1. Introduction Scholarly discussions about the genesis of the Arabic dialects have always been connected by another crucial issue: the linguistic situation in Arabia before Islam and its relation to the linguistic variety of the Qurʾān and poems attributed to pre-Islamic poets. Yet, there are very few studies devoted exclusively to dialects in the pre-Islamic period (Rabin 1951; Owens, forthcoming 2). Arabic dialects appeared after the expansion of the Arabs, which began after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad in 632 C.E. All colloquial varieties or dial…

  1. Introduction In an idealized Stammbaum Model, each language descends linearly from a single ancestor. Historical linguists argue that a process of general drift will cause a language to experience changes to all levels of its grammar over time. If Xa signifies the language of a single speech community, it will develop over time to Xb, then Xc, where Xc is simply a later, changed form of Xa. Monogenesis:                                      Xa → Xb → Xc If the original speech community (Xa) becomes fragmented, each fragment is then able to change independently of the ot…

This entry describes the evolution of the Arabic language through all its phases, paying special attention to the causes and implications of the changes which have taken place in the language. In order to place Arabic in its broad context and to offer a diachronic insight into the history of a language which is spoken today by approximately 200 million people worldwide and is the preferred religious language of all Islamic countries, it is necessary to consider its historical setting and present-day situation. From the outset it is necessary to consider the scope and limits of…

1. The Neo-Aramaic dialects The modern Aramaic dialects are the remnants of a wide variety of Old and Middle Aramaic dialects that dominated the Middle East in antiquity. The western variety of Aramaic survived only in three villages in the Qalamūn Mountains in Syria, 60 km north of Damascus, whereas the eastern variety survived until the beginning of the 20th century in large areas with hundreds of thousands of speakers in southeast Turkey, in northern Iraq, in Persian Azerbaijan, and in Persian Kurdistan. The massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 exterminated not only Ar…

1. Andalusi Arabic Andalusi Arabic is a dialect bundle, constituted by scarcely differentiated members and generated by the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the 8th century by armies of Muslim Arabs and (partially) Arabicized Berbers. It appears to have spread rapidly and been in general oral use in most parts of the geopolitical entity resulting from those events, called al-Andalus by its native population, between the 9th and 15th centuries. It reached its highest peak of users, which can be roughly estimate…

Reduplication is a special case of the more general device of repetition of linguistic material. It figures among the most prominent current issues in linguistic theory and mostly concentrates on morphological reduplication (cf. Rubino, 2005). Reduplication, however, can also occur on other linguistic levels, as already proposed by Pott (1862). But it is a matter of some debate where the line should be drawn between reduplication and other repetition phenomena. It is useful to distinguish betwee…

  Introduction It is curious that one of the most fundamental concepts of historical linguistics, a discipline that came of age in the 19th century, the proto-language as a product of comparative reconstruction has never been systematically integrated into a historical linguistic interpretation of Arabic. One of the historical linguistic landmarks in the study of Arabic is found in an article by Fleischer (1854:155) in which the entities Old, Middle, and New (or Neo) Arabic are proposed. Fleischer…

/n/, pronunciation of Ḥaraka naʿal Insults nāba ʿan Impersonal Verb nabāṭ Aramaic/Syriac Loanwords, 617 Nabataea ʿArab Nabataean Arabic Greek Loanwords, Old Arabic (Epigraphic), Pre-Islamic Arabic, Thamudic Nabataean Aramaic ʿArab, Arabic Alphabet: Origin, Arabic Alphabet: Origin, Aramaic/Syriac Loanwords, Dialects: Genesis, Nasx, Northwest Arabian Arabic, Old Arabic (Epigraphic), Pre-Islamic Arabic, Syria, Thamudic, Thamudic Nabataean inscriptions Classical Arabic Nabataean Kingdom Pre-Islamic Arabic Nabataean script Arabic Alphabet: Origin, Arabic Alp…

The relative pronoun in Arabic dialects is expressed by a form that is invariable in gender and number and may refer either to persons or objects. The most common form used in the majority of Arabic dialects is (i)lli, with variants halli and yalli (Retsö 2004:264–265). This form is found in the Egyptian dialects, the Levantine dialects, the gilit dialects from Iraq, most of the Arabian Peninsula, and the majority of the Maghrebi dialects. Examples are əlli mā ḥməd qalīl mā yəḥməd kat̲īr ‘he who is not grateful for a little is not grateful for a lot’ (Ḥassāniyya Arabic; Ould …

The term ‘poetic koine’ (also ‘poetico-Qurʾānic koine’) refers to a supratribal variety of Arabic which, according to some scholars, was the variety of Arabic used in pre-Islamic poetry. The linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period is a controversial topic (history of Arabic). Opinions about this situation may be divided into two main theories. According to one theory, which was also that of the Arabic grammarians, the language of the Arab tribes in the pre-Islamic period was basically hom…

1. Lingua franca: Functions and structures The term ‘lingua franca’ (or vehicular language) designates any language used as a means of interethnic communication in a multilingual setting. It usually refers to the spoken levels rather than to written levels, although an oral form of a lingua franca can become a written and standardized language. Lingua francas have been known since early Antiquity (for instance, Akkadian and Aramaic in the Near East). The development of a lingua franca is usually associated with one of the following historical and socioeconomic factors: expansion of tr…

This entry describes some of the linguistic features of the language of 8th-10th-century Greek/Arabic and Syriac/Arabic translations, links them to the history of the translation movement from Greek into Arabic, and attempts to place them in the context of contemporary linguistic change from ‘Classical Arabic’ to ‘Middle Arabic’. 1. The Greek/Arabic translation movement The term ‘Greek/Arabic translation movement’ describes a wave of translations of Greek scientific and philosophical texts either directly into Arabic or by way of Syriac. Unsystematic translation activiti…

1. Definition The very term ‘Middle Arabic’ is ambiguous because of the history of its use, the multiple meanings of the term ‘middle’ (historically middle, sociolinguistically intermediate, linguistically mixed – not to mention the middling quality of texts, in the opinion of some people), and the variety of views on the history of the Arabic language. Different definitions or characterizations have thus been proposed. As is the case for other languages, ‘Middle’ has been used to refer to a historic…

1. Definition Language is a communication tool and a cultural vehicle, which implies that it is also a reference for identifying ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’, a content of loyalty and hostility, of social and cultural status. For nationalists, language is a tool that connects past and future, projecting a reconstructed centripetal unity out of the centrifugal reality of the present. Language is, therefore, one of the most visible symbols in the nationalistic museum, a symbol with a powerful legitimizing role (Fishman 1972). The etymology of the word ʿArab is still uncertain. It was c…

  1. General definitions Classical Arabic designates that form of Arabic which was described by the Arab grammarians of the 8th century and called by them al-ʿarabiyya. They regarded this as the only correct Arabic language. Western scholars call it Classical Arabic to differentiate it from the Arabic vernaculars of the neo-Arabic type. It is the language in which the Arabic texts of pre-Islamic and early Islamic times were handed down, first of all the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, but also the historical and legal traditions of that time. In the process …

1. Introduction The term ‘koine’ comes from the Greek word koinē ‘common’, referring to the variety of Greek that became the lingua franca, or common language, of the eastern Mediterranean area during the Hellenistic period. It has since been applied to many other languages that share certain features with the original Greek koine. Inspired by the Hellenistic tradition, a number of Arabists used the term to refer to two historical types of Arabic varieties: the pre-Islamic poetic koine and the military or urban dialect koine of the early periods of the Arab conquest. The poet…

The pronominal system of Arabic dialects has one characteristic in common with other varieties of the Arabic language and other Semitic languages: it consists of a series of independent pronouns and a series of suffixed pronouns, whose form may vary from region to region for various reasons, among which are the influence of the substratum (e.g. the Aramaic substratum in the Syrian-Lebanese area; see Diem 1971) and its own internal evolution, or even a mixture of both (see Behnstedt 1991). These …

Demonstratives in Arabic dialects have different forms, depending on the region. In order to describe the main paradigms, this entry generalizes as much as possible and describes their general features rather than individual dialectal details. In all Arabic dialects, there are two series of demonstratives, one conveying the idea of near deixis, with respect to the speaker, ‘this, these’, the other the idea of far deixis, which is associated with the interlocutor, ‘that, those’. This difference is not limited to a space opposition near/far…

Classical Arabic has few words that function solely as adverbs. More often, a word with a basic nominal or adjectival function may be used as an adverbial in certain syntactic contexts. Prepositional phrases typically function as adverbials. The accusative is the fundamental marker of adverbiality in Classical Arabic. (The few exceptions to this rule will be dealt with below in sections 1.1 and 1.2.) This general pattern is most obviously apparent in forms such as dāʾim-an ‘always’ derived from the adjective dāʾim ‘lasting’ or dawām-an ‘permanently’ derived from the noun dawām ‘perma…

  1. Definition The term ‘convergence’ is not an established term, in either theoretical linguistics in general or Semitic and Arabic linguistics in particular. Neither is the opposite term ‘ divergence’. However, the term does occur in an informal sense in studies concerning koineization phenomena (Ferguson 1959; Palva 1982), as well as pidginization and creolization phenomena of language contact (Gumperz and Wilson 1971; Kossmann 1994; Mous 1994). Lately, with Versteegh's book Pidginization and creolization: The case of Arabic (1984), Arabists have become aware of the …