986) review the evidence in al-Bakrī’s account of an early Arabic trade pidgin. The activities of Arab traders in Africa, bringing with them both Islam and the Arabic language, are dealt with by Miquel (1975: 127–202); specifically about Arab trading in West Africa, see Levtzion (2000). On Arabic as a trade language in Ethiopia, see Ferguson (1972); on contemporary Arabic trade jargons in the Horn of Africa, see Simeone-Senelle (2007). Baker (1996) explains why no Arabic trade language was used in Central Asia. Arabic foreigner talk remains largely unstudied; for some information, see Tweissi (1990) and Al-Sharkawi (2010). Bizri’s (2010) description of Pidgin Madame contains not only samples of speech by Srilankan domestics, but also by Lebanese housewives when addressing them. Gulf pidgins and pidgins used in Saudi Arabia were first described by Smart (1990), and then by Al-Moaily (2008), Naess (2008), Al-Azraqi (2010) and Bakir (2010); Avram (2006–7) identified a Romanian Arabic pidgin used in the oilfields, and published a study of the existential fī as a verbal marker (2012). On the variety called Turku, see Tosco and Owens (1993). The Chadian Arabic variety spoken in Abbéché, which functions for many speakers as a second language, is described by Roth-Laly (1979). A short sketch of Bongor Arabic is given by Luffin (2008). The first comparison of Juba Arabic and Ki-Nubi is in Nhial (1975). A short sketch of Juba Arabic is given by Miller (2007b); a longer one by Manfredi and Petrollino (2013). The verbal system of Juba Arabic is analysed by Tosco (1995). Mahmud (1979) discusses variation in Juba Arabic and the interference from Khartoum Arabic (see also Versteegh 1993b). On the linguistic and sociolinguistic development of the language in South Sudan, a series of articles was published by Miller (1985–6, 1987, 1994, 2007a, c). For the linguistic situation in Kadugli in southern Kordofan, see Manfredi (2013), who compares the non-native varieties of Arabic spoken there with those in the Horn of Africa and with Juba Arabic. All publications were written before the independence of South Sudan in 2011; not much is known about the present-day situation, but see Nakao (2012, 2013). A short dictionary of Juba Arabic was published by Smith and Ama (2005). A long spoken text in Juba Arabic with full transcription and glossing by Manfredi is available in the Corpus of Afroasiatic Languages at http://corpafroas.tge-adonis.fr. A description of Nubi Arabic has been available since the unpublished dissertation of Owens (1977); general interest in Nubi started after the first publication of

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a grammatical description by Heine (1982). Some publications concentrate on the history and development of Nubi and its relationship to the substratal languages (e.g., Owens 1990); others deal with the language from the point of view of general creole studies (cf. Miller 1994). An extensive description of the variety of Nubi spoken in Bombo (Uganda), with comparative notes about the various pidgin varieties in sub-Saharan Africa is Wellens (2005); Luffin published a grammatical sketch (2005) and texts (2004).

Chapter 17

Arabic as a World Language

17.1 Introduction At a rough guess, approximately 200 million people use a variety of Arabic as their mother tongue. But the domain of Arabic does not stop at the boundaries of the Arabophone area. Throughout history, speakers of Arabic have frequently come into contact with speakers of other languages and affected their language, in its vocabulary or even in its morphosyntactic structure. In situations of contact between speakers of two languages, the direction of the influence and its nature are determined by the relative prestige of both languages and by the history of their cohabitation. Wherever Arabic is spoken as a minority language in a region where another language is the prestige language, it is affected by the language of the host country, both in the so-called language islands and in the emigration (cf. above, Chapter 15). But as an international language it has in its turn affected other languages within its sphere of influence, in large parts of Africa, in Turkey, in Iran, in South Asia and in South-east Asia. In these regions, Islam was introduced as the new religion, but the language of the Arabs did not supplant the indigenous language as it had done in the central areas. Farsi (New Persian), for instance, was originally the language of one of the peripheral areas of the Sasanian Empire, also called Dari, while the official language was Middle Persian (Pahlavi). Subordinate to Arabic during the first centuries of the Islamic conquest, Pahlavi continued to be used until the ninth century, but was supplanted in the tenth century by Farsi as the national language of Iran under the dynasty of the Samānids (cf. above, pp. 81f.). From the beginning of the conquests Farsi had been used as the language of religious instruction to those converts who had not (yet) mastered Arabic, and it is therefore not surprising that it became the carrier of the religious message even further east. In Asia, the role of Arabic was restricted to that of the language of the Qurʾān; many Arabic loanwords in the indigenous languages, as in Urdu and Indonesian, were introduced through the medium of Persian. In all Islamic countries, the influence of Arabic is pervasive because of the highly language-specific nature of Islam. Although in practice, local languages were used in religious instruction and even in recitation, many people believed

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that the Qurʾān could not be translated (see above, Chapter 5, pp. 80f.), and that those who converted to Islam had to learn its language. Ordinary believers, even when they did not learn to speak Arabic properly, held the Arabic text of the Qurʾān in great awe. In all countries where Islam is a majority religion, religious instruction always involves a certain amount of instruction in Arabic. Even when most of the instruction and explanation of the text takes place in an indigenous language, children still learn to pronounce or write the text more or less correctly, often without really understanding it. In some countries, there is a whole network of Qurʾānic schools offering instruction in Arabic. Linguistically, the presence of Arabic as a religious language is seen above all in the vocabulary, in which Arabic words abound. In many of the languages involved, two layers may be distinguished in the Arabic-based vocabulary. The first layer represents the original borrowings from the period of the Islamic expansion; these have usually been integrated completely into the lexicon of the language. The second layer consists of learned loanwords, which have been introduced recently by the scholarly elite, who aim to preserve to some degree the original Arabic pronunciation. It would be too restrictive to see the influence of Arabic purely as a matter of religion. In large parts of the world, Arabic represented, and still represents, access to knowledge of a kind that is not available otherwise. The Swahili scholarly tradition that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the city-states of Lamu and Pate on the East African coast developed a mixed literary culture in which Arabic sources served as models for the production of Swahili writings. In contemporary times, young students in West Africa are eager to improve their proficiency in Arabic, because it gives them access to a much wider array of written sources than the restricted curriculum of the madrasas can provide them with. It was precisely because of this role of Arabic as the language of both science and religion that Arabic script was often used to alphabetise indigenous languages. Major Islamic languages, like Persian, Turkish, Malay, Swahili and Urdu, were written with an adapted Arabic alphabet, which in some cases supplanted an existing writing system. Persian, for instance, used to be written with the Pahlavi script, but when Farsi became the new cultural language of the area, Arabic script was chosen as its medium. In Africa, a large number of languages adopted Arabic script as their first medium of writing. These writing systems have become known collectively as ajami (< Arabic ʾaʿjamī ‘foreign, non-Arabic’). The introduction of Arabic script for languages with a completely different phonemic inventory led to a number of sometimes very ingenious adaptations. Thus, for instance, the retroflex consonants of Urdu are represented by their Arabic equivalents with a small superscript ṭāʾ; in the same manner aspirated Urdu consonants are followed in the script by a letter hāʾ. Many adaptations involved manipulating the diacritic dots, for example, a bāʾ with two subscript dots to represent implosive [ɓ] in Hausa or

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a fāʾ with three dots to represent [v] in Kurdish. Even more ingenious devices had to be employed for the representation of vowels, of which there are only three in Arabic. One way to solve this problem is by using combinations of vowel signs. Thus, in Arabic-Afrikaans the combination of fatḥa and kasra is used for the vowel /e/ (Davids 2011: 180–8). In African languages, the so-called Warš dot is often used to represent the vowel /e/, for instance, in Tuareg (Kossmann and Elghamis 2014). This subscript dot – named after the Qurʾānic reader Warš (d. 197/812) – stems from the Maghrebi scribal tradition, which used it to indicate fronting (ʾimāla) of the vowel /a/ to [æ] in Qurʾānic manuscripts. Arabic and Arabic script contributed to the development of literacy, and sometimes even to the development of a vernacular into a standard language. In South Africa, immigrant Muslims, most of them coming from South or South-east Asia, began to write materials for religious instruction in the spoken language of the Cape Colony, Afrikaans, using Arabic script. This gave rise to a body of literature of Afrikaans in Arabic script, which has become known under the name of Arabic-Afrikaans. The codification of Afrikaans was to play a crucial role in its development as an official language, since up until then Afrikaans had merely been a spoken language lacking the prestige of the dominant standard language, Dutch. In this chapter, we shall take a look at the different modes of coexistence in those regions where Arabic did not become the dominant language and the effect of these linguistic contacts on the indigenous language. 17.2  Arabic in al-ʾAndalus After the conquest of large parts of the Iberian peninsula in 711, the Arabs came into direct contact with a Romance-speaking population in Arab Spain (al-ʾAndalus), a contact which was to last until the end of the reconquest of the peninsula by the Christian kingdoms to the north in 1492. According to some scholars, during this prolonged contact the Arabic language all but replaced the native Romance language of the population under their sway. A contemporary witness, the ninth-century Paulus Alvarus from Cordova, complains that the Christian youths of his time were more interested in Arabic poetry than in knowledge of Romance (Wright 1982: 156–7). According to others, Arabic never ousted Romance as a colloquial language, and even Latin may have remained in use as a cultural language. Certainly, there are traces of Romance throughout the period of Arab domination in the peninsula, but after the conquest of Toledo in 1085 by the Castilians its importance declined in those areas that remained in Arab hands, especially after the invasions of the Almoravids and the Almohads in the twelfth century. Yet, throughout the period of Islamic domination, there must have subsisted a considerable degree of bilingualism. The poets of zajal, such as Ibn Quzmān (d. 555/1160), used dialect and in the muwaššaḥas we even

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find Romance in the refrains (jarchas; Arabic ḫarja) in the same way that poets of this genre in the east used the vernacular to close their poems. In the following instance of such a jarcha, colloquial Arabic and Romance are mixed for stylistic reasons (Zwartjes 1997: 264): álba díya esta díya / díya d-al-ʾanṣara ḥáqqa bestiréy mew al-mudabbáj / wa-nišúqq ar-rumḥa šáqqa ‘A white day is this day / the day of Saint John, indeed I shall put on my brocade dress / and break the lance’ In this poem the words álba ‘white’ and díya ‘day’ are Romance, and so is the verbal form bestiréy ‘I shall put on’ and the pronoun mew ‘my’; the rest of the poem is Arabic. The local dialect of the petty kingdom of Granada, which survived until the end of the Reconquista in 1492, contained a large number of Romance loans, as we know from the description of Pedro de Alcalá, who lists in his vocabulary of 1505 words like xintilla ‘spark’ (Spanish centella), banq, plural bunúq ‘couch’ (Spanish banco), cornéja ‘crow’ (Spanish corneja), with Arabic plural carániç and diminutive coráyneja. The Arabs called the Romance vernacular lisān al-ʿAjam or ʿAjamiyya ‘language of the foreigners, non-Arabs’ and the assimilated bilingual speakers mustaʿribīn ‘those who have become like Arabs’ (hence their name in Spanish, Mozárabes). When these people wrote down their own Romance language, they used the Arabic script; the literature in which their dialect has been preserved is often called aljamiado (< al-ʿajamiyya). There is another corpus of texts in Romance in Arabic script, the literature of the Moriscos, the Muslims who stayed behind after the Reconquista and compulsorily converted to Christianity in 1525 until their expulsion from the peninsula (1609). Their use of the Arabic script does not mean that they knew Arabic: almost certainly some of them were monolingual in Romance. The centuries of Arabic linguistic domination did not fail to affect the Romance language. The total number of Arabic loanwords in Spanish has been estimated at around 4,000; they cover almost the entire lexicon, but are particularly numerous in the domains of warfare (alcázar ‘fortress’ < Arabic qaṣr, almirante ‘admiral’ < Arabic ʾamīr), agriculture (albaricoque ‘apricot’ < Arabic barqūqa, itself from Greek praikokkia < Latin praecoquum), commerce (aduana ‘customs’ < Arabic dīwān, almacén ‘warehouse’ < Arabic maḫzan) and building (albañil ‘mason’ < Arabic bannāʾ). The majority of the loans are nouns, most of them borrowed together with the Arabic article al-, but there are some adjectives of Arabic origin (e.g., mezquino < Arabic miskīn ‘poor’, gandul ‘lazy’ < Arabic ġandūr ‘dandy’, azul ‘blue’ < Arabic lāzuward ‘lapis lazuli’). There are even a few verbs that were borrowed from Arabic, such as halagar ‘to caress’ (< Arabic ḥalaqa ‘to shave’). The two Spanish words for ‘so-andso’ are of Arabic origin, fulano (< Arabic fulān) and mengano (< Arabic man kāna ‘who was it?’), and the Spanish interjection ojalá ‘may God will’ derives from the Arabic

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wašallāh. There is one example of a suffix, -í, that became moderately productive in Spanish; it occurs in the loanword baladí ‘insignificant’ (< Arabic baladī ‘rural’), but is also used in Spanish words such as alfonsí ‘belonging to king Alfonso’. There is, however, little evidence of syntactic influence of Arabic in Spanish. Perhaps the conjunction hasta ‘even, until’ was taken from Arabic ḥattā. Semantically, Arabic influence may be seen in the large number of Spanish expressions containing God’s name. From Spain, large numbers of Arabic words were transmitted to other countries in Western Europe. We have seen above (Chapter 1, pp. 1f.) that during the Middle Ages Arabic was regarded as the language of scholarship not only in al-ʾAndalus, but also in the universities of Western Europe. After the fall of Toledo, many Arabic texts on mathematics, medicine, alchemy and astronomy were translated into Latin, and in the process a host of Arabic technical terms were borrowed in their original form. In mathematics, for instance, most European languages took over the word algorithm, derived from the name of al-Ḫwārizmī (d. c. 232/850), whose book al-Jabr wa-l-muqābala (Restoration and Comparison) lived on in the term algebra. In astronomy, terms such as almanac (< al-manāḫ ‘station of the Zodiac’), azimuth (< as-samt ‘course, direction’), zenith (< samt ar-raʾs ‘vertical point in the sky’), nadir (< naḏ̣īr ‘opposite’), and the names of many stars, such as Betelgeuse (< bayt al-Jawzāʾ ‘Gemini’) and Aldebaran (< ad-Dabarān ‘the Follower’), derive from Arabic. In medicine, many of the Latin terms that are still current are calques of Arabic terms that ultimately go back to Greek sources; thus, for instance, retina and cornea are translations of the Arabic words šabakiyya and qarniyya, rather than direct translations of the Greek terms amphiblēstroeidēs and keratoeidēs. Spain, however, was not the only source of Arabic loans in the European languages. There were other routes through which they could reach Europe, primarily through Italy, either via Arab Sicily, or via Venetian and Genoan traders. In some cases, the phonetic form of the word betrays its Spanish or Italian provenance. The Italianised loans were usually taken over without the article, whereas Arabic loans in Spanish were often borrowed together with the Arabic article. Compare, for instance, the pairs Italian carciofo (North Italian articiocco)/ Spanish alcachofa ‘artichoke’ (< Arabic ḫaršūf); cotone/algodón ‘cotton’ (< Arabic quṭn); zucchero/azúcar ‘sugar’ (< Arabic sukkar). In these three examples, the other European languages took the word from Italian. 17.3  Arabic in Africa Arabic as a mother tongue is widespread in Africa not only in the Maghreb and Egypt, but also in the sub-Saharan areas and in East Africa. Leaving aside the special case of Nubi in Uganda and Kenya (see Chapter 16), Arabic is the native language of many people in Sudan and Chad, and of sizeable minorities in Nigeria (see Chapter 15, p. 288) and Niger. Even in those areas where Arabic

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never replaced the indigenous languages, it left behind a substantial heritage through the trading networks that the Arabs established all over the continent. The expansion of Islam brought many of the cultures in the northern half of the continent under the Islamic sphere of influence, which resulted in hundreds of loanwords in the domains of religion, culture and science. The main expansion of Islam and Arabic in Africa took place along two routes of exploration and exploitation. One route followed the Nile to the Sudan, and from there went westwards along the savannah belt between the Sahara Desert and the forest, through the region known by the Arabs as the bilād as-Sūdān ‘land of the Blacks’. The other route followed the Saharan trails to the south. The expansion of the Arabs along the savannah belt brought them in touch with Hausa-speaking people. Hausa, commonly regarded as a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, had spread from its main centres in Niger and Nigeria as a lingua franca over large parts of Central Africa. The history of the relations between the Arabs and the Hausa is reflected in the structure of the Arabic loanwords in their language. In the western Sudan, Hausa speakers borrowed from Arabic in the same way as speakers of other West African languages; through Hausa these Arabic loanwords received an even wider circulation, for instance, in Kanuri, Bambara and Fulfulde. In Sudan, a large group of Hausa-speakers lives in an Arabic-speaking environment. They have become completely bilingual in both languages and their language use exhibits extensive code-mixing. The oldest groups of loans, borrowed in West Africa, is integrated completely into the structure of the language, with extensive adaptation to the phonology. Arabic /b/ is represented by /f/ (e.g., littaafìi, plural lìttàtàafay ‘book’ < Arabic kitāb), most of the velars and pharyngals have disappeared (e.g., làabaarìi, plural làabàaruu ‘news’ < Arabic plural ʾaḫbār; maalàmii, plural maalàmaa ‘learned man’ < Arabic muʿallim). The examples given here also demonstrate that the early loans from Arabic almost always contain the Arabic article and have been provided with a Hausa plural. Recent loans from Arabic in West African Hausa are all in the domain of religion or Islamic sciences and represent a much closer approximation of the original form, for instance, nahawù ‘grammar’ (< Arabic naḥw). If they contain an Arabic article, it has the form ʾal instead of colloquial il-, l-, li-, for example, àḷaadàa ‘custom’ (< Arabic ʿāda), àlhajìi ‘pilgrim’ (< Arabic ḥājj), àlbarkàa ‘blessing’ (< Arabic baraka). There is a tendency among religious learned men to pronounce even the older loans in an Arabicised way, for instance, by replacing /d/ deriving from Arabic /ḏ/ with /z/. Most of the Arabic loans in Hausa are substantives, but there are also a few Arabic conjunctions, such as in, ìdan ‘if ’ (< Arabic ʾin, ʾiḏan), sabòo dà ‘because’ (< Arabic sabab ‘reason’ + Hausa dà) and lookàcii dà ‘when’ (< Arabic al-waqt ‘time’ + Hausa dà). The linguistic contact of Hausa with Arabic in Sudan exhibits the effects of extensive code-mixing. Here, Arabic nouns are always borrowed without the Arabic article, and Arabic verbs, which make up almost one-fifth of the total loan lexicon,

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are completely integrated in the structure of the Hausa verb (Abu-Manga 1999), for example, halàkaa ‘to destroy’ (< Arabic halaka), sàllamàa ‘to greet’ ( harfeere/plural karfeeje, or dunyā ‘world’ > dunyaaru/plural duuniyaaru. In some cases this led to virtual unrecognisability, for instance, in ḫinzīr ‘swine’ > hinjiiru/plural kinjiiji. As in other African cultures, the contact with Islam led to the emergence of an intellectual and religious elite of scholars, who became well versed in Classical Arabic and wrote commentaries in Fulfulde on Arabic religious texts. Their familiarity with Arabic manifests itself in a tendency to Arabicise the pronunciation of Arabic loans, for example, ḏikru ‘mention of God’s name’ instead of the popular jikru, or zamaan ‘time’ instead of the usual jamanu, jamaanu, jamanuuru. A special case is that of Arabic influence in the Austronesian language Malagasy, the official language of Madagascar. Trading contacts with Arab traders go back several centuries, but it seems that the loanwords from Arabic in general use are restricted to the domain of astrology (called alikilili < Arabic al-ʾiklīl ‘the Head of Scorpio’). Still, there must have existed a literate tradition connected with Arabic, which produced an extensive literature in Malagasy written with a modified Arabic script. Several hundred manuscripts of these so-called sorabe texts have been preserved. In the south-west of Madagascar, one of the Antemoro clans still uses a secret jargon based on Arabic lexical items and called kalamon’Antesitesy ‘language of the people of the sand’ (e.g., maratsi ‘woman’, Arabic marʾa, instead of usual Malagasy vehivàvi, or dzoma ‘day’, Arabic yawm, instead of usual andru). 17.4  Arabic in Iran In the early centuries of Arab domination after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, Arabic became both the dominant and the prestigious language of the Persian provinces. This situation changed with political developments (see Chapter 5):

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New Persian (Farsi) became the national language of the ʿAbbāsid successor states in eastern Iran and Central Asia, but Classical Arabic retained its position as the language of the Qurʾān. At the present time, there is one province of Iran, Khuzestan, where Arabic is still spoken by an Arab minority (cf. above, Chapter 11, pp. 203f.). Strangely enough, the Iranian authorities do not seem to find any contradiction between their treatment of the Arabic-speaking minority, who are not encouraged to cultivate their ethnic and linguistic background, on the one hand, and their reverence for Arabic as the language of the Holy Book, on the other. From the beginning, contacts between Arabic and Persian were intensive. The amount of Persian loanwords in Arabic is considerable (cf. above, p. 70). Conversely, of all the languages with which Arabic came into contact, Persian is the one that was most influenced by this process. The number of Arabic loanwords is enormous, not only in the literary language, but even in everyday speech. From time to time there have been trends to de-Arabicise Persian vocabulary, sometimes for political reasons. The Arabic component of the language is so deeply rooted, however, that it would be impossible to eradicate it completely. Compared with the language reform in Turkey, which aimed at the total eradication of the Arabic vocabulary, language reform in Iran was more moderate. Inspired by the language reform in Turkey under Atatürk, Reza Shah established an Iranian language academy (Farhangestān) in 1928, with the explicit aim of modernising the language, including the replacement of Arabic loanwords by Persian equivalents. This language purism was opposed by those who felt that this move was also intended as a step towards secularisation. Subsequent efforts under Mohammed Reza Shah and even after the Islamic revolution of 1979 have been partly successful, in the sense that some Arabic words were indeed replaced by Persian equivalents. Persian is written with the Arabic alphabet, with the addition of four letters (p, č, ž, g). Since a number of Arabic phonemes merged in the process of borrowing, the script has become ambiguous: Arabic /ṯ/, /s/, /ṣ/ are pronounced as /s/; Arabic /t/ and /ṭ/ as /t/; Arabic /ḏ/, /z/, /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ as /z/; Arabic /ġ/ and /q/ as /ġ/; Arabic /ʿ/ and /ʾ/ as /ʾ/; and Arabic /ḥ/ and /h/ as /h/. All Arabic loans are written, however, according to Arabic orthography, which places an extra burden on Iranian children learning to write. Most of the Arabic loans are abstract words, in particular, in the domains of religion, science, scholarship and literature. The full impact of Arabic can be seen especially in the morphology of these words: in many cases, Arabic words retain their original plural endings, for example: moʾallem/moʾallemin ‘teacher’ (Arabic muʿallim) mosāfer/mosāferin ‘passenger, traveller’ (Arabic musāfir) ejtemāʾi/ejtemāʾiyin ‘socialist’ (Arabic ijtimāʿī) daraje/darajāt ‘degree’ (Arabic daraja)

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maġāle/maġālāt ‘article’ (Arabic maqāla) hejvān/hejvānāt ‘animal’ (Arabic ḥayawān) The plural ending -āt was applied even to words that were not of Arabic origin, for example, deh/dehāt ‘village’ (the plural means ‘country’), mive/mivežāt ‘fruit’. Broken plurals were often taken over together with their singular, for example: vaġt/ouġāt ‘time’ (Arabic waqt) hāl/ahvāl ‘situation’ (Arabic ḥāl) ġazā/aġziye ‘food’ (Arabic ġiḏāʾ) In Modern Persian, it is quite common, however, to abandon the broken plural and supply the word with a Persian plural ending, for example, ḫabar-hā ‘news’ alongside aḫbār (Arabic ḫabar/ʾaḫbār), or ketāb-hā ‘books’ alongside kotob (Arabic kitāb/kutub). In some words, the broken plural is treated as a singular, for example, arbāb ‘master’ (Arabic ʾarbāb, plural of rabb), which may obtain a Persian plural ending, arbāb-hā ‘masters’. An interesting development has taken place in the representation of the Arabic feminine ending -at, which appears in Persian sometimes as -at and sometimes as -e (written with silent -h). According to Perry’s (1991) analysis of the distribution of these two endings, feminine words with the ending -at belong to a literary tradition and generally have a more abstract meaning, whereas words with the ending -e have a more specific or concrete meaning and go back to spoken interaction. In some words, this has led to a contrast, for example, baladiyat ‘expertise’ versus baladiye ‘town council’. The verbal morphology of Arabic is even less suited than its nominal morphology to integrate into the structure of Persian. Therefore, verbo-nominal compounds are used as a periphrastic device to avoid the need to inflect the Arabic loans. Most compounds contain the dummy verbs kardan ‘to do’ and šodan ‘to become’ in combination with Arabic verbal nouns, participles or adjectives. Examples abound: mokātebe kardan ‘to correspond’, lit. ‘to make correspondence’ (Arabic mukātaba) taʾlim kardan ‘to teach’, lit. ‘to make instruction’ (Arabic taʿlīm) fekr kardan ‘to think’, lit. ‘to make thought’ (Arabic fikr) harakat kardan ‘to set out’, lit. ‘to make movement’ (Arabic ḥaraka) sabr kardan ‘to wait’, lit. ‘to make patience’ (Arabic ṣabr) maġlub kardan ‘to defeat’, lit. ‘to make defeated’ (Arabic maġlūb) There is a regular correspondence between active compounds with kardan and passive with šodan: eʾlām kardan ‘to announce’/eʾlām šodan ‘to be announced’ (Arabic ʾiʿlām) rāzi kardan ‘to satisfy’/rāzi šodan ‘to be satisfied’ (Arabic rāḍī) asir kardan ‘to take prisoner’/asir šodan ‘to be taken prisoner’ (Arabic ʾasīr)

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When these compounds are connected with pronominal objects, the suffix is added to the nominal part of the compound, for example, ḫabar-ešan kard ‘he informed them’, lit. ‘he made their news’. There is extensive borrowing even in the case of prepositions, often compounded with a Persian preposition, for instance, baʾd az ‘after’ (Arabic baʿda + Persian ʾaz), bar lahe ‘for’ (Persian bar + Arabic lahu ‘for him’) and bar aleh ‘against’ (Persian bar + Arabic ʿalayhi ‘against him’), for example, ġāzi bar lahe u hokm dād ‘the judge made a judgement in his favour’. Many conjunctions in Persian are formed with Arabic words, for example, vaġtike ‘when’ (Arabic waqt ‘time’), mādāmi ke ‘as long as’ (Arabic mā dāma), ġablazānke ‘before’ (Arabic qabla). As in other languages that have borrowed extensively from Arabic, certain indeclinable particles have been taken over as well, for example, hattā ‘even’, faġat ‘only’, dāyeman ‘continually’, bal (usually with Persian suffix ke) ‘but’, va ‘and’, ammā ‘as for, but’, lāken ‘but’. 17.5  Arabic in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey With the ascendance of the Seljuks in Anatolia, the position of Arabic as the language par excellence of the Islamic empire was eroded considerably. The Turkic dynasties adopted Persian as their literary language and retained Arabic only as the language of religion. In the Ottoman Empire, Turkish became the official language of the state, but at the same time Persian and Arabic were maintained as the languages of culture. Collectively, the three languages were called the elsine-i selāse (with two Arabic words, ʾalsina and ṯalāṯa, and a Persian connective particle!); they constituted the cultural baggage of the intellectual elite. In the period between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the linguistic influence of the two cultural languages, Persian and Arabic, increased to such a degree that in some literary styles only the morphology and the structure of the text remained Turkish, whereas the lexical material was almost completely taken from the two other languages. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, there was an increasing tendency on the part of the Arab provinces to stress their right to linguistic autonomy, that is, their right to use Arabic as an official language (cf. above, Chapter 12). This feeling was reinforced by the developments in the Turkish revolution. First the Young Turks and then Atatürk (1881–1938) dissociated the notion of Islam from that of the Arabic language. In line with the secularisation of the new Turkish republic, there was to be no special place for the Arabic language, and this was formally symbolised by the abolition in 1928 of the Arabic script that had hitherto been used for the writing of Ottoman Turkish. The new emphasis on Turkish identity brought with it a campaign to preserve or restore the purity of the Turkish language. Since the reformers regarded Turkish as the most perfect language on earth, it was inconceivable to them that its lexicon should include large quantities of Persian and Arabic words.

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As a result of the language reform, many of the loanwords and constructions that were common in the Ottoman period have become obsolete, but even in Modern Turkish a large number of loans from Persian and Arabic (or from Arabic through Persian) are still present. These loanwords can often be recognised because they are not subject to the strict rules of vowel harmony in Turkish, which forbid the combination of back vowels and front vowels within a word. A word such as kitap ‘book’ (< Arabic kitāb) with front vowel followed by back vowel does not obey the rules of vowel harmony, and a word such as saat ‘hour’ (< Arabic sāʿa), if it were Turkish, would receive the third-person singular possessive suffix -ı, but since it is an Arabic word it becomes saat-i. Certain phonetic changes take place in the process of borrowing: in the Ottoman spelling, which used the Arabic script, the emphatic and pharyngal consonants of Arabic were distinguished but not pronounced. Since the spelling reform, the orthography no longer distinguishes these sounds, but follows the pronunciation (a often spelled as e; w as v; ḥ, ḫ as h, etc.). Many Arabic nouns were borrowed together with their plural, so that in Ottoman Turkish it was customary to have, for instance, hâdise, plural havâdis (< Arabic ḥādiṯa/ḫawādiṯ) ‘event’, whereas in modern Turkish the plural is hâdiseler; likewise akide, plural akait (Arabic ʿaqīda/ʿaqāʾid) ‘dogma’, nowadays akideler. Common words such as kitap ‘book’ always had a Turkish plural kitaplar. Some abstract nouns were borrowed in the feminine plural form, such as edebiyat ‘literature’, tafsilât ‘details’; syntactically, these words are still treated as plurals. Characteristic of Ottoman prose was the use of long compounds of Arabic origin, which, if they have not been abolished, remain in use as idiomatic singleword expressions, for example, kuvveianelmerkeziye ‘centrifugal force’ (Arabic quwwa + ʿan + al-markaz + iyya) or mukabeleibilmisil ‘retribution’ (Arabic muqābala + bi + al-miṯl). In both examples, the connection between the main components of the compound word is made with the Persian suffix -i-, which in Persian (and in Persian loans in Turkish) indicates the genitive construction (ezāfe). In Ottoman Turkish, these constructions were still productive, whereas in Modern Turkish they have become fixed expressions. In constructions of Arabic nouns with Arabic adjectives, on the other hand, the agreement rules of Arabic are still followed, for example, aklı selim (Arabic ʿaql salīm) ‘common sense’, but esbabı mucibe (Arabic ʾasbāb mūjiba) ‘compelling circumstances’. Just like Persian, Turkish has borrowed a large number of nouns that are used as postpositions. A few examples may suffice: nisbetle ‘compared to’ (Arabic nisbatan li-), rağmen ‘in spite of ’ (Arabic raġman), itibaren ‘from … onwards’ (Arabic iʿtibāran), and even the pronominal expressions leh and aleyh (Arabic lahu and ʿalayhi) in the sense of ‘for’ and ‘against’, for example, with Turkish pronominal suffixes lehimizde ‘for us’, aleyhinde ‘against him’. Originally, Turkish did not have conjunctions, but it has borrowed the Arabic wa- ‘and’ (Turkish ve), presumably through Persian.

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In Ottoman Turkish, the nisba adjective was still used in its function as an adjective; in adverbial expressions, a noun in the accusative (ḥāl construction) was preferred, so that resmî meant ‘official’, but resmen ‘officially’ (Arabic rasmī/rasman); likewise zarurî ‘necessary’, zarureten ‘necessarily’ (Arabic ḍarūrī/ḍarūratan). In Modern Turkish, the constructions with a ḥāl accusative are often replaced by the adjective with Turkish olarak, for example, resmî olarak instead of resmen. An interesting parallel between the pattern of borrowing in Persian and that in Turkish is the use of verbo-nominal compounds with the verbs olmak ‘to be, become’ and etmek (and synonyms) ‘to do, make’, for example: sebep olmak ‘to cause’ (Arabic sabab) memnun olmak ‘to be pleased’ (Arabic mamnūn) refakat etmek ‘to accompany’ (Arabic rafāqa) ziyaret etmek ‘to visit’ (Arabic ziyāra) rica etmek ‘to request’ (Arabic rajāʾ) tebdîl etmek ‘to change’ (Arabic tabdīl) In Ottoman Turkish, such expressions were still understood as Arabic structures, so that, for instance, ‘to change clothes’ was expressed as tebdîl-i qïyâfet etmek, lit. ‘to make a-change-of-clothes’ with Persian connective -i-. In Modern Turkish, this would be expressed as kıyafeti tebdil etmek, lit. ‘to-make-a-change clothes’ (with accusative suffix -i), so that the syntactic tie between verb and noun has become much tighter. The passive of such constructions is made with olunmak, but in combinations with an Arabic infinitive of the seventh verbal measure, which has a passive meaning of itself, etmek is used, for example, intişar etmek ‘to be published’ (Arabic intišār); the active voice is expressed by the Turkish causative: intişar ettirmek ‘to publish’. 17.6  Arabic in the Indian subcontinent Contacts between the Islamic world and India go back as far as the ninth century, when Muslim traders ventured east, to India and China. The Islamicisation of the Indus valley took place much later, when it was conquered by the dynasty of the Ghaznavids in the eleventh century. The Ghaznavids, whose centre was Ghazna in Afghanistan, spoke Persian and, just like most dynasties in this area, used Persian as their literary language. The founder of the Mughal empire in 1526, Bābur, himself wrote in Chagatay Turkic, but at the Mughal court the literary language remained Persian, while the colloquial language was Urdu (also called Hindawi or Hindi), a Prākrit dialect from North India. Urdu had been used as the language of communication between Hindus and Muslims from the time of the Ghaznavids, and under the Mughal emperors it even became the medium of a vernacular literature. Because of the prestige of Persian, a large number of loans from that language entered Urdu during this period.

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With the advent of the English, the harmonious relation between the langu­­ ages, the vernacular and Persian, was disturbed, and the language question became a controversial issue. While in the western provinces the use of Urdu in Arabic–Persian characters was accepted even by Hindus, in the eastern provinces Hindus propagated the use of the same language, but under the name of Hindi, written in Devanagari characters. The matter of the script became the focus of the discussions. Eventually, Devanagari was adopted in India, and the Arabic script remained in use in Pakistan. For the representation of Urdu phonemes, a number of characters were added to the alphabet, for example, for č, ž, g, p; the representation of retroflex consonants by a superscript ṭ, and of aspirated consonants by a following h has been mentioned above. With the Partition between Pakistan and India in 1947, the two varieties of the language were separated, too. Urdu became the official language of Pakistan and of some Muslims in north-west India, and retained its Arabic–Persian vocabulary, while Hindi became one of the two official languages of India (together with English). Hindus started a campaign to purify Hindi and replace the Arabic– Persian loans with words derived from Sanskrit. Modern literary Hindi has ousted a large part of the Persian vocabulary, but in the more colloquial registers of the language some of these words are still used. Since the grammatical structure of Urdu and Hindi is practically identical, the difference between them is almost entirely lexical. There is a large number of synonym pairs, of which the Sanskrit word is used in literary Hindi and the Persian–Arabic word in colloquial Hindi and in Urdu, for example, uttar (S.)/javāb (P./A.) ‘answer’; ṛtu (S.)/mausim (P./A.) ‘season, weather’; ghar (S.)/makān (P./A.) ‘house’ (Arabic ‘place’); pustak (S.)/kitāb (P./A.) ‘book’. It appears that all Arabic words passed through Persian before being introduced to Urdu, together with a large number of originally Persian words. This even applies to those Arabic words which were borrowed both in the singular and the plural form, for example, akhbār ‘newspaper’ (< ʾaḫbār, plural of Arabic ḫabar ‘news’); asbāb ‘tools, luggage’ (< ʾasbāb, plural of Arabic sabab ‘reason’). In Urdu, such plurals are usually treated as singular words. Arabic plurals in -īn (e.g., hāzirīn ‘public, audience’ < Persian < Arabic ḥāḍirīn) and -āt (e.g., dehāt ‘villages, the countryside’ < Persian dehāt) are distinguished from originally Urdu words in that they do not take the oblique marker -õ. Just like Persian, Urdu contains a considerable number of prepositions, adverbial expressions and conjunctions taken from Arabic. It appears that in these categories, too, there was no independent borrowing from Arabic, but Persian always acted as the channel through which these words passed, for example, lekin ‘but’, va ‘and’, balke ‘but on the contrary’ (< Arabic bal + Persian ke); taqriban ‘approximately’ (< Arabic taqrīban), fauran ‘at once’ (< Arabic fawran); bilkul ‘entirely’ (Arabic bi-l-kull); barkhilāf ‘contrary to’ (< Arabic ḫilāf ‘difference’), bāvajūd ‘in spite of ’ (Arabic wujūd ‘existence’) and so on.

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In Urdu, as in Persian and Turkish, no Arabic verbs appear to have been borrowed, probably because of the morphological complexity of the Arabic verb, which prohibited morphological integration. Instead, verbo-nominal compounds are made with the help of the dummy verb karnā ‘to do’, possibly under the influence of the Persian verb kardan (cf. above), although similar compounds are made with Sanskrit words, for example, intazar karnā/pratīkṣā karnā ‘to wait for someone’ (< Arabic intiẓār, verbal noun of intaẓara ‘to wait, to expect’), inkār karnā ‘to refuse’ (< Arabic ʾinkār ‘refusal’). Passives are made with the verb honā ‘to be, to become’, for example, khātam honā/samāpt honā ‘to be finished’ (< Arabic ḫātam). Other verbs are also used occasionally, such as denā ‘to give’ (e.g., javāb denā ‘to give an answer’ < Arabic jawāb ‘answer’), or lenā ‘to take’ (e.g., badlā lenā ‘to take vengeance’ < Arabic badla ‘replacement, compensation’). The impact of Arabic and Persian on other modern Indian languages strongly correlates with the degree of Islamicisation which their speakers underwent. The two varieties of Bengali, spoken both in the Indian province of Bengal and in Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, but an independent state since 1971, differ considerably in their lexicon. In Bangladesh, which is predominantly Muslim, there is a growing tendency to replace older Sanskrit words with Arabic–Persian loans, especially in the domain of religion. In West Bengali, the literary language (sādhu-bhāṣā) contains few loanwords, but in the colloquial language (calit-bhāṣā) some Sanskrit words have an Arabic–Persian synonym (e.g., šobad vs khobor (< Arabic ḫabar) ‘news’, or prakar versus buruj (< Arabic burj) ‘fortress’). The trading network in the Indian Ocean was another source for the spreading of Islam and Arabic loanwords. Since the beginning of the second millennium ce, traders from South Arabia had been in contact with speakers of Tamil and other Dravidian languages spoken in South India. Through these contacts, a number of Arabic loanwords entered Tamil, most of them in the religious or administrative domain, for example, curattu ‘sura’ (< Arabic sūra). Some common words have also been borrowed from Arabic, especially in dialects spoken by Muslims, for example, mauttu ‘death’ (< Arabic mawt). The ending -u is the result of internal phonological rules in Tamil and has nothing to do with case endings in Arabic. Tschacher (2009: 434) makes the valid point that since there is independent motivation for this change in Tamil, it is likely the intermediary source for a similar ending in Arabic loanwords in Indonesian (see below). This may also be the case for the lateral reflexes of Arabic /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ in Tamil, for example, parulu ‘duty’ (< Arabic farḍ); perhaps this lateral realisation goes back to the fact that the early traders mostly came from South Arabia (see below, p. 330). In contemporary Tamilnadu, a variety of Arabic script is still used for an extensive Muslim literature in Tamil, known as Arwi.

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17.7  Arabic in South-east Asia The earliest direct contacts between the Islamic world and East Asia go back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Before that time Persian and Arab trade had mostly taken place between South Arabia and South India; South Indian merchants then took over the second leg of the route to the Malaysian archipelago. From the fourteenth century onwards, some traders may have settled on the coast of Sumatra and later on Java. No precise numbers are known, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the presence of more than 30,000 Ḥaḍramawtī immigrants is reported (Lombard 1990: 65–6). Since the Malay language was firmly established in the Malayan peninsula and as a lingua franca in the Indonesian islands, Arabic was unable to gain the same position that it had obtained in the lands of the Middle East and North Africa, but there can be no doubt that as the language of the Qurʾān and Islam it exercised an enormous influence. This influence manifests itself in the use of Arabic loanwords in Malay and its modern offshoot Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia; furthermore, in the use of Arabic script for the Malay language; and, finally, in the use of Arabic as the religious language of most people. The first signs of Arabic presence in the Indonesian archipelago date from the period of the thirteenth century in the form of tombstones. The first preserved inscription in Arabic script dates from the fourteenth century, a legal edict that was found in Trengganu in the Malay peninsula, written in the variety of Arabic script that became known as Jawi. It is an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet with special additional signs for c, g, ng, ny, p and v, which was used in manuscripts from the sixteenth century onwards. In Indonesia, this script remained in use until the twentieth century, when it was replaced by a Latin orthography during the period of the Dutch administration in Indonesia. The Indonesian Muslim community is the largest community of Muslims outside the Arab world. The vast majority of the population of about 240 million people are Muslims and regard Arabic as the holy language of their religion. It is, therefore, not surprising that the position of Arabic as a religious language is unshaken. Most Indonesians have a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic because of their Qurʾānic training. The secular curriculum, however, does not do very much to improve this knowledge and, in spite of periodic attempts by the authorities to improve the level of Arabic, it is largely left to the so-called pesantren schools to train those who wish to learn in Arabic. The pesantren system has been very successful in setting up a religious curriculum on the pattern of the so-called ‘Meccan’ model, that is, traditional transmission of texts by ʾijāza ‘licence to transmit’ and on the whole passive knowledge of the written language. The number of words from Arabic in modern Indonesian is considerable; according to some estimates, at least 3,000 words may be traced back to an Arabic original. Naturally, many of these words are connected to religion, but there are Arabic loans all over the lexicon in such domains as politics, philosophy, zoology

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and botany, medicine, education and science. Many, or most, of the loans have probably come through the medium of Persian, as in the case of Urdu. In some cases, the exact provenance is still visible in the form of the word. Thus, the word for ‘digestion’ exists in two variants, hadam, which must have come directly from Arabic haḍm, and hajam, which must have been taken from the Persian form of the word, hazm. Just like in Persian, many Arabic feminine words were taken over with the ending -at, for instance, nasihat (< Arabic naṣīḥa ‘advice’, Persian nasihat). The Indonesian words going back to Arabic range from complete expressions (e.g., silaturahmi ‘friendship’) to borrowed suffixes (e.g., the suffix -i/-iah, which occurs in words of Arabic origin such as abadi ‘eternal’, alami ‘natural’, ilmiah ‘scientific’, but also in neologisms such as gerejawi ‘church-’ from Portuguese gereja ‘church’). Some of the complete expressions that were borrowed may have belonged to a written tradition, since they retain the article in its unassimilated form, as in writing, for example, ahlulnujum ‘astrologers’ (< Arabic ʾahl an-nujūm) or aldubul akbar ‘Great Bear’ (< Arabic ad-Dubb al-ʾAkbar). Those expressions in which the article is assimilated probably belong to the spoken language, for example, ahlussunnah ‘people of the Sunna’. Phonetically, the following developments may be noted. Arabic /ʿ/ and /ʾ/ have merged in Indonesian borrowings, as in Persian, through which most of the Arabic words reached Indonesian. Both phonemes are pronounced with a glottal stop, represented in modern orthography by either ʾ, or at the end of the syllable by k (pronounced ʾ), as in maklum (< Arabic maʿlūm ‘known’), iklan (< Arabic ʾiʿlān ‘announcement’). Arabic /f/ is usually represented by p, for example, palak ‘celestial sphere’ (< Arabic falak); for such words, there is usually a learned variant with the ‘correct’ f. In a number of loans, Arabic /ḍ/ is represented by l or dl. Thus, for instance, the Arabic word ʿaraḍ ‘obstacle’ has become aral in Indonesian, ḥāḍir ‘present’ is hadlir, and qāḍī ‘judge’ is variably spelled as kadi or kadli. It is not certain whether this spelling renders an originally lateral pronunciation of the ḍād. A similar pronunciation occurs in Acehnese. This lateral realisation has sometimes been explained by the early contacts with Ḥaḍramawtī traders, but an alternative explanation connects it with Tamil, where a similar correspondence exists (see above, p. 328). This might also account for the vowel ending found in some nouns of Arabic origin in Indonesian, for example, waktu ‘time’ (< Arabic waqt), abdu ~ abdi ‘slave’ (< Arabic ʿabd), and salju ~ salji ‘snow’ (Arabic ṯalj). It is unlikely that these vowels have anything to do with Arabic case endings. Most of the loanwords are nouns, but just like Swahili the Indonesian language exhibits a remarkable ability to assimilate Arabic loanwords morphologically with the help of its many prefixes and suffixes. Thus, we have from Arabic ʾinkār ‘denial’ the noun ingkar, but also the verb mengingkari ‘to deny the truth’, and from Arabic ḥukm ‘judgement’ the noun hukum, but also the verb menghukumkan ‘to pronounce judgement’. Nominal compounds are also used, as for instance, from perlu ‘necessary’ (< Arabic farḍ ‘duty’) keperluan ‘need’. Abstract nouns are

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formed with the prefix tata-, for example, tata-hukum ‘legal order’, tata-kalimat ‘syntax’ (< Arabic kalima ‘word’). A few Arabic words may be regarded as roots themselves, for instance, fikir/pikir ‘to think’. An interesting phenomenon in modern Indonesian is the coexistence of two variants of the same original, for example, fikir/pikir, both derived from Arabic fikra ‘opinion, thought’, or kadi/kadli, both from Arabic qāḍī ‘judge’. In the case of the Arabic word farḍ there are two common derivates, perlu meaning ‘necessary’, and the more official word fard ‘obligatory [often in a religious sense]’. The semantic development of Arabic loans in Indonesian often shows the prestige of Western (especially Dutch) terms: compare, for instance, tabib (< Arabic ṭabīb ‘physician’), which has become the current term for a traditional healer, against the modern dokter, derived from Dutch. In other cases, just as in Swahili (cf. above, p. 320), an Arabic equivalent is preferred over the Western word that is associated with the colonial period. Further reading General survey of language contacts involving Arabic in Thomason (2007) and Versteegh (2010). An important collection on Arabic in al-ʾAndalus, Daghestan, Bactria, Israel, Nigeria and Turkey is Owens (2000). On the use of the Arabic script for other languages (Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Kashmiri, Urdu, Sindhi, Ottoman Turkish, Uyghur, Malay, Berber) and the adaptations it underwent in the process, see Kaye (1996) and Daniels (2014). On the ajami adaptations of Arabic script in Africa, see Mumin (2009, 2014); a collection of articles on various cases of ajami in Africa involving, among other languages, Berber, Swahili, Kanuri, Fulfulde, Mande, Afrikaans, was edited by Mumin and Versteegh (2014). On the special situation of Arabic-Afrikaans, see Davids (2011). On the linguistic situation in al-ʾAndalus, see Wright (1982: 151–61) and Zwartjes (1997: 5–22). On the language of the Mozarabs and the relations between Romance and Arabic, see Galmés de Fuentes (1983; Romance loans in Pedro de Alcalá, pp. 213–44; cf. also Corriente 1988). The standard grammar of Andalusian Arabic is Corriente (1977), of which a revised edition was published in 2013. Arabic in Sicily: Agiùs (1996). Dozy and Engelmann (1869) produced a list of Arabic words in Spanish and Portuguese; this has now been superseded by Corriente’s (2008) dictionary of Arabic loanwords in Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan; for Arabic words in French, see Devic (1876); for Arabic words in English, see Cannon (1994). For general information on the spread of Islam in Africa, see Fisher (1970); a collection of articles on Arabic influence in African languages, Langue arabe et langues africaines appeared in 1983. On Islamic scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa, see Reichmuth (2000); on the role of the madrasas in west Africa, see Brenner (2000); on the role of Arabic in Mali as a gateway to knowledge, see Bouwman (2005). A comparison between Arabic loanwords in Swahili and Hausa is presented by Baldi

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(1988). On Arabic loanwords in Hausa, see Greenberg (1947); Hausa–Arabic bilingualism in Sudan is dealt with by Abu-Manga (1999). On the influence of Arabic in Swahili and the development of Arabo-Swahili culture, see Haddad (1983) and Lodhi (1986); the effect of loanwords on Swahili nominal classes is analysed by Zawawi (1979). For the development of Swahili literate culture, see Vierke (2014). The examples from Fulfulde have been taken from Labatut (1983). On Malagasy, see Beaujard (1998) and Versteegh (2001); the standard work on Sorabe texts and the secret language kalamo is Rajaonarimanana (1990). The Arabic element in Persian is traditionally treated as a separate component in the standard grammars, for instance, in Lambton (1961: 181–250) and Alavi and Lorenz (1972: 167–70, 174–8, 181–3), from which the examples have been taken. On the semantics of Arabic loans in Persian, see Asbaghi (1987) and Perry (1991). On language purism and the work of the Farhangestān, see Karimi-Hakkak (1989) and Paul (2010). The role played by Persian in the spreading of Islam is discussed by Fragner (2006). Arabic words in Ottoman Turkish are dealt with in all standard grammars of Ottoman Turkish, for example, Kissling (1960, especially pp. 45, 67, 152f., 243f.), from whom the examples quoted here are taken; on Arabic and Persian loans in Ottoman Turkish, see Battersby (1966); on the Turkish campaign for purity of the language, see Zürcher (1985); a comparison between the language reform movement in Turkey and Iran is made by Perry (2004). On the language question in the Indian subcontinent, see Kanungo (1962). The examples of loan pairs in Hindi have been taken from Pořízka (1972). On the two varieties of Bengali, see Dil (1972). On Arwi literature in Tamil, see Tschacher (2001), on the nature of Arabic loanwords in Tamil, see Tschacher (2009). On the role of Arabic in the first Malay grammars, see Ogloblin (1981); on Arabic loanwords in Indonesian, see Versteegh (2003) and van Dam (2010); a dictionary of all loanwords was compiled by Jones (2007), from which most of the examples in the present chapter were taken. A general survey on the role of Arabic in Indonesia is given by Meuleman (1994) and Campbell (2007). On Arabic loanwords in Acehnese, see Al-Harbi (1991). The ‘Meccan’ system of transmission of knowledge in Indonesia is analysed by Laffan (2008). Not all contact situations with Arabic could be dealt with here. For the linguistic situation in Israel, see Kinberg and Talmon (1994); on the Arabic component in Hebrew slang, see Kornblueth and Aynor (1974); on language attitudes and variation in Palestinian communities, see Amara (1999). The substratal influence of the languages that were spoken in the Islamic empire at the time of the Arab conquests has been dealt with above (Chapter 8, pp. 140–4). Arabic has also influenced these languages and in some cases continues to influence them: on Arabic influence in Coptic, see Richter (2001); on Nubian–Arabic bilingualism and the influence of Arabic in Nubian, see Rouchdy (1991); on Arabic influence in Berber, see Chaker (1984), Aguadé and Behnstedt (2006); on Arabic influence in Berber literary culture, see van den Boogert (1997). On Arabisms in Mehri, see Rubin (2010: 307–9).

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Abbreviations

AAE AI AIDA I AIDA II

AIDA IV AIDA V AIDA VI AIEO AION AJAS AJH AJSLL AKAWB AL AO AOASH Ar al-ʿArabiyya ArchLing AÜ BASOR

Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Chichester. Ars Islamica, Ann Arbor. Actes des premières journées internationales de dialectologie arabe de Paris, eds Dominique Caubet and Martine Vanhove, Paris: INALCO. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of L’Association Internationale pour la Dialectologie Arabe, held at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, 10–14 September 1995, Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1996. Aspects of the Dialects of Arabic Today: Proceedings of the 4th Conference of the International Arabic Dialect Association (AIDA), Marrakesh, 1-4 April 2000, ed. Abderrahim Youssi, Rabat: Amapatril, 2002. Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA): 5th Conference, Cádiz, September 2002, eds Ignacio Ferrando and Juan José Sánchez Sandoval, Cadiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2003. L’arabe dialectal: enquêtes, descriptions, interprétations. Actes d’AIDA 6: travaux offerts au Professeur Taïeb Baccouche, ed. Salah Mejri, Tunis: Centre d’études et de recherches economiques et sociales, 2006. Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales, Algiers. Annali del Istituto Orientale di Napoli, Naples. American Journal of Arabic Studies, Leiden. Arab Journal of the Humanities, Kuwait. American Journal of Semitic Languages and Linguistics, Chicago. Philosophische und historische Abhandlungen der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Berlin. Anthropological Linguistics, Bloomington, IN. Acta Orientalia, Copenhagen. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Budapest. Arabica. Revue d’études arabes, Leiden. al-ʿArabiyya. Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, Columbus, OH. Archivum Linguisticum: A Review of Comparative Philosophy and General Linguistics, Leeds. Afrika und Übersee, Berlin. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem.

Abbreviations  379

BCEPSP BIFAO BiOr BLC BSA BSLP BSOAS CERES CHAL

CHI CIAP Concordances CRL CSSH Diachronica DOP EALL EDNA EI(2) EP FO GAP

GAS HAR HdO HL IEJ IJALEL

Bulletin du Centre d’étude des plurilinguismes et des situations pluriculturelles, Nice. Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, Cairo. Bibliotheca Orientalis, Leiden. Blingualism: Language and Cognition, Cambridge. Budapest Studies in Arabic, Budapest. Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris, Paris. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Cahiers du Centre d’études et de recherches economiques de l’Université de Tunis, série linguistique, Tunis. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, vol. I: Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, eds Alfred F. L. Beeston, Thomas M. Johnstone, Robert B. Serjeant and Gerald R. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. IV: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, ed. Richard N. Frye, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, ed. Moshe Sharon, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, vol. I (1997), vol. II (1999), vol. III (2004), vol. IV (2009), vol. V (2013), Leiden: Brill. Concordances et indices de la Tradition Musulmane, eds Arent Jan Wensinck, Wim Raven and Jan Just Witkam, 7 vols, Leiden: Brill, 1936–69. Colorado Research in Linguistics, Boulder, CO. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cambridge. Diachronica. International Journal for Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Washington, DC. Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, eds Mushira Eid, Alaa Elgibali, Kees Versteegh, Manfred Woidich and Andrzej Zaborski, 5 vols, Leiden: Brill, 2006–9. Estudios de dialectología norte-africana y andalusí, Zaragoza. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1908–34. New edition prepared by a number of leading Orientalists, Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004. L’enseignement public, Paris. Folia Orientalia. Revue des études orientales, Cracow. Grundriß der arabischen Philologie, vol. I: Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Wolf­­­ dietrich Fischer; vol. II: Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Helmut Gätje; vol. III: Supplement, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1983, 1987, 1992. Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, Leiden: Brill, 1967–. Hebrew Annual Review, Columbus, OH. Handbuch der Orientalistik, Leiden: Brill. Historiographia Linguistica, Amsterdam. International Education Journal, Scarsdale, NY. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, Maidstone (Australia).

380  The Arabic Language IJB IJoAL IJSL IOS Der Islam JAAL JAL JAOS JCCE JJP JNAS JPCL JPS JQR JSAI JSI JSS al-Karmil LA LC Lg LI Lingua Linguistics LPLP MAS ME MEJCC MSOS MUSJ NLLT OA Orientalia OS PAL

International Journal of Bilingualism, Thousand Oaks, CA. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, Delhi. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Berlin. Israel Oriental Studies, Tel Aviv. Der Islam. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients, Berlin. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages, Princeton, NJ. Journal of Arabic Literature, Leiden. Journal of the American Oriental Society, New Haven, CT. Journal of Communications and Computer Engineering, Cairo. Journal of Juristic Papyrology, Warsaw. Journal of North African Studies. London and New York. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Journal of Persianate Studies, Leiden. Jewish Quarterly Review, Leiden. Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Jerusalem. Journal of Social Issues, New York. Journal of Semitic Studies, Manchester. al-Karmil. Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, Haifa. Linguistic Analysis, New York. Language and Cognition, Berlin and New York. Language. Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, MD. Linguistic Inquiry, Cambridge, MA. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, Amsterdam. Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences, London. Language Problems and Language Planning, Amsterdam. Matériaux arabes et sudarabiques, Paris. Medieval Encounters, Leiden. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Leiden. Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen, westasiatische Studien, Berlin. Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, Beirut. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Dordrecht. Oriens Antiquus. Rivista del Centro per le Antichità e la Storia dell’ Arte del Vicino Oriente, Rome. Orientalia. Commentarii Periodici Pontificii Instituti Biblici, Rome. Orientalia Suecana, Stockholm. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, vol. I, ed. Mushira Eid (1990); vol. II, eds Mushira Eid and John McCarthy (1990); vol. III, eds Bernard Comrie and Mushira Eid (1991); vol. IV, eds Ellen Broselow, Mushira Eid and John McCarthy (1992); vol. V, eds Mushira Eid and Clive Holes (1993); vol. VIII, ed. Mushira Eid (1996); vol. XI, eds Elabbas Benmamoun, Mushira Eid and Niloofar Haeri (1997); vol. XIII–XIV, eds Dilworth B. Parkinson and Elabbas Benmamoun (2002); vol. XIX, ed. Elabbas Benmamoun (2007), Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Abbreviations  381

PCALL

Proceedings of the Colloquium on Arabic Lexicology and Lexicography, Budapest, 1–7 September 1993, eds Kinga Dévényi, Tamás Iványi and Avihai Shivtiel, Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University. Phonology Phonology, Cambridge. Pragmatics Pragmatics, Antwerp. PS Palestinskij Sbornik, Moscow and Leningrad. PSAS Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Oxford. Q Qurʾān. QSA Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Rome. R-A Romano-Arabica, Bucarest. RAL Revue d’aménagement linguistique, Quebec. REI Revue des études Islamiques, Paris. RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions, Paris. RO Rocznik Orientalistyczny, Warsaw. RTSS Revue tunisienne des sciences sociales, Tunis. SbBAW Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen Classe der kaiserlichen bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich. SGA Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, Cologne. SHAG I Studies in the History of Arabic Grammar. Proceedings of the First Symposium on the History of Arabic Grammar, held at Nijmegen 16–19 April 1984, eds Hartmut Bobzin and Kees Versteegh (= ZAL 15), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1985. SI Studia Islamica, Paris. Théorie Analyses Travaux Vincennois. Études Arabes. Théorie Analyses, Paris [aka. Analyses Théorie]. TJ Travaux et Jours, Beirut. WAD Behnstedt, Peter and Manfred Woidich, Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte, vol. I: Mensch, Natur, Fauna und Flora; vol. II: Materielle Kultur; vol. III: Verbe, Adjektive, Zeit und Zahlen, Leiden: Brill, 2010, 2011, 2014. WALS The World Atlas of Language Structures, eds Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. WdI Die Welt des Islams, Leiden. WKAS Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1957–. Word Word. Journal of the International Linguistics Association, New York. WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vienna. ZAL Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik, Wiesbaden. ZDMG Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Leipzig and Wiesbaden. ZDPV Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins, Leipzig and Wiesbaden.

Index

Aartun, K., 93 Abbassi, A., 271 ʿAbbāsids, 75–8 ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Yaḥyā, 76 ʿAbd al-Malik, Caliph, 65, 75, 81, 128 Abdelfattah, N., 233 Ablaut, 90 Abou, S., 265 Abraham, 44 ʾAbū ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAlāʾ, 51, 67 ʾAbū Ḥanīfa, 80 ʾAbū l-ʿAlāʾ Sālim, 76 ʾAbū l-ʾAswad ad-Duʾalī, 63f., 66, 108 ʾAbū Qurra, Theodore, 164 ʾAbū Ṭāhir, 80 ʾAbū ʿUbayda, 69 Abul Fadl, F., 176 Abu-Manga, A., 319 Académie française, 226 Academies, Arab, 226f., 229, 231 Academy of Amman, 227 Academy of Baghdad, 227 Academy of Cairo, 226f., 229, 231 Academy of Damascus, 226f. Academy of Rabat, 227 accommodation, 180, 182f. accusative, 51, 54, 111 Acehnese, 330 acrolectal speech, 147 active participle see participle, active ʿĀd, 43 Adam, 37 adjective, 110 administration language of, 60 ʾUmayyad, 65 ʿAdnān 43f., 173 adstratal influence, 141, 276, 286f. adverbials, 193 advertisements, language choice in, 250 affrication, 50, 180, 194, 202f., 285

of /k/, 50 of /t/, 143 ʾAfġānī, Jamāl ad-Dīn al-, 225 Afghanistan, 285 Afrikaans codification of, 315 in Arabic script, 315 see also Arabic-Afrikaans Afro-Asiatic languages, 17 Agapius, 164 Agarenes, 2 age, as a variable, 256 agent, 111–13 in passive sentence, 233 zero, 113 Aghlabids, 130, 276 agreement, 86 asymmetry, 99 full, 99 of the dual, 148 partial, 99 subject, 51f., 96–9, 148, 160 with inanimate plural, 187 Aguadé, J., 214 ʾahl al-Yaman, 44 ʾAḥmad ibn Masʿūd, 124 Aḥmad il-Fāṛ, 171 ʿajam, 42 ajami, 314 Fulfulde, 331 Kanuri, 331 Mande, 331 ʿajamiyya, 173, 316 ʾakalūnī l-barāġīṯ, 52, 99 Åkesson, J., 124 Akkadian, 10–12, 14, 16, 18, 22–4, 27, 140 Old, 22 Akkadians, 12 aktib/niktibu dialects, 178 Al Batal, M., 248, 266 Al Wer, E., 183, 253–5

Index  383 Alcalá, Pedro de, 2, 316 alchemy, 75 ALECSO, 240 Aleppo, 127, 197 Alexandretta see Iskenderun Alexandria, 182 ʾAlf layla wa-layla 158 Algeria, 174, 189 Berber in, 130 French occupation of, 260 linguistic situation in, 263–5 position of French in, 242 Algerians, in Western Europe, 292–6 Algiers, 129 ʿAlī, Caliph, 75 ʾalif, 54, 118, 121 ʾalif maqṣūra, 131 ʾalif, accusative, 158 ʾalif, dagger, 33 ʾalif, otiose, 161 ʾalif, perpendicular, 33 see also glides aljamiado, 316 Al-Jazeera, 237 allegro register, 56 allophones, xvii, 121 Al-Mansour, A., 18 Al-Moaily, M., 302 Alvarus, Paulus, 315 ʿamal, 107, 235 Amazigh, pl. Imazighen, 272 Amazigh movement, 273; see also Berber amazighe, 272 Amazighe, as an official language in Morocco, 273 American University in Beirut, 265f. Amharic, 11 ʿāmil, 109, 116 Amman, 183 linguistic situation in, 254 ʿammānī see Arabic language, Amman ʿāmmiyya 236, 241–3, 252 ʿāmmiyyat al-mutanawwirīn, 244 ʿāmmiyyat al-muṯaqqafīn, 243f. ʿāmmiyyat al-ʾummiyyīn, 244 Amorite, 16 Amorites, 13 Amoritic, 10 ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, 128 Amr Khaled, 251f., 256 ʾan, 137 ʾan muḫaffafa, 51 analogical extension, 228 analogy, 108, 135, 178, 228f., 235

analytic construction, 55, 136, 144f. analytic genitive, 146, 175 Ancient North Arabian, 29f., 40, 43 inscriptions, 40 Ancient North Arabic see Ancient North Arabian ʾAndalus al-, 1, 130, 272 Arabic in, 315–17 conquest of, 315 Anglo-Egyptian army, 306 ʿAniza, 186 ʾanna, 51 annexation, 99–101 improper, 100 ʾanṣār, 43 Antemoro, 321 Aoun, J., 99 aphasia, 89 Aphrodito, archives of, 157, 170 apocopate see jussive apophony, 90, 187 ʿaql, 63, 66 arab, 285 ʿArab, 42f. ʾAʿrāb, 42f. Arab Academies see Academies Arab ʿArab al-ʿāriba al-, 43 ʿArab al-bāʾida al-, 43 ʿArab al-mustaʿriba al-, 43 ʿArab al-mutaʿarriba al-, 43 Arab Americans, 291 arab ana bongor, 305 Arab Christians, 225f., 265 Arab Congress, 224 Arab Kingdom, 225 Arab nation, 226, 252 arabe médian, 243 arabi juba see Arabic language, Juba Arabian Nights see ʾAlf layla wa-layla Arabian peninsula, 26f. Arabic as a foreign language, 263 as a minority language, 276–98 as a pure language, 56, 172 as a world language, 313–32 as interface language in Facebook, 238 as language of administration, 164 as language of education, 236 as language of religion, 223, 226, 251 as language of religion in Indonesia, 329 as language of religion in the Ottoman Empire, 324 as lingua franca, 301 as national language in Comoro, 320

384  The Arabic Language as official language, 80–2 as official language in Morocco, 273 as language of the dīwān, 65 as language of the Qurʾān, 322 classification of, 18–24 comparison with Hebrew, 4 in Africa, 317–21 in Algerian schools, 263 in Bactria, 331 in Daghestan, 331 in education, 234 in Ethiopia, 301 in Iran, 321–4 in Israel, 186 in Mali, 331 in South Asia, 326–8 in South-east Asia, 329–31 in Sudan, 194 in Syria, 197 in the Ottoman empire, 224 in the social media, 238 in Tunisia, 211 in Turkey, 324–6 in Zanzibar, 319 mixed, 168 perfection of, 108 standardisation of, 60 study of, 1–9 superiority of, 81, 85 teaching of, 8 transcription in Greek script, 156 transfer grammar of, 239 Arabic creoles, 87, 94, 299–312 Arabic dialects, 192–220 Arabic glossaries, 2 Arabic inscriptions, 40 Arabic language Abbéché, 288, 305 Aden, 192 Afghanistan, 189, 285 al-ʿArīš, 208 Aleppo, 198, 218 Alexandria, 182 Algerian, 211f. Algérois, 212 al-Ḥaṣā, 275 al-Manāma, 196 Amman, 183, 218, 254f. Anatolian, 146, 189, 202, 281–4 ʿAnazī, 192 Andalusian, 220 ʿAqra, 204, 219 Arbīl, 202, 219 Asyūṭ, 206

Āzǝx, 297 Baghdad, 159, 196 Bagirmi, 287f. Baḥariyya, 208, 219 Baḥārna, 196, 254f. Bahrain, 176, 196, 287 Bahrain Shiʿite, 76, 254f., 192, 196 Bahrain Sunnite, 136, 176, 192, 253–5 Balkh, 285 Baskinta, 218 Baṣra, 172, 204 Bedouin, 47, 55–7, 71f., 130, 132f., 138, 150, 173, 180, 184–90, 193, 213 Bedouin Syrian desert, 194, 197 Beirut, 198f., 218 Beur, 294 Bimbashi, 306 Bīr Zēt, 218 Bišmizzīn, 201, 218 Bongor, 305f., 310 Bukhara, 284 Cairene, 88, 134, 145, 147, 175, 182f., 206–10 Casablanca, 182, 184, 213 Central African, 206 Central Algerian, 212 Central Arabian, 54, 188 Central Asian, 190 Central Delta, 182 Central Hilālī, 212 Central Plateau Yemenite, 195 Central Syrian, 198f. Central Tunisian, 212 Chadian, 145, 205f., 305 Chauen, 220 Cherchell, 213, 220 Christian Baġdādī, 201f., 283 Christian Middle, 152, 155, 163–5 Classical, 45, 60–84, 132, 134–6, 152–5, 157, 159f., 193, 234, 253f., 300 Constantine, 211 Constantinois, 212 Cypriot Maronite, 87, 145, 189f., 198, 279–81 Cyrenaica, 220 Daḫla, 180, 208, 219 Damascus, xvii, 103, 145, 148, 198–200, 255 Daragözü, 282–4, 297 Dawāġrah, 192, 208 Dēr iz-Zōr, 184, 197 Diyarbakır, 282 Djidjelli, 87, 141 Druze, 198 Early, 28f.

Index  385 Early Standard, 40 East, 45, 47–50, 52 Eastern, 88, 132, 178 Eastern Algerian, 211f. Eastern Bedouin, 188 Eastern Hilālī, 212 Eastern Libyan, 220 Eastern pre-Hilālī, 211 Eastern Tunisian, 212 Educated Standard, 243, 248 Egyptian, 88, 95, 101, 106, 137, 141, 143, 146, 153–5, 166, 174, 176, 183, 190, 205–11, 217, 236, 239, 244f., 252, 256 Egyptian Delta, 175, 178, 194, 206 Egyptian Oases, 177, 180 Esna, 206 Euphrates, 202 Farafra, 179f., 182, 208 Fes, 211, 213 Formal Spoken, 168 gilit, 149, 194, 201f., 204 Gizeh, 206 Gulf, 95, 188, 192 Ḥaḍramawt, 192 Ḫarga, 180, 208 Hasköy, 297 Ḥassāniyya, 129, 190, 211, 213, 216 Hatay, 197 Ḥijāzī, 45, 49, 51f., 54f., 64, 192, 194 Hilālī, 180, 211f. Ḥōrān, 176, 198 id-Dalawiyya, 210 il-ʿAwāmṛa, 219 il-Baḥariyya, 208, 219 informal Modern Standard, 237, 245 Iraqi, 137, 146, 159, 187 Jawzjān, 285 Jeinau, 286 Jewish, 184 Jewish Baġdādī, 135, 201f. Jewish Middle see Judaeo-Arabic Jewish of Algiers, 87, 211 Jewish of Morocco, 220 Jewish of Tripoli, 87, 220 Jewish of Tunis, xviii, 162, 211, 220 Jogari, 285 Jordanian, 197–9 Jordanian Bedouin, 192 Juba, 147f., 190, 306f. Kadugli, 310 k-dialect, 195 Khartoum, 148, 219, 306f. Khorramshahr, 205 Khuzestan, 203–5

Kinderib, 297 Kozluk, 282 Kūfa, 172 Kuwaiti, 176, 192, 217 Kwayriš, 219 Lebanese, 197–9, 266 Levantine, 88 Libyan, 190, 211f. Luxor, 206 Maghrebi, 87f., 163, 178, 182, 191, 208, 211–16 Malinese Ḥassāniyya, 220 Maltese see Maltese Maʿqil, 212 Mardin, 282f., 287 Marīdī, 301 Marrakech, 180 Mauritania, 211f. Mecca, 46, 188, 192, 194, 197 media, 233f., 237, 239, 248, 257 Medina, 192, 194 Mesopotamian, 140, 201–5, 286 Mesopotamian qǝltu, 282 Mḥallamīye, 283, 297 Middle, 65, 80, 131, 152–71 Middle Egyptian, 206, 208 Modern Standard, 221–40, 255 Moroccan, 88, 105, 137, 148, 179, 184, 190, 211, 214, 216f., 269, 293 Mosul, 219 Muslim Baġdādī, 135, 145, 182, 201f. Muslim Middle, 157–160 Muslim Tunis, 214 Nag Hammadi, 206 Najd, 46, 134, 187, 192–4 N’Djamena, 288, 305 Negev, 147, 188, 192, 194, 208 New, 53, 55f., 58, 132f., 144, 300 Nigerian, 140, 189, 205f., 288–90 North African Bedouin, 212 North Lebanese, 143 North Syrian, 198f. North Yemenite, 176 North-east Arabian, 192, 194 North-east Yemenite, 195 Northern Plateau Yemenite, 195 North-west Arabian, 192, 208 Old, 40, 53, 55f., 58, 132f., 300 Omani, 196, 217, 287 Oranais, 212 Palestinian, 88, 106, 190, 198f. Palmyra, 176 pre-diasporic, 140 pre-Hilālī, 211

386  The Arabic Language pre-Islamic, 42–59, 88, 132 Qarṭmīn, 282f. Qašqa Darya 284 qǝltu, 145, 149, 197, 201f., 282, 284, 286 Qēna, 206 Rabat, 145, 180, 182, 184, 213 radio, 248, 257 Rwala, 194 Saʿdah, 218 Ṣaʿīdī, 207 Šammar, 192, 196 Ṣanʿānī, 145, 195, 218 Šarqiyya, 176, 206, 208 Sason, 282 Shuwa, 189 Siirt, 282 Sinai, 147, 188, 192, 194, 208 Skūra, 180, 220 Sousse, 220 South Egyptian, 194 South Jordanian, 188, 192 South-east Arabian, 196 South-east Yemenite, 195 Southern Algerian, 212 Southern Plateau Yemenite, 195 South-west Arabian, 192 Standard, 167f., 237, 241–3, 245f., 248–50, 266f., 276 Sudanese, 145, 190, 306 Sudanic, 140, 206 Šukriyya, 219 Sulaym, 212 Sult, 254f. Syrian, 101, 133–5, 137, 142, 146, 148, 155, 178, 190, 199, 217 Syro-Lebanese, 88, 176, 184, 190, 197–201 Syro-Mesopotamian Bedouin, 188, 192, 280 Tafilalt, 220 Tamīm, 50f. Tetouan, xviii, 220 Tigris, 202 Tihāma, 179, 192, 195 Tikrit, 182 Tlemcen, 211f. Tripoli (Lebanon), 218 Tripoli, 21, 199 Tripolitanian, 190 Tunisian, 211f., 254, 261 Upper Egyptian, 194, 206 urban Chad, 288 Uzbekistan, 95, 140, 144, 146, 180, 189, 196, 203, 284–8 West, 46–50, 53, 208

West Arabian, 192, 194 Western, 132, 178 Western Algerian, 211f. Western Bedouin, 187, 189 Western pre-Hilālī, 211 Western Sudanic, 140 Yemenite, 44, 143, 179, 183, 190, 192, 195, 287 Arabic pidgins, 94, 299–312 Arabic prose, 66 Arabic script, 37–39, 63 abolition of, 324 for Berber, 272 for other languages, 314 origin of, 32, 38f., 54 Arabic-Afrikaans, 315 Arabicisation, 126, 150, 180, 184, 229, 260, 272 in Algeria, 263f. in Morocco, 262 in Tunisia, 261 of Egypt, 205 of Hebrew words, 162 of loanwords, 321 of Mesopotamia, 201 of North Africa, 149, 186, 211 of Syria, 197 of the administration, 263 of the Nabataean kingdom, 22 of Upper Egypt, 149 arabish, 169, 238 ʿarabiyya, 42, 45, 132 ʿarabiyyun, 42 arabizantes, 2 arabīzi, 169 Arabs, 21f., 26 Arabu, 26 Aramaeans, 12f. Aramaic, 4, 10–12, 14, 16, 20f., 24, 26, 31f., 49, 67f., 83, 127, 149, 214 as lingua franca, 10, 32, 127 as language of Jews, 160 Central, 127 Eastern, 10f., 127 inscription, 36 Neo-, 142 Old, 10 script, 31–3, 37 substratal influence, 142f. Western, 10f., 127 Arbāya, 26 Arbi, 26 Aribi, 26f. Arnold, W., 142

Index  387 Arslān, Šakīb, 226 article am- in Yemenite Arabic, 44 definite, 20, 23, 30, 34, 156, 161f., 164, 269, 286, 302, 317f.. Dutch, 295 French, 295 h(n)- in Ancient North Arabian, 29–31 indefinite, 159, 211, 285f., 302 reanalysis of, 308 articulator active, 120 passive, 120 articulatory class, 122 Arwi, 328 ʾaṣaliyya, 120 ʾaṣl, 109; see also underlying level aspect, 93f. continuous, 94f., 137, 145f., 159, 180, 194, 200, 209, 247, 303, 306 continuous past, 282 durative, 20 habitual 145f., 209, 303 iterative, 94 markers, 94, 136f., 145f., 158, 194, 209, 245, 309; in Juba Arabic, 307 perfect, 95, 196, 282 punctual, 93f. resultative, 209 stative, 294 volitional, 94, 146 assimilation, 24 associations linguistic, 249–53 political, 250 Assurbanipal, 27 Assyrian, 6, 10f., 127 Assyrian, Neo-, 22 Assyrians, 27 asyndetic construction, 137, 158 Atatürk, 225, 322, 324 attitude, of the speaker, 248 augment, 115, 119 Aurelian, 28 automatic speech recognition, 106 automatic translation, 106 auxiliary consonants, 114f. auxiliary language, 299 Avicenna, 2–3 ʾAws, 44 Ayalon, A., 221f. ʾayyām al-ʿArab, 74 ʾAzharī al-, 71f.

Bābur, 326 Babylonian, 10f. Babylonian empire, 10 Babylonian, Neo-, 22 Bacouche, T., 176 Bactria, 331 Badawi, E., 244f. bādiya, 188 Baerman, M. , 93 Baggara belt, 288, 290, 305 Baghdad, 183 fall of, 82 Bagirmi Arabic see Arabic language, Bagirmi Baḥārna, 196, 254f. Bahasa Indonesia see Indonesian Bahloul, M. , 99 Bahrain, linguistic situation in, 253–5 Bakrī, ʾAbū ʿUbayd al-, 301 baladi, 256 Balāḏurī al-, 65 Bambara, 318 Bangladesh, 328 Bantu, 310 barbari, 271 basilect, 147, 300 Baṣra, 81, 130, 201 Bassiouney, R., x, 248, 250, 255 Baṭḥarī, 127 Bayt al-ḥikma, 70, 77, 228 Bedouin, 43, 60 as arbiters of language 65, 72 as informants, 45, 63, 71–3 language of, 47, 55–7, 71f., 130, 132f., 138, 150, 173, 180, 184–90, 193, 213 migration of, 197; to North Africa 129 prestige of, 57 Sinai, 147 Bedouinisation, 21, 27, 150, 184, 186, 196, 212 Bedwell, W., 4 begadkefat, xvii Behnstedt, P., 129, 142, 176–8, 182, 195, 210 Beirut, linguistic situation in, 265 Beja, 205 Bellamy, J., 35f. Belnap, K., 291 Ben Ali, Zine el Abidine, 261 Bengali, 328 Benrabah, 263–5, 273 Bentahila, A. 267 Berber, x, 17, 129f., 141, 173, 211, 213, 263, 271–3, 293, 332 as national language in Algeria, 273 in Algeria, 130 in Libya, 130

388  The Arabic Language literary culture, 332 manuscripts, 272 policy, French, 272 prefix a-, 141, 213 Siwa, 130, 209 teaching of, 273 Berbers in Morocco, 130 in Tunisia, 260, 274 Bergsträßer, G., 176 Bible, study of, 4 Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 106 biconsonantal root, 91 biculturality, in Lebanon, 265 Bies, A., 106 Biḥēra il-, 186 bilād as-Sūdān, 205, 318 bilingual education, in the Maghreb, 260 bilingual marriages, 306 bilingual schools, 260f. bilingualism, 146, 243, 259–76 Arabic–Aramaic, 142 Arabic–Berber, 213 Arabic–French, 264 Arabic–Fulfulde, 288 Arabic–Hebrew, 332 Arabic–Ivrit, 275 Arabic–Kanuri, 288 Arabic–Kurdish, 281f. Arabic–Persian, 285 Arabic–Tajik, 284f. Arabic–Turkish, 281f. Arabic–Uzbek, 284 Aramaic–Arabic, 142 Berber–Arabic, 141, 143, 271–3 Coptic–Arabic, 129 English–Arabic, 258 French–Arabic, 258, 261, 266–8 Greek–Arabic, 280 Hausa–Arabic, 318 Hebrew–Arabic, 258 in Lebanon, 265 Nubian–Arabic, 332 Syriac–Arabic, 163 bilinguisme, 259 b-imperfect, 147, 165, 200 Biqāʿ, 265 biradicalism, 91 Birkeland, H., 54 Bizri, F., ix, 303 Blanc, H., 201f., 254 Blau, J., 14, 55, 152, 164 body parts, names of, 135 Bohas, G., 91f., 118

Bombo, 312 books, 66, 70, 74, 76–8, 124 Greek, 75 Syriac, 75 Bopp, F., 6 Borg, A., 280f. Borno State, 288 borrowing, 13, 228f.; see also loanwords Bougie, 273 Boumans, L., 295 Boumediene, President, 263 Bourguiba, President, 260f. Boussofara-Omar, N., 246 Bouteflika, President, 264, 273 Braukämper, U., 288 breath, 120 Brincat, J., 277 British, language policy of, 174 Brockelmann, C., 6 broken plurals, 18f., 21, 85f., 93, 117 in Arabic loanwords, 323 in Maltese, 279 of Hebrew words, 162 Buckwalter, T., 106 Bukhara, 284f. Bulliet, R., 27 Bureaux d’arabisation, 227, 263 Bustānī, Buṭrus al-, 226 Byzantine empire, 1, 28 Cadora, F., 180 Cairo, 182f. Cairo Geniza see Geniza calit-bhāṣā, 328 calligraphy, 64 calque, 230, 232, 284 calque, syntactic, 230 camel, domestication of, 27 Cameroon, 205, 288 Canaanite, 10, 12, 20f., 24 Canaanites, 12 Cantineau, J., 176, 199 Cape Colony, 315 caravan cities, 28 Carter, M., 124 Carthage, 10 Casablanca, 184 case endings, 47, 109, 111, 248 absence of, 140 disappearance of, 55 fossilised, 56 incorrect, 57f. see also declension Catalan, 331

Index  389 Catholic Kings, 2 Caubet, D., 176, 216 causative, 30, 105, 135, 193 Caxaro, Pietro de, 277 Central African Republic, 205, 288 Central Semitic, 15, 20f. Chad, 205, 288, 305, 317, 321 Chadic languages, 17 Chagatay Turkic, 316, 326 Cham, 5, 17 chancellery style, 75 child language, 89 China, 326 Christians, Eastern, 3 Christians, language of, 155 Christological treatises, 164 chuo, pl. vyuo, 319 circumfix, negative, 101, 137, 246 class, as a variable, 253f. Classical Arabic see Arabic, Classical classicisation, 148, 150, 253 Clenardus, 3 clerks, 65 cliticisation, of indirect object, 136, 137 code-mixing see code-switching code-switching, 243, 245–7, 270f., 276, 281, 296 Arabic–English, 274 Arabic–French, 259, 271 French–Arabic 269 Hausa–Arabic, 318 intersentential, 294 intrasentential, 294 Moroccan Arabic–Dutch, 271, 293–5 Moroccan Arabic–French, 295 Cohen, D., xviii, 139, 216 collectives, 19, 93, 102, 148 in Nubi, 309 collocations, 240 colloquial, 131, 153, 155, 166f., 246 illiterate, 245 in literary texts, 166 literate, 245 marker, 166, 248f. poetry, 74 colloquialisation, 169 colloquialism, 156, 158, 167f., 252 colonial languages, 300 colonial policy, British, 174 colonial policy, French, 259 colons, 259, 263 communal dialect see dialect, communal Comoro, Republic of, 320 comparative linguistics, 6, 7

complement, 235 compounds, 231f. adjectival, 232 in Ottoman Turkish, 325 computational linguistics, 106 Comrie, B., 85f., 101 conditional particle, 20 consonant cluster, 88, 90, 199, 203, 209 consonantal skeleton, 109 consonants /č/, 121 /ḏ̣/, 134, 153f., 156, 187, 215, 328 /ḍ/, 17, 19, 24, 32, 87, 121, 134, 153f., 156, 187, 215, 328–30 /f/, 19 /j/, 176, 182f., 207, 237 /k/, 50, 203 /l/, 121 /p/, 85 /q/, 24, 49, 120, 125, 154, 173f., 176, 180, 182, 187, 193f., 196–8, 202, 207, 212, 244f., 247f., 254–6, 285f., 288 /r/, 121, 159 /ṭ/, 120 /t/, 143 /ṯ/, 175 /v/, 121, 215, 315 aspirated, 314 bilabial, 122 dental implosive, 289 emphatic, 13, 23, 86f. glottal stop, 46f., 154; see also hamza glottalised, 13, 18 homorganic, 89 implosive, 314 interdental, 22f., 134, 141f., 187, 193, 197, 202, 212, 247, 254, 285f. interdental in Anatolian Arabic, 282 interdental in Baḥārna Arabic, 196 lateral, 87, 121 palatalised in Ḥassāniyya, 215 pharyngeal, 22, 85–7, 90f. pre-palatal, 24 retroflex, 304, 314 sibilant, 24, 30f., 285 stops in Cypriot Maronite Arabic, 280 uvular, 86f. velar, 22, 87, 122 velarised, 49 voiced, 120, 173 voiceless, 120, 174 weak, 91, 118f., 121 Constantinople, fall of, 2 construct state, 99–101

390  The Arabic Language content morpheme see morpheme, content contextual forms, 53 continuum, language, 148, 243f., 247, 300 continuum, urban-rural, 185 contracted forms, 73 contrastive grammar, 105 convergence, 16f., 139f., 146, 149 conversion, 3 of Moriscos, 2 to Islam, 126, 127 converts, 57 speech of 130 co-occurrence constraints, 89, 122 co-occurrence, of variants, 254 Coptic, 17, 81, 129, 141, 205, 332 as a literary language, 128 as language of the liturgy, 129 icons, 165 Sahidic, 128 script, for Arabic, 163f. substratal influence, 129, 143f. survival of, 129 copula, 98 derived from personal pronoun 282f. Cordova, university of, 2 corpus linguistics, 106 Corriente, F., 19, 55 corruption of speech, 63f., 66f., 138, 299 countability, 148 marker of, 102 creole Arabic see Arabic creole créole haitien, 242 creoles, 299–312 creolisation, 147f., 299f. of Juba Arabic, 306 Crusades, 1 cuneiform script, 6 cursive script, 64 Cushitic languages, 17 CV skeleton, 89 Cyprus, 280 ḍād, 121; see also consonants, /ḍ/ Dadan, 29 Dadanitic inscriptions, 29 Ḏ̣afīr, 186 Daghestan, 331 Dagorn, R., 58 Daher, J., 255 Dahir berbère, 272 dāʿī, 301 ḏalaqiyya, 120 dalīl, pl. dalāʾil, 118 Damascus, 130, 197

linguistic situation in, 253f. Damietta see Dumyāṭ ḍamma, 63 Daoud, M., 262 Dār al-Kutub aẓ-Ẓāhiriyya, 227 Dari 128, 313 dārija, 241, 269 Davids, A., 315 Ḍayf, Š., 235 Dead Sea scrolls, 10 de-arabicisation, of lexicon, 322 Dearborn, 292 declension, 22, 46, 57, 93, 109, 111 functional load of, 55 in poetic Arabic, 47 loss of, 53, 56, 136, 185 of the verb, 117 retention of, 16, 18, 72 see also case endings Dedanitic see Dadanitic defective spelling, of long vowels, 33 definite article see article, definite definiteness, 305 delocutive verb, 231 demonstratives, 20, 159, 249 position of, 209 Dereli, B., 284 derivational morphology, 109, 119 derivation, of verbs from nouns, 92 Déroche, F., 63 determination, 100 Devanagari script, 327 dhimotikí, 242 diacritic dots, 32, 63f., 314 in Hebrew, 161 dialect atlas 6, 176f., 190 dialect communal, 201, 254 conservative, 185, 188, 193 contact, 180 continuum, 188, 280 geography, 172 map, 176–82 marker, 248f. poetry see colloquial poetry study, reaction to, 174f. written, 168f. dialectal koine see koine, dialectal dialectology, 6f., 172–91 dialectometrics, 177 dialects classification of, 176 common features of, 133, 138 differences between, 44, 133, 139

Index  391 hierarchy of, 45 pre-Islamic, 47–53, 63, 139 diathesis, 105 Dichtersprache, 53, 55 dictionaries, 71 Arabic, 103f., 226 of Classical Arabic, 103f. of Modern Arabic, 240 rhyming order in, 123 Diem, W. , 32, 56f., 142f., 143, 148, 247, 249 différentiel see parlers différentiels diffusion, 180 diglossia, 80, 86, 132, 147, 153, 175, 241–58, 300 diglossia, pre-Islamic, 47, 58 diglossic mixing, 246 diglossic switching 246 diminutives, 19, 93 ḏimmī, 161f. Dinka, 306 diphthongs, 49 in the Egyptian Delta 175 diptosis, 93, 115, 116 direct object, 96 Directionality Constraint, 245 discourse analysis global, 245f. local, 245 discrete variety see variety, discrete dīwān, 65, 75, 81 dīwān al-maʿārif, 227 dominant language, 296 Dominant Language Hypothesis, 245f. Dominicans, 3 DO-verb see dummy verb Dravidian languages, 18 Dreisilbengesetz, 88 Druze, 265 ḏū ṭāʾiyya 51 dual, 135, 148, 187 dual, undeclined, 51 dual endings, 93, 116 Ḏufār, 127 . Dūmat al-Jandal, 29, 75 dummy verb, 233f., 284, 295, 323, 326, 328 Dumyāṭ, 182, 207 Dutch, 331 as standard language in South Africa, 315 East Semitic, 19 Eblaite, 10, 12, 16 ecolinguistics, 180 Edfu, 306 Edzard, L., 16, 139

Egypt, 174 Facebook in, 238 linguistic situation in, 251 Egyptian Academy see Academy of Cairo Egyptian movies, 252 Egyptian nationalism, 224 Egyptian soap operas, 252 Egyptian teachers, 252f. Egyptian influence, in Yemen, 183 Egyptianisation, 166 Egyptianisms, 159 Ehret, C., 91 Eid, M., 245 Eisele, J., 93 El Aissati, A., 293 El Houri, W., 250 elevated style, 79 Elghamis, R., 315 Elgibali, A., 244f., 301 elision, 134, 142 of /a/, 199 of /i/, /u/, 200 of final vowels, 56 of short vowels, 88, 209, 213 of vowels, 199 elsine-i selase, 324 Elyaacoubi, M., 214 embedded language, 294 Emin Pasha, 307 emphasis, 86f. loss of, 142, 278, 280, 285, 308 spread, 87 emphatic allophone, 121 emphaticisation see emphasis spread ʿĒn ʿAvdat, inscription of, 36f. enclaves, linguistic, 142, 189, 203, 213, 276, 313 endogamy, 285 England, migrants in, 297 English, 300 as interface language in Facebook, 238 as official language in South Sudan, 307 in India, 327 in Lebanon, 265 in Malta, 277 in Tunisia, 262 in Zanzibar, 319 Enlightenment, French, 221 Ennahda party, 261 Ennaji, M., 262, 267f. epenthesis, 47, 88 epenthetic vowel, 188, 199f., 203, 209 epigraphic script, 64 Epigraphic South Arabian, 6, 11, 16, 18, 22f., 26, 28, 44

392  The Arabic Language epistolary style, 75 ʿEreb, 27 Eritrea, 301 Erpenius, 4f. Ethiopia, Arabic in, 301 Ethiopian, 16, 18f., 22f. invasion, 28 Semitic languages, 11 Ethiopic, 12, 14, 20, 22f., 214 Ethiopic, Classical, 11 ethnolect, 296 etymology, 115 exegesis, of the Qurʾān, 66 existential, 101, 303f. expletive pronoun, 99 extension, analogical, 228 extension, semantic, 228, 230, 232 ezāfe, 325 fa-, 233 fāʿala, 19, 23 faʿālīl, 134 Facebook, 237f. fāʿil, 111f. fʿālil, 134 family-tree model, 12, 15, 17f., 186 Farhangestān, 322 Fārisī, al- 81 Farsi, 81f., 313, 322 fasād al-luġa, 138, 299; see also corruption of speech faṣīḥ, pl. fuṣaḥāʾ, 56f., 71 fatḥa, 63, 315 Fatimids, 129 Faysal, King, 226 feature checking, 99 female speech in Cairo, 256 in Jordania, 255 in Korba, 256 in Sult, 255 feminine ending, 30, 54, 93, 102f., 135, 148, 159, 207 in Persian, 323 Ferguson, C., 85f., 103, 138, 148, 242f. fī, 303f. fiʿāl, 134 fiʿl, 117–19; see also verb final vowels, elision of, 56 fiqh, 77 first language acquisition, 89 Fīrūzābādī al-, 123 Fischer, W., 214, 186f. Fishman, J., 242

f-ʿ-l notation, 89, 109f., 115 focaliser, 309 folktales, 158 foreigner talk see foreigner-directed talk foreigner-directed talk, 299f., 302 Forkel, F., 269 formal speech, 241 Franco-Arabe, 270f., 294; see also codeswitching, French-Arabic Frayḥa, A., 235 French, 236, 241, 300 as a foreign language in Algeria, 264 as interface language in Facebook, 238 as language of administration, 263 as language of literature in Algeria 264 as language of progress, 269 as language of technology, 269 in Algeria, 242, 263 in Moroccan schools, 262 in North Africa, 259f., 266 in the sciences, 268 in Tunisian schools, 261 local variety in the Maghreb, 271 French Berber policy, 272 French colonial policy, 259 French influence, in Modern Standard Arabic, 269 French language policy, 174 French schools, in Morocco, 262 Frisius, Laurentius, 3 fronting of /a/, 121 Fūʾād I, King, 227 fuʿāl, 134 Fück, J., 82 Fulfulde, 288, 318, 321 ajami, 331 in Arabic script, 331 functional distribution, of varieties, 242 functional grammar, 105 fundamentalism, Islamic, 261, 273 fuṣḥā, 236f., 241f., 248f. fuṣḥā al-ʿaṣr, 244 fuṣḥā at-turāṯ, 244 fuṣḥā, knowledge of, 255 fusḥāmmiyya, 171 Fusṭāṭ, 128, 130, 205 future expected, 200 intended, 200 marker, 146, 202, 248 tense, 94, 137, 146, 194, 209, 282 Gafos, A., 89 Gafsa, 129

Index  393 gahawa syndrome, 194, 196, 208 Gao, 301 Garbini, G., 15–17, 20–2, 27 Garmalahi, 36 garrison camps, 306 Ġassān, Banū, 28, 212 ġayr munṣarif, 115; see also diptotic Geʿez, 18 gemination, 64 gender, 141 as a variable, 255 distinction, 134, 187f., 193, 197, 202, 212 gender-related variation in Korba, 256 in Damascus, 256 in Sult, 256 in Cairo, 257 genealogical paradigm see genetic classification genealogy, tribal, 43 general trend, 139 generative grammar, 105 genetic classification, 13–15, 17 genitive, 111, 145 analytic, 55, 158, 165 synthetic, 55 genitive exponent, 136, 139, 144–6, 164, 167, 180, 183, 187, 194, 202, 282, 305 in Nigerian Arabic, 289 in Nubi, 309 Geniza, 160, 162 geographers, Arab, 130 Georgian, 18 Germany, migrants in, 297 gerund, in Nubi, 308 Ghana, 301 Ghannouchi, R., 261 Gḥaṭān see Qaḥṭān Ghazna, 326 Ghaznavids, 326 ghost words, 96 Gibson, M., 254 gilit see Arabic language, gilit Gindibu, 27 glides, 46, 49, 91, 116, 118f., 121 glossing, xviii glottalisation, 23 Golius, 5 Gouttenoire, M.-A., 71 Government and Binding, 105 grammar aim of, 63, 66, 108 codification of, 67 Greco-Latin 107f., 111f.

normative, 108 simplification of, 235 teaching of, 235 grammarians, 57, 63 grammars of Classical Arabic, 103 of Modern Arabic, 239f. grammatical marker, 118 grammatical tradition Arabic, 107–24 beginning of, 57 grammaticalisation, 136, 145, 299 Granada, 3 fall of, 2 kingdom of, 316 university of, 2 Grandguillaume, G., 262 Greater Lebanon, 265 Greece, diglossia in, 242 Greek, 3, 65, 81 Greek as language of administration, 127 as language of the dīwān, 65 as language of the elite, 128 Christian, 155 in Egypt, 128 medicine, 1 philosophy, 1 Greenberg, J., 89 Gregory of Nazianzus, 171 Griffith, S., 128 Grotzfeld, H., xvii, 200 Guillaume, J.-P., 118 Guinea, 321 Gulf Arabic Pidgin, 302 Gulf Asian Pidgin, 302 Gulf States, Facebook in, 238 Gumperz, J., 242 Gussenhoven, C., 309 Gutas, D., 70 Haarmann, U., 82 ḫabar, pl. aḫbār, 78, 111, 113; see also predicate habitual aspect, 145f., 209 ḥadīṯ, 78 collecting of, 75, 78 Ḥadramawtī traders, 329f. Haeri, N., 251, 256 ḫafḍ, 111 ḫafīf, 64 Hagarenes see Agarenes Haiti, diglossia in, 242 Haitian Creole, 308 Ḥajjāj al-, 74

394  The Arabic Language ḥāl construction, 326 Ḫālid ibn Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya, 75 Ḫalīl ibn ʾAḥmad al-, 64, 70f., 119, 122 ḥalqiyya, 120 Ḥamāsa, 51 Hamdānī al-, 44, 72, 127, 196 Hamitic languages, 17 Hamito-Semitic languages, 17 hamza, 45, 49, 64 absence of, 45f., 49 spelling of, 45f., 54, 64 hamzat al-waṣl, xv Ḥanafites, 80 Ḫapiru, 27 ḥarf al-jarr, 111 ḥarf al-līn wa-l-madd, 121 ḥarf, pl. ḥurūf, 110 Ḥarīrī al-, 79 ḫarja, 316 Ḥarrān, inscription of, 37 Ḫarsūsī ,127 Ḥaṣā al-, 30 Ḥaṣaitic, 30f. Ḥasan al-Baṣrī al-, 76 Hassan II, King, 273 Ḥassāniyya see Arabic language, Ḥassāniyya Ḫaṭīb al-Baġdādī, al-, 78 Hausa, 17, 314, 318 as lingua franca, 318 in Sudan, 318 hawāʾiyya, 120 Hayapa, 27 Ḫaybar, 37 Ḫazraj 44 head, 99 headlines, newspaper, 233 Heath, J., 269f. heaviness, of phonemes, 119 heavy sequence, 207f. Hebbo, A., 83 Hebrew, 8, 10, 12, 18–24, 86, 106, 332 as language of Paradise, 4 Biblical, 4, 10 feminine nouns in, 20 Mishnaic, 10 Modern, 10 slang, 332 transcription of, xvii verbal system of, 21 Hebrews, 27 Heine, B., 310 Heinen-Nasr, R., 239 Heligoland Treaty, 319 Hellenistic cities, 197

heresy, 1 heterogeneity, morphological, 14 Hetzron, R., 14f., 20f. Hezbollah, 266 hierarchy, of phonemes, 119 high variety, 153, 242 Ḥijāz, 45, 186 Ḥijr, al-, 29 Ḥijr, inscription of al-, 36 Hilāl, Banū, 129, 149, 186, 189, 211 Ḥillī, Ṣafī d-Dīn al-, 159 Ḥimyar, 28, 44 Ḥimyarī, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-, 277 Ḥimyaritic, 44, 143, 196 Hindawi, 326 Hindi, 326f. Hippocrates, 77 Ḥīra al-, 37, 39, 43, 67, 127 Hišām, Caliph, 75f. historical-comparative linguistics, 16f., 140 ḫizāna, 75 Hobyōṭ, 127 Hochdeutsch, 242 Holes, C., 149, 176, 233, 254f. hollow verbs, 49, 118 Holy Land, 2 home language instruction, 292–4 homorganic consonants, 122 Hoogland, J., x, xi, 169 Horn of Africa, 301 Huḏayl, 44 Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq, 70, 77 Hungarian, 18 Ḫurāsān see Khorasan Ḫurayba, al-, inscription of, 35 Ḫūrī, G. al-, 235 Ḥuṣrī, Sāṭiʿ al-, 226 ḫuṭba, 84 Ḫwārizmī, al-, 317 hybrid formations, Arabic-French, 271 hybrid style, 168 hybrid text, 245f. hypercorrection, 58, 65, 154, 248f., 269 hyperurbanism, 207 hypocorrection, 154 hypotaxis, 137 iambic pattern, 93 Ibadidi, 27 Ibn ʿAbbās, 122 Ibn ʾAbī ʾUṣaybiʿa, 80 Ibn ʾĀjurrūm, 124 Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, 57, 63, 94, 108

Index  395 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 76f. Ibn an-Nadīm, 37 Ibn Durayd, 123 Ibn Fāris, 79, 85 Ibn Ḫaldūn, 56f., 138, 173, 223, 299 Ibn Hišām, 78, 83 Ibn Hišām al-Laḫmī, 131 Ibn ʾIsḥāq, 78 Ibn Jinnī, 72, 81, 91, 123f., 184 Ibn Maḍāʾ, 235 Ibn Manẓūr, 103, 123 Ibn Quzmān, 315 Ibn Sūdūn, ʿAlī al-Bašbuġāwī, 159 ibtidāʾ, 113 ʾiḍāfa, 99, 111; see also possessive construction identity marker, 296 ideophone, 290 Idi Amin, 308 ʾIdrīsī al-, 129 Idrissi, A., 89 ʾIfrīqiya, 130 Iftaḥ yā Simsim see Sesame Street ʾiḥyāʾ at-turāṯ, 227 ʾiʿjāz al-Qurʾān, 42 ʾijāza, 329 ʿIjl, tombstone of, 34 illiteracy, of the Prophet, 61, 62 illiterate speakers, 147 ʿilm al-luġa, 109 ʾimāla, 48f., 121, 159, 161, 164, 256, 315; see also vowels, fronting of /a/ in Syro-Lebanese dialects, 198f. pausal, 207 imperative, 309 as source of pidgin verbs, 302f. imperfect bi-, 147, 165, 200 prefix, 14, 49f., 134, 187 verb, 20, 89, 93, 111, 117f., 136; resemblance to noun, 112 implicational scale, 254 Imruʾu l-Qays, 35, 42 ʾin, 51 ʾin muḫaffafa, 51 inchoative verb, 95, 97 indefiniteness, 111 marker, 22f., 188, 193 indetermination, 100 Indian Ocean, 301 indirect object, 136 Indo-European languages, 6, 12–14, 17f. Indo-European linguistics, 24 Indonesian, 24, 313, 328–31 in Latin script, 329

infinitive, in Nubi, 308 informal speech, 241 Ingham, B., 188, 192f., 196, 204f. in-group language, 155, 161, 249, 256 ʾinna, 51 innovation, 13, 178, 185, 193, 215 morpholexical, 14 negative, 15 spreading of, 179 inscription of an-Namāra, 35f., 42, 51 of ʿĒn ʿAvdat, 36f. of Ḥarrān, 37 of al-Ḥijr, 36 of al-Ḫurayba, 35 of Jabal ʾUsays, 37 of ʾUmm al-Jimāl, 35–7 of Zabad, 37 inscriptions Ancient North Arabian, 40 Arabic, 40 Aramaic, 36 Dadanitic, 29 Liḥyanitic, 29 Nabataean, 33, 49, 53 Palmyrene, 32f. pre-Islamic, 26–39, 53 pseudo-Sabaean, 34, 44 Qaḥṭānic, 34, 44 Qaryat al-Faʾw, 34 Ṣafaitic, 30, 40 South Arabian, 28 integration, of loanwords, 270 interdigitation, 89 interference, 141 interjection, 110 interlanguage varieties, 300 interlocutor, 246 internal passive see passive, internal internal plural see broken plural interrogatives, 137 clitic, 204 fronting of 143, 144 position of, 209 IPA, xiv, xviii ʾiqlīmiyya, 251 ʾiʿrāb, 47, 57, 109, 111, 184; see also declension Iraqi Academy see Academy of Baghdad Ishmael see ʾIsmāʿīl Iskenderun, 197 Islamic art, 64 conquests, 126, 149f. languages 7

396  The Arabic Language reform, 225 revival, 251 revolution, in Iran, 322 Spain, 1f., 44; see also ʾAndalus alIslamisation, 263, 285 ism, 110, 115–17; see also noun ʾIsmāʿīl, 37, 44, 58, 253 ʾisnād, 78 isogloss, 176 ištiqāq, 115 ʾakbar, 123 kabīr, 123 Italian, 296, 317 in Malta, 277 ʾiṭbāq, 86 iterative aspect, 94 iʿtimād, 120 Ivrit see Hebrew, Modern izdiwājiyyat al-luġa, 243; see also diglossia Jaʿal, 205 Jaʿaliyyūn, 205 Jabal Ramm, graffiti of, 37 Jabal Šammar, 189 Jabal ʾUsays, inscription of, 37 Jabartī al-, 221, 223 Jāhiliyya, 39, 45, 55 language of, 42–59 Jāḥiẓ al-, 79, 172 jamʿ mukassar, 117 Jamaican English, 308 Japheth, 5, 16 jarcha, 159, 316 jargon see trade jargon, work jargon jarr, 111; see also genitive Jastrow, O., 201f., 214, 282, 284 Java, 329 Jawharī al-, 123 Jawi script, 329 jazl, 79 jazm, 112; see also jussive Jews, language of, 155 Jibbali, 127 Jiha, M., 201 Jin, H., 106 jizya, 126 Jong, R. de, 194, 208 Jordanian Academy see Academy of Amman Jouhadi al-, 273 Juba, 306 Judaeo-Arabic, 155, 160–3 Juhayna, 205 jumla, 112; see also sentence jumla fiʿliyya, 112; see also sentence, verbal

jumla ismiyya, 112; see also sentence, nominal Jurhum, 37, 43 jussive, 20, 153f. k- perfect, 44, 143, 195f. Kaʿba, 61 Kabylian, 271f. Kabylian activism, 273 Kager, R., 88 kalām, 112 kalām al-ʿArab, 43f., 73 kalamon’Antesitesy, 321 Kalb, 44 Kanuri, 288, 318 ajami, 331 in Arabic script, 331 Kartvelian languages, 18 Kashmiri, in Arabic script, 331 kaskasa, 50 kaškaša, 50 kasra, 63, 315 katharévousa 242 kātib, pl. kuttāb 75f. Kenya, 307f., 317, 319 Khorasan, 128, 285 Khuzestan, 285, 322 Kienast, B., 12, 16 Kikuyu, 307 Kinda, kingdom of, 28, 43 kinship names, 141 Kinubi see Nubi kitāb, 62 Knauf, E., 43 koine dialectal, 182 Iraqi, 182 military, 138 Moroccan, 182 poetic, 47, 53, 55 poetico-Qurʾānic, 47, 53 sedentary, 149 koineisation, 183f., 253 Kormakiti, 279f. Kossmann, M., 315 Kūfa, 81, 130, 201 Kūfic script, 64 Kurd ʿAlī, 227 Kurdish, 283f. in Arabic script, 315 kuttāb, 262 kuttāb see kātib Ladefoged, P., 87 lafḏ̣, 79

Index  397 lahawiyya, 120 Laḫm, Banū, 28 laḥn, 173 laḥn al-ʿāmma, 108, 131 Lake Chad, 288, 305 Lakhmids, 39 Lamu, 314 Landberg, C. de, 153f. language as God’s creation, 108 as identity marker, 237, 296 as manipulation, 250 auxiliary, 299 codification of, 60f. dominant, 245, 291, 296 embedded, 294 gendered, 258 harmony of, 109 home, 291, 293, 296 in nationalism, 250 of the media, 230, 233f. purity of, 69 sacred, 251 supra-tribal, 60 vehicular, 305 language acquisition, 56, 300 first 89 second, 133, 141f., 146 language attitude, in North Africa, 268f. language attrition, 293 language choice, 246–9 in North Africa, 266–8 in political speeches, 250 manipulation of, 253 language contact, 16 Arabic–Aramaic, 53, 142 Arabic–Berber, 141 Arabic–South Arabian, 143 Arabic–Tajik, 286 Arabic–Uzbek, 287 language corpora, 106 language islands see enclaves, linguistic language learning, unmonitored, 146 language loss, 293, 296 language myth, 85 language question, 252 language reform, 226, 236 in Turkey, 322 language shift, 293, 296 from Coptic to Arabic, 128 of the dīwān, 65, 75, 81 Larcher, P., 119 laryngal theory, 18 Latin, 68, 241

Christian, 155 in Malta, 277 survival of, 129 Latin script, for Arabic, 168 LBCI, 266 learnability, 146 Lebanese in Argentine, 292 in Brazil, 292 in the United States, 291 Lebanon 168 biculturality of, 265 domestics in, 303 linguistic situation in, 265 mandate period in, 265 Lehnübersetzung, 230 level of education, as a variable, 254 level of speech, 244f., 247 levelling, 147, 193 of verbal endings, 203 urban, 183 Levin, A., 159 Lévy, S., 180 lexical variation, in Modern Standard Arabic, 234 lexical-functional grammar, 106 lexicographers, 67 lexicography, Arabic, 70f., 122–4 lexicon Bedouin, 667 codification of, 70 expansion of, 60, 67, 69, 227–33 modernisation of, 227–33 of rajaz poetry, 71 reform of, 226–33 restructuring of, 146 Libya, 189 Berber in, 130 ligatures, 39 lightness of phonemes, 119 Liḥyanitic, 29 inscriptions, 29 script, 34 lingua franca, 14 Aramaic as, 10, 32, 127 linguistic continuum, 147 linguistic distance, 177 linguistic errors, 57, 130f., 138, 153f., 166, 172 linguistic markers, 138, 249f. linguistic pollution, 261 linking suffix, 140, 164, 196, 203, 285f., 289 lisān al-ʿajam, 316 lisān al-ʾifrīqī al-, 129 liṯawiyya, 120

398  The Arabic Language literacy, 61, 315 in the Jāhiliyya, 83 literary language, 52f., 58 literary standard, 73 loan postpositions in Turkish, 325 loan preposition, 321, 323 in Urdu, 327 loan translation, 230 loan translations, from Greek in Arabic, 163 loan verbs, 284, 292, 295 in Hausa, 319 in Maltese, 278 in Persian, 323 in Turkish, 326 in Urdu, 328 loanwords, 226, 228f. Arabic, 301 Arabic in Acehnese, 330 Arabic in Bambara, 318 Arabic in Berber, 332 Arabic in Catalan, 331 Arabic in Coptic, 332 Arabic in English, 331 Arabic in French, 331 Arabic in Fulfulde, 318, 321 Arabic in Hausa, 318 Arabic in Hebrew slang, 332 Arabic in Indonesian, 24, 328–31 Arabic in Italian, 317 Arabic in Kanuri, 318 Arabic in Malagasy, 321 Arabic in Malay, 329–31 Arabic in Nubian, 332 Arabic in Ottoman Turkish, 223, 325 Arabic in Persian, 322–4 Arabic in Portuguese, 331 Arabic in South Arabian, 34 Arabic in Spanish, 24, 316f. Arabic in Swahili, 320f. Arabic in Tamil, 328 Arabic in Turkic, 82 Arabic in Turkish 325f. Arabic in Western European languages, 317 Arabo-Persian in Bengali, 328 Arabo-Persian in Urdu, 327f. Aramaic in Arabic, 67f., 83 Bantu in Nubi, 310 Berber in Arabic, 141 Berber in Ḥassāniyya Arabic, 213 Berber in Maghreb Arabic, 213 Coptic in Arabic, 129 Dutch in Indonesian 331 English in Arabic, 274

English in Lebanese Arabic, 292 English in Maltese, 278f. English in Nubi, 310 English in Palestinian Arabic, 275 English in sermons, 252 English in Swahili, 320 Ethiopic in Arabic, 68f. foreign, 67, 69 French in Algerian Arabic, 274, 296 French in Arabic, 230 French in Moroccan Arabic, 269f., 295 Greek in Arabic, 68, 70 Greek in Cypriot Maronite Arabic, 280f. Hebrew in Judaeo-Arabic, 160, 162f. identification of, 122f. in the Qurʾān, 67, 69 integrated, 270 Italian in Maltese, 278f. Ivrit in Palestinian Arabic, 275 Kurdish in Anatolian Arabic, 283f. Latin in Arabic, 68 Nabataean in Arabic, 68f. Ottoman Turkish in Arabic, 223 Pahlavi in Arabic, 68 Persian in Arabic, 68, 70, 81, 123 Persian in Khuzestan Arabic, 204 Persian in Kūfa Arabic, 172 Persian in Ottoman Turkish, 325 Persian in Urdu, 326 Portuguese in Lebanese Arabic, 292 Romance in Andalusian Arabic, 316 Russian in Arabic, 230 Sanskrit in Bengali, 328 Sanskrit in Hindi, 327 Sicilian in Maltese, 278 South Arabian in Arabic, 68f. Spanish in Moroccan Arabic, 270 Syriac in Arabic, 67–9, 83 Turkish in Anatolian Arabic, 283f. Western in Arabic, 226 Lombard, D., 329 low variety, 153, 242 Lucas, R., 237 Luffin, X., 305 luġa al-wusṭā al-, 243 luġa mumtazija, 173 luġa mutawassiṭa, 236 luġa muyassara, 236 Luganda, 307 luġāt, 45, 47, 52 luġat aḍ-ḍād, 87, 121 luġat al-muṯaqqafīn, 236 Luo, 306 Luxenberg, C., 39, 83

Index  399 mā ḥijāziyya, 51 Maamouri, M., 106 Macdonald, M., x, 37, 43 Madagascar, 321 Maddieson, I., 87 māḍī, 117; see also perfect verb madrasa, 314 madrása/mádrasa stress types, 208 mafʿal, 92, 110 mafʿūl, 111f. mafʿūl muṭlaq, 111; see also object maġāzī, 78 Maghreb, linguistic situation in, 259–75 maġrib al-ʾaqṣā al-, 130 Maġribī, Yūsuf al-, 174 Mahdi, 158 Mahdist revolt, 306f. Mahmud, U., 306f. mahmūs, 120 Mahra, 127 maḫraj, 119, 173 Maiduguri, 297 Maimonides, 160 majhūr, 120, 173 Majmaʿ al-luġa al-ʿarabiyya, 227 majrūr bi-l-ʾiḍāfa, 235 Malagasy, 321 Malay, 301, 329–31 in Arabic script, 314, 329 Malaysian Archipelago, 329 Malta, 296 conquest of, 130 Maltese, 87, 102, 145f., 189f., 213, 276–9, 295 as national language, 296 as official language, 277 Maʿlūla, 127, 142 Mamluks, 82 Maʾmūn al-, Caliph, 70, 77, 228 maʿnā, 79, 109 Mandaean, 11 mandate period, in Lebanon, 265 Mande ajami, 331 Mande, in Arabic script, 331 Manfredi, S. , 311 māniʿ aṣ-ṣarf, pl. mawāniʿ aṣ-ṣarf, 116 Mansour, J., 202 Manṣūr, Caliph al-, 78 manuscripts, Berber, 272 maqāmāt, 79 Maʿqil, 129 Marçais, P., 141, 242 Mari, archives of, 10, 27 Marīdī ,301

marker aspect, 94, 136f., 145f., 158, 194, 209, 245, 307. 309 future, 146, 202, 248, 280 non-past, 280 of countability, 102 of indefiniteness, 22f., 188, 193 past, 94, 280 plural, 117, 309 possessive, 136, 139, 144–6, 164, 167, 180, 183, 187, 194, 202, 282, 305 predication, 304 standard, 248f. Maronites, 3f., 225, 265 Marrakech, 186 Marsimani, 27 Marwān II, Caliph, 76 masʾala zunbūriyya, 72 maṣdar, 77, 100 matched guise technique, 267f. matn, 78 matrix, 92 matrix language, 246, 294f. Matrix Language Frame model, 246 Mauritania, 129, 301 mawālī see mawlā Mawhūb ibn Manṣūr, 164 mawlā, pl. mawālī, 57, 130 Mazdaeism, 128 McCarthy, J., 93 Mecca, 28, 43, 45, 47, 61 Meccan model, of teaching, 329 media preachers, 251 medicine, 3, 75, 159 Medina, 43f. Mehri, 11, 16, 26, 127 Mejdell, G., x, 168, 245f., 248f. melody, vocalic, 89 merger, of voiced and voiceless stops, 280 merger, phonemic, 134 Middle Arabic see Arabic language, Middle middle language, 243 Middle Persian see Pahlavi middle verb, 96 Mifsud, M., 278 migrant labourers, 301 migrants, Arab, 290–6 migrants, rural, 183 migration, 16 Bedouin, 128, 140, 149, 180, 186, 188, 201, 208, 211, 285, 288 of Jews from Baghdad, 202 of Lebanese to America, 291 of North-Africans to Europe, 291

400  The Arabic Language to the city, 207 military camps, 211 military koine, 138 Miller, C., x, 183, 307 mimation, 22, 28 Minaean, 11, 26, 29 Minimalist grammar, 106 mission civilisatrice, 259 missionaries, Christian, 3 mixed Arabic, 168 mixed dialect, 207 mixed grammar, 239 mixed marriages, 147, 307 mixed register, 270 mixed style, 168 modal endings, 136, 145 modal expressions, 137 modals, 101 Modern South Arabian, 11, 16, 21, 24, 26, 143 Modern Standard Arabic see Arabic language, Modern Standard modernisation, 225, 255 of language, 226 of lexicon, 227–33 modersmalundervisning, 294 Mohammed Reza Shah, 322 Mohammed V, King, 262 monogenesis, 138f. Moriscos, 2, 316 expulsion of, 2 Moroccan Academy see Academy of Rabat Moroccan minority, in the Netherlands, 167 Moroccans, in Western Europe, 292–6 Morocco, 184 Arabicisation of, 130 Berber in, 130 Facebook in, 238 French occupation of, 260 linguistic situation in, 262f. morph-by-morph translation, xviii morpheme content, 246 system, 246 morphological derivation, 89 morphological patterns, 92, 109, 230f. morphological segmentation, 110, 116f. morphological template, 13, 89 morphology, 92–7 heterogeneous, 14 non-concatenative, 85, 89 root-and-pattern, 89 movies, Egyptian, 183, 207, 252 Mozambique, 319 Mozárabes, 316

Muʿāwiya, Caliph, 75 mubtadaʾ, 111, 113; see also topic muḍāf, 111, 235 muḍāf ʾilayhi, 111 Muḍar, language of, 173 muḍāriʿ, 111, 117; see also imperfect verb Mughal empire, 326 muhājirūn, 43 Muḥammad ʿAbduh, 225 Muḥammad ʿAlī, 221, 226 Muḥammad, Prophet, 1, 28, 42, 44, 61f., 74f., 126 biography, 62 Mujāhid, 68 multilingualism, 81 munḥarifa, 242 Muqaddasī al-, 173 Muqātil ibn Sulaymān, 67 muʿrab, 112 muṣḥaf, 62 mustaʿmalāt, 71 mustaqbal, 117 mustaʿrib, 43, 316; see also Mozárabes muʿtall, 118f. Mutanabbī al-, 73 muṭāwaʿa, 119 Muṭayr, 186 muwallad, 73 muwaššaḥ, 74, 159, 315 Myers-Scotton, C., 246, 294 Nabataean, 31f. inscriptions, 33, 49, 53 kingdom, 11, 22, 28, 140 orthography, 37 script, 36, 39, 54, 63f. Nabhan, N., 292 Naess, U., 302 Nagato, Y., xi Nahḍa, 166, 225f., 237 naḥt, 231 naḥw, 107; see also grammar; syntax Najd, 186, 188 Namāra inscription, 35f., 42, 51 Napoleon, 221 naql, 63, 66 naṣb, 111f.; see also accusative Nasrallah, H., 250 Nasser, President, 250 nation, Arab see Arab nation nationalism, 166 and Arabic, 224 Arab, 224, 250 Egyptian, 224f.

Index  401 Islamic, 226 Lebanese, 265 regional, 251 Syrian, 225 native speakers, 108, 146 naṯr, 79 Navajo, 87 negation, 86, 101, 246, 249 in Nubi, 310 lam, 20 nominal, 101, 155 tensed, 101 Nehmé, L., 63 Neo-Arabic see Arabic language, New neologism, 70, 229, 232 neoterici, 2 Nessana, archives of, 65, 157 Netherlands, Moroccan immigrants in the, 292–6 New Persian see Farsi newspaper corpus, 106 Niger, 274, 288, 317f. Nigeria, 205, 288, 305, 317f. Nilotic languages, 306 Niniveh, 27 nisba, 93, 134 in Ottoman Turkish, 326 niṭʿiyya, 120 Nitsana see Nessana Noah, 5, 16 Nöldeke, T., 100, 155 nomads, invasion by, 12f., 16, 21, 27 nominal classes, in Swahili, 320 nominal negation, 155 nominal sentence, 52, 96f., 102, 112f., 235 nominative, 111 non-concatenation see morphology, nonconcatenative non-countable, 148 non-derivational morphology, 109 non-différentiel see parlers non-différentiels Normans, 277 norms, of language, 63, 66 North Africa, Arabicisation of, 129f. North Arabian, 20, 44 script, 43 North-west Semitic, 18–20, 22 Nortier, J., 294f. Nostratic languages, 18 noun(s), 115–17 animate, 286 definition of, 110 feminine, 33 inanimate, 286

weak, 116 Nuba, 306 Nubi, 87, 189, 307–10 Nubia, 205 Nubian 332 Nubians, 20, 307 Nuer, 306 numerals, 102f. in Swahili, 321 numerical characters, in transcription, 169 nunation, 22, 46, 54, 63, 93, 111, 115f., 164, 193, 289 in dialects, 54, 193 object, 111f. fronting, in Uzbekistan Arabic, 287 internal 111 marking, on participle, 286 Obligatory Contour Principle, 89 Obodas, 36 observer’s paradox, 175 OCP see Obligatory Contour Principle Oġuz Turkic, 82 Old Arabic see Arabic language, Old Old Egyptian, 17 Old Libyan, 17 Old South Arabian see Epigraphic South Arabian Omani dynasty, 319 one-morph-one-meaning principle, 110, 116 oral poetry, 193 oral transmission, 60 Oran, 129 oratory style, 250 Oriental languages, 4f. orthography Arabic, 64 invention of, 60 Nabataean, 37 Qurʾānic, 45, 47, 49, 54f. Ottoman empire, 221, 223f., 250, 265 Ottoman parliament, 224 Ottoman Turkish, 223, 325 in Arabic script, 324f. over-generalisation, 180, 207 Owens, J., x, 47, 53, 132f., 139f., 206, 287–90, 300, 305 Pahlavi, 68, 127, 313 as a written language, 128 as an administrative language, 127 script, 314 Pakistan, 327 Palestinians, 183

402  The Arabic Language Palmyra, 28, 32 Palmyrene inscriptions, 32f. Palmyrene kingdom, 11 Palva, H., 147, 192 pan-Arabism, 166, 224f., 250, 273 pan-Islamism, 226 Panović, I., 169, 252 papyri, 57f., 63, 65f., 74, 157 bilingual, 157 language of, 65, 149, 152, 157, 158 mistakes in, 131 Paradise, language of, 4 parallelism, 76f. Paris, University of, 2 Parkinson, D., 255 parlers différentiels, 199 parlers non-différentiels, 199 parser, 106 Parsi-i dari, 128 participle, 77 active, 94f. in Uzbekistan Arabic, 286 with object marking, 286 with perfect aspect, 196, 203 with subject marking, 286 particle, 111 coordinative, 233 definition of, 110 Partition, 327 parts of speech, 110 Pashto, in Arabic script, 331 passive, 49, 233, 237, 245 formed with prefix, 214 in Berber, 214 in Ḥassāniyya, 215 in Nubi, 308f. internal, 95, 135, 158, 188, 193 participle, 19 past marker, 94, 280 past tense, 94 Pataouète, 271 Pate, 314 pattern, morphological, 92, 109, 230f. pausal form, 33, 36, 53–5 Payne, T., xviii Penn Arabic treebank, 106 Pentateuch, translation of, 161 perfect aspect, 95, 196 perfect verb, 20, 90, 93, 117f., 135 k- 44, 143, 195f. permansive, in Akkadian, 14 permutation, 92, 123 Perry, J., 323 Persian, 6f., 81, 127f., 313, 322–4

as language of missionaries, 301 as literary language, 81f., 128 as literary language in the Mughal empire, 326 as literary language in the Ottoman empire, 324 in Arabic script 314, 322, in Indonesia, 330 in recitation, 80 in prayers, 80 study of, 5 substratal influence in Khorasan Arabic, 285 superiority of, 81 transcription of, xvii Persian Empire, 5, 10, 28 Persian kings, 127 personal prefixes, 307 personal pronoun, as copula, 282f. pesantren, 329 Peter the Venerable, 2 Peterson, J., 102 Petra, 28, 31, 140 pharyngalisation, xiv, 23, 86 loss of, 142 strong, 256 pharynx, constriction of, 86 Phoenician, 10, 20 script, 26 phoneme inventory, 23, 86 in the grammatical tradition, 120 phonetics, in the grammatical tradition, 109, 119–22 Pidgin Madame, ix, 303–5 Pidgin, Maridi, 301 Pidgin, Romanian Arabic, 311 Pidgin, Urdu Arabic, 302 pidginisation, 147f., 299 pidgins, 299–312 place of articulation, 119, 173 plural, 19, 93, 293 in Nigerian Arabic, 289 marker, 117; in Nubi, 309 patterns: in Cypriot Maronite Arabic, 280; in Yemenite Arabic, 143 sound, 54, 56, 93, 116 see also broken plurals plurality, 103 poetic koine, 55, 58 poetic language, 140 poetic licence, 65 poetic register, 46 poetry colloquial, 159

Index  403 development of, 43 language of, 46, 55, 65 pre-Islamic, 108 rajaz, 71 strophic, 73 transmission of, 61 polarity, of numerals, 102f. political speeches, language choice in, 250 political terminology, 221–5 polygenesis, 16, 139f. Port Royal, grammar of, 5 Portuguese, 292, 299, 331 possession alienable, 175 construction, 55, 102, 111, 136, 141, 144f., 175, 187, 289 inalienable, 175 marker, 136, 139, 144–6, 164, 167, 180, 183, 187, 194, 202, 282, 305 Prakrit, 326 predicate, 111, 113f., 235 predication marker, 304 prefix-conjugation, 89, 93f. prefixes, in compounds, 231 preformative vowel see imperfect prefix pre-Islamic dialects, 14, 47–52, 66, 172 pre-Islamic poetry, 60, 63, 73 preposition, 110f. fused with verb, 91 prescriptive grammar, 66 present tense, 209 press, Arabic, 226 prestige dialect, 147, 207 prestige varieties, 253, 255 Prevost, V., 129 Principles and Parameters, 106 Prochazka, T., 193 proficiency, in French, 267 pronominal suffix, 134, 187 pronoun, 99, 110 personal, 282f. resumptive, 271 proper names, 28, 36, 53f. declension of, 93 in Nabataean, 31–3 prose style, 61, 79 development of, 73 protectorate, British, 225 protectorate, French, 225 proto-Arabic, 28f. proto-Indo-European, 18 proto-language, 12, 16f. proto-Semites, 13 proto-Semitic, 49

verbal system, 20 pseudo-correction, 154, 156, 158, 160, 165f. pseudo-dual, 135, 148 pseudo-Sabaean inscriptions, 34, 44 pseudo-verb, 86, 101f. Ptolemaeic Egypt, 29 public speeches, 74 punctual aspect, 93f. Punic, as origin of Maltese, 277 purism, 228f. in Hindi, 327 in Iran, 322 in Turkey, 324 purity of language, 71, 184, 226 of Turkish, 324 Qaḥṭān, 43–5 Qaḥṭānic inscriptions, 34, 44 Qalamūn Mountains, 142 qāma bi-, 233 qāmūs, 123 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 257 Qarawiyine, 262 Qaryat al-Faʾw, 34 Qašqa Darya, 284 qāṣṣ, pl. quṣṣāṣ, 74 Qaṭabānian, 11, 26 qawl, 112 qawmiyya, 250 Qayrawān, 129f. Qays, 44 confederation of, 43, 140 qǝltu see Arabic language, qǝltu qeryānā, 62 Qipčaq Turkic, 82 qirāʾāt, 62 qiyās, 108, 229, 235; see also analogy quadriradical noun, 122 Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar, 79 Qurʾān, 42f., 60, 62 Berber translation of, 273 codification of, 61f. collection of, 62f. commentaries, 67 copyists of, 47 exegesis of, 66, 68, 78 language of, 44f., 52f., 55, 62, 65f., 76, 147 loanwords in, 69 manuscripts of, 54, 63f. miracle of, 61 orthography of, 45, 47, 49, 54f. Persian translations of, 81 recitation of, 52, 62, 80, 109, 176, 251

404  The Arabic Language rhyming conventions of, 54 text of, 45f., 61, 108 translation of, 80, 314 Qurʾān schools, 314, 329 in East Africa, 319 in Indonesia, 329 Qurayš, 28, 42, 44f., 173, 285 quṣṣāṣ see qāṣṣ Qutayba ibn Muslim, 285 Rabat, 184 Rabeh, 305 Rabīʿa, 44 radicals, 91, 114f. radio programmes, 248 speech, in Morocco, 269 texts, 167 radio Arabic see Arabic, radio rafʿ, 107, 111f.; see also nominative rajaz poetry, 71, 73 rajaz poetry, lexicon of, 96 Rāšidūn, 75 Ravid, D., 89 rāwī, 53, 61 reanalysis, 307 of Arabic loanwords in Fulfulde, 321 of Arabic loanwords in Swahili, 320 Rebhan, H., 222 recitation see Qurʾān, recitation Reckendorff, H., 100 Reconquista, 316 rection, 107 reduced varieties, 300, 302 reduplicated verbs, 135 reduplication, 96 reflexive-intransitive verbs, 96 reform in 19th-century Egypt, 225 Islamic, 225 regionalism, 251 register allegro, 56 informal, 234, 237 mixed, 270 poetic, 46 relative pronoun, 135, 159, 161, 245f. religion, as a variable, 254 restructuring, 146f. resultative aspect, 209 resumptive pronoun, 271 Retsö, J., x, 42f. revival Islamic, 251

of Arabic studies, 225 Reza Shah, 322 rhymed prose see sajʿ rhyming order, 123 ridda wars, 126 rider-warriors, 27 Rif, 272 riwiš, 252, 256 Rizk, S., 256 Roman empire, fall of, 1 Romance, 315f. languages, 101, 169 Romanian Arabic pidgin, 311 root, 91, 109, 122 abstraction, 278 determinative, 91 structure, 89 root-and-pattern morphology, 92f. root-based approach, 89 Rosenbaum, G., x Rosenberger, B., 130 Rosenthall, S., 89 Ruʾba ibn al-ʿAjjāj, 73 rural speech, 255 Russian, 230 Ryding, K., 239 Saadya Gaon, 161 Sabaean, 11, 20, 26 script, 34 sacred language, 251 Saʿd ad-Dīn Wahba 171 Sadat, President Anwar, 251 šadda, 64 Saddam Hussein, 182 saddle, camel, 27 saddle-bow, invention of, 27 sādhu-bhāṣā, 328 šadīd, 64 Ṣafa, 30 Ṣafadī aṣ-, 82 Ṣafaitic inscriptions, 30, 40 Safavids, 82 Šafawiyya, 120 Sahara, 318 saḫīf, 79 Saʿīd ʿAql, 168 Saint Catherine, monastery of, 163 šāʿir, pl. šuʿarāʾ, 53 sajʿ, 76 šajriyya, 120 Ṣāliḥ, 29 Salmanassar III, 26 Samanids, 82, 313

Index  405 Samarqand, 285 Šammar, 186, 189 Sanskrit, 327f. Saracens, 2 Sargon II, 27, 29 Sasanian empire, 128, 313, 321 Saudi Arabia, Facebook in, 238 savannah belt, 205, 318 sawāḥil, 319 Sawaie, M., 291 Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ see Severus of Eshmunein Schlözer, A. L., 5 Schoeler, G., 75 school reform, in Tunisia, 261 schools Algerian, 263 bilingual, 260f. French, 262 traditional, 262 Tunisian, 261 see also Qurʾān schools Schreiber, G., 197 Schriftsprache, 46f., 52 Schwyzertüütsch, 242, 252 science, Arabic, 3 scribal error, 51 scribes, 58, 62, 64f., 74, 76, 157 Jewish, 161 Maghrebi, 315 script Arabic, 62 Aramaic, 54 cuneiform, 6 cursive, 39 Devanagari, 327 epigraphic, 64 Hebrew, 160f. Jawi, 329 Kūfic, 64 Liḥyanitic, 34 Nabataean, 36, 39, 54, 63f. North Arabian, 43 Pahlavi, 314 Phoenician, 26 Sabaean, 34 South Arabian, 26, 28–30, 34 Syriac, 37–9, 63 Tifinagh see Tifinagh second-language acquisition, 133, 141f., 146 secret language, in Madagascar, 321 secularisation, of the Turkish republic, 324 secularism, in Turkey, 225 sedentarisation, 21

sedentary dialects, 72, 147, 150, 175 sedentary koine, 149 Seeger, U., 285 segmentation, morphological, 110, 116f. Seljuks, 82, 281, 324 semantic bleaching, 137 semantic extension, 69, 228, 230, 232 semantic relationship, of roots, 123 semantics, 109 semi-consonants see glides Semitic Central, 15, 20f. Early New, 12 East, 11, 19 homeland, 13 languages, 4–7, 10–25, 140 languages, classification of, 11–18 Late New, 12 North-east, 11 North-west, 12, 18–20, 22 Old, 12 South, 12, 14, 18, 20–2, 26, 93, 143 South-west, 12 West, 12 sentence definition of, 112 nominal see nominal sentence structure, 136 verbal see verbal sentence sermons, 76 by Amr Khaled, 252 in Kabylian, 273 language of, 251 Sesame Street, 236f. Severus of Eshmunein, 128 Shah ʾIsmāʿīl, 82 Sharkawi, M., xi Sharon, M., 36 Sheikh Kishk, 251 Shem, 5, 17 Shiʿa, 82 Shiʿites, in Bahrain, 176; see also Baḥārna Shilluk, 306 Shingazija, 320 Shuwa Arabs, 288 shwa, xvii Sībawayhi, xi, 49f., 62f., 66, 70, 72f., 81, 107, 110f., 117, 120f., 124, 174 Sicilian, 278 Sicily, Arab, 1 Sidon, 10 Šidyāq, Fāris aš-, 226, 231 Ṣiffīn, Treaty of, 75 Sijpesteijn, P., 65, 157

406  The Arabic Language Silvestre de Sacy, A. I., 5 simplification of grammar see grammar, simplification of of language, 235f. simplified varieties, 147, 149 Sinai Bedouin, 147 Sindhi, in Arabic script, 331 Singer, H.-R., xviii singular, 19 Sinhalese, 304 sīra, 78, 83 Siwa Berber, 130, 209 slave trade, 306 Smart, J., 302 soap operas, Egyptian, 183, 252 social media, 169 Arabic in the, 238 influence of the, 237 social network, 254 sociolinguistics, 8 Soliman, A., 251 Somalia, 319 Soqoṭri, 16, 26, 127 sorabe, 321 sound plural see plural, sound Sous, 272 South Arabia, 22 South Arabian, 12, 16, 19f., 30f., 127 script, 26, 28–30, 34 substratal influence, 143, 196 South Palestinian texts, 164 South Semitic, 14, 18, 20–2, 26, 93, 143 South Sudan, 306f. South-west Semitic, 21 Spain, Islamic, 1f., 44; see also ʾAndalus, alSpain, migrants in, 297 Spanish, 24, 270, 299, 316f. specifier, 99 speech corruption of, 56f. errors, 89 setting, 246 situation, 246 topic, 246 split, phonemic, 143 Sprachinsel see enclaves, linguistic Sri Lanka, domestics from, 303 Staffellandschaft, 178 standard language, 241, 245, 249f., 253f., 315 influence of, 146–50 marker of, 248f. standardisation, 63–6, 149 star names, 317 Starcky, J., 39

stative aspect, 94 in Akkadian, 14 verb, 95 stereotypes, 302 stigmatisation, 147, 207 story-telling, 74, 78, 158 street names, French, 264 stress, 87f., 122, 134 stress assignment, in Egyptian Arabic, 207f. stress shift, 88, 194 in Maghrebi Arabic, 213 stress, expiratory, 48, 134 stress, word-final, 182 strong verbs, 135 Stroumsa, R., 65 šuʿarāʾ see šāʿir subject, 97–9, 114, 235 subject marking, on participle, 286 sub-Saharan trade, 301 substratal influence, 139, 141–4 Aramaic, 142f. Berber in Arabic, 272 Coptic, 129, 141–4 Persian in Khorasan Arabic, 285 South Arabian in Yemenite Arabic, 143, 196 substrate Arabic in Nabataean, 31 pre-Hilali, 180 Sudan, 205, 317 pacification of, 306 suffix conjugation, 90, 93f.; see also perfect verb suffixes, 90 pronominal, 56 verbal, 14, 20 Sulaym, Banū, 129, 180, 186, 189 Suleiman, S., 255 Suleiman, Y., 237 Sumatra, 329 Sumerian, 27 Sunnites, in Bahrain, 176 superlative, 237 sūqiyya, 242 Suquṭra, 127 Šuʿūbiyya, 81, 128 Suyūṭī as-, 69 Swahili, 217, 301, 307, 310, 319–21 as national language, 320 in Arabic script, 314 in Zanzibar, 319 literary tradition in, 314, 319 Switzerland, diglossia in, 242

Index  407 syllable structure, 89 heavy, 88 light, 88 open, 134 superheavy, 88 unstressed, 142 synonyms, 85 syntax, 97–103 synthetic language, 55 Syria nationalism in, 224 under French mandate, 265 Syriac, 11, 22, 81, 127 script, 37–9, 63 Neo-, 127 translations, 3 Syrian Academy see Academy of Damascus Syrian desert, 27 Syrian Protestant College, 265 system morpheme see morpheme, system tāʾ marbūṭa, xv, 54, 102, 131, 165 Ṭabarī aṭ-, 78 tabsīṭ al-luġa, 235 tabsīṭ an-naḥw, 235 Tabūk, 62 Tachelhit, 271 taʿdiya, 119; see also transitivity Tadmur see Palmyra tafḫīm, 121 tafsīr, 78 tagged corpus, 106 Tajik, 284f. adstratal influence in Uzbekistan Arabic, 286 tajwīd, 109 takmila, 235 Talmon, R., 63, 66, 176 Talmud, 162 Babylonian, 11 taltala, 49, 134, 156, 187 Tamazight see Berber Tamil, 18, 328 in Arabic script, 328 Tamilnadu, 328 Tamīm, 44f. tamma, 233 Ṯamūd, 29, 31, 43 Tamudi, 27, 29 Ṯamūdic, 29 Tanūḫ, Banū, 127 tanwīn see nunation Tanzania, 319

Taqbilit see Kabylian taqdīr, 109 taqlīd, 225 taʿrīb, 229, 236, 266; see also Arabicisation Tarifit, 271 Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, 272 taṣrīf, 107, 109, 115; see also morphology ṭawāf, 80 Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, 166 tax register, 65 taxation, 65, 130 taysīr, 237 taysīr an-naḥw, 235 Ṭayyiʾ, 44 teachers, Egyptian, 252 teaching of Algerian Arabic, 263 of home language, 292 of Standard Arabic, 235 television preachers, 251 talkshows, 255 template, morphological, 13, 89 temporal adjuncts, 303 adverbs, 145 tense, 94, 117, 303 anterior, 282 future, 94, 137, 146, 194, 209, 282 in negation, 101 past, 94 present, 209 terminology astronomical, 317 botanical, 70 computer, 232 creation of, 227 football, 232 French in Arabic, 234 linguistic, 232f. mathematical, 316 medical, 70, 317 philosophical, 70 religious, 69 scientific, 231 social media, 233 terrace landscape, 178 text repositories, 19 texts, transmission of, 60 theophoric names, 31, 53 Thomason, S., 301 Tifinagh, 273 in Niger, 274 Tiglatpilesar III, 26

408  The Arabic Language Tigre, 11 Tigriña, 11 Timur Lenk, 285 Tizi-Ouzou, 273 Toledo, conquest of, 1, 315, 317 tones in Arabic loanwords in Hausa, 319 in Bongor Arabic, 305 in Nubi, 308f. tongue retraction, 86 topic, 111, 113, 246 topicalisation, 113 Torah, language of, 10 Tosco, M., 305 trade, 28 Central Asian, 301, 326 contacts, in the Egyptian Delta, 182 in East Africa, 319 in the Indian Ocean, 301 in the Qurʾān, 61 incense, 26f., 29 jargon, 301, 305f. routes, in Africa, 318 slave, 306 sub-Saharan, 301 with South Asia, 329 traders Ḥaḍramawtī, 329f. South Arabian, 328 trading networks, 318 Trajan, 28 transcription, xiv– xviii of Arabic in Latin characters, 169, 238 phonetic, xvii–xviii phonological, xvii–xviii transfer grammar, 239 Transformational grammar, 105 transitional zone, 177, 185, 194, 208, 212 transitive, 111 transitiviser, 309 transitivity, 105, 119 translation from Arabic into Latin, 2, 317 from Arabic into Turkish, 224 from English into Arabic, 233f. from French into Arabic, 221, 233 from Greek into Arabic, 70, 75, 156, 163, 228 from Greek into Syriac, 77 from Pahlavi into Arabic, 76 from Persian into Arabic, 76 from Syriac into Arabic, 77 of grammatical terms, 107f. of political ideas, 221–4

of the Bible in Arabic, 164 of the Bible in Coptic, 128 of the Pentateuch in Arabic, 161 of the Qurʾān in Berber, 273 translators, 1 transliteration, xiv–xviii transmission of poetry, 61 of texts, 60 oral, 61 Transoxania, 285 treaties, 61f., 75 Trengganu, 329 tribal areas, 186 trilingualism Arabic–Turkish–Kurdish, 275, 281f. Arabic–Uzbek–Tajik, 275, 284f. triptosis, 115f. triradicalism, 13, 91, 124 triradicals, 115 Tschacher, T., 328 Tsereteli, G., 284 Tuareg, 274 Tuareg, in Arabic script, 315 Tunisia, 129, 189, 225 Berber in, 130 French occupation of, 260 linguistic situation in, 260–2 Ṭūr ʿAbdīn, 127 Turkic, 82 Chagatay, 316 grammars of, 125 in Egypt, 82 Oġuz, 82 Qipčaq, 82 Turkish, 6, 223, 283f., 325f. as a perfect language, 324 as administrative language, 82, 223 in Arabic script, 314 study of, 5 transcription of, xvii Turkmenistan, 285 Turks, Seljuk see Seljuks Turku, 305 Ṭurōyo, 127 Twitter, 238 typological classification, 11 Tyre, 10 Uganda, 307f., 319 Ugaritic, 10, 12, 22f. ʿUlā, al-, 29 Ullendorff, E., 15 Ullmann, M., 71, 319

Index  409 ʿUmar ibn ʾAbī Rabīʿa, 73 ʿUmar, Caliph, 80 ʾUmayyads, 73, 75–8 ʾUmm al-Jimāl, inscription of, 35–7 ʾumma, 224, 226 ʾummī, 61 undeclinability, 108 underlying level, 109, 111 Université Saint Joseph, 265 upgrading, of speech, 248 Uralo-Altaic languages, 18 urban centres, 185 dialects, 149f. speech, 173, 255 variants, 180 variety, 254 urbanisation, 180, 183, 253, 255f. Urdu, 313f., 326–8 Urdu Pidgin Arabic, 302 Urdu, in Arabic script, 314, 327f. ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ, 80, 159f., 166 ʿUṯmān, Caliph, 62 uvularisation, 86 Uyghur, in Arabic script, 331 Uzbek, 284f. adstratal influence in Uzbekistan Arabic, 287 Uzbekistan, 285 valency, 95f., 119 Valletta, 297 Vansleb, J. M., 129 variable, 177 age as, 256 class as, 253f. education as, 253f. intrapersonal 253–6 gender as, 255 religion as, 254 variables, interdependence of, 254 variant readings, 62 variation gender-related, 255, 256 in Modern Standard Arabic, 233 linguistic, 253–6 variety discrete, 185, 243 high, 242 intermediary, 243 low, 242 sociolectal, 253 Vassalli, M., 277 vehicular language, 305

velarisation, xiv, 23, 86 verb, 112, 117–19 auxiliary, 145 declension of, 111 definition of, 110 delocutive, 231 diminutive, 216 dummy see dummy verb hollow, 49, 118 imperfect see imperfect verb inchoative, 95, 97 middle, 96 non-stative, 306, 309 of motion, 95, 209 of perception, 209 perfect see perfect verb reduplicated, 135 reflexive-intransitive, 96 stative, 306, 209 strong, 135 weak, 118f., 135, 203 weak in Maltese, 278 verbal measure II, 92, 96, 105, 214 III, 96, 214 IV, 96, 105, 135 V, 96, 169, 214 VII, 92, 214 VIII, 96, 214 X, 96, 215 verbal measures, 95f., 119, 214 verbal mood, 54 verbal noun see maṣdar verbal sentence, 51f., 96f., 112–14, 235 verbal suffixes, 21 Versteegh, K., 299 Vinnikov, I., 284, 287 Violet, B., 156 Vita of St Menas, 165 Vita of St Pachomius, 164 vocabulary split, 180 vocabulary, essential, 236 vocal cords, 120 Vocke, S., 283 voiced, 120, 173 voiceless, 120, 174 Voigt, R., 21 volitional aspect, 94, 146 Volkssprache, 46f., 52 Vollers, K., 46f., 52 vowel allophones, 121 contraction, 49 dots, 63

410  The Arabic Language epenthetic, 47, 188, 199f., 203, 209 harmony, 48, 325 reduction, 87 signs, 64; Tiberian, xvii, 161 vowels, 121 /a/, 87, 121 /ā/ spelled with wāw, 33, 49 /e/, 315 /e/, in West Arabic, 49 backing of /a/, 48 defective notation of long, 63 elision of short, 142 final long, 134 final short, 134 fronting of /a/, 48 long, 198 notation of long, 32f., 121 notation of short, 38, 63f. reduction of short, 202 shortening of long, 209 shwa, xvii writing of, 164, 315 Vrolijk, A., 159 Vycichl, W., 129 wa-, 233 Waldner, W., 283 Walters, K., 256 waqaʿa, 234 Wāqidī al-, 75 Warš, 315 Warš dot, 64, 315 waṭan, 224 waṭaniyya, 251 wave model, 15f. wāw as spelling of /ā/, 33, 49 consecutivum, 20 ending in nouns, 54 in ʿamr, 33 in names, 33, 35, 53f. see also glides weak consonants, 91, 118f., 121 Wellens, I., 308–10 West Bank, 258 White Nile, 288 Wikipedia, 252 Egyptian, 169, 252

Wise, L., 251 Woidich, M., xi, 88, 176–8, 180, 182, 206, 210, 239 women’s speech see female speech word atlas, 177 word order, 52, 99, 136, 233f., 287 free, 55f. words, rare, 71 work jargon, 305 Wright, W., 315 writing, 74 as an aid to memory, 62 knowledge of, 61 written dialect, 168f. written Egyptian Arabic, 168 written language, 153f. written Moroccan Arabic, 169 yāʾ see glides Yāzijī, Nāṣif al-, 225, 231 Yehuda ibn Qurayš, 4 Yemen, Egyptian colloquialisms in, 253 Young Turks, 324 Youssi, A., 269 youth culture, 256 youth language, 256 Zabad, inscription of, 37 Zabīd, Murtaḍā az-, 123 Zaborski, A., 91 Zadeh, T., x, 80f. Ẓāhiriyya aẓ- see Dār al-Kutub aẓ-Ẓāhiriyya zāʾid, pl. zawāʾid, 114f. Zaire, 319 zajal, 74, 315 Zajjājī az-, 67, 124 Zamaḫšarī az-, 79 Zanzibar, 217 Sultanate of, 319 ẓarf pl. ẓurūf 111 zawāʾid see zāʾid Zayd ibn Ṯābit, 62 zero pronoun, 114, 117 Zimmermann, G., 285 ziyāda, 119 Zuhrī az,- 75 Zwartjes, O., 316 Zwettler, M., 53