The Nature of Old Arabic and its Change into Middle and then Modern Arabic
Table of Contents
In this paper we will examine the various theories about the
development of Arabic. This includes the nature of the language prior to the
onset of Islam, what happened to it as it spread out from the Arabian Peninsula
and what was the nature of the changes that occurred to Arabic once it became
the dominant spoken language in the Middle East and North Africa. Finally, how
did the Modern Arabic dialects develop from the Arabic that established itself
after the Islamic expansion? Further questions arise depending upon the answers
to the preceding questions. Was the Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula in the early
7th century for all intents and purposes a unified whole or was it many dialects
with a poetic form alien to any existing spoken form of the language? Did the
current dialects develop as the result of the conquered subjects in the new
Islamic empire being unable to learn the common poetic language or did the
conquered populations learn the different spoken dialects of the conquering
armies? Posing the preceding question with a slightly different emphasis, had
the break between the spoken language and the written language already occurred?
On another tack, did the process of Arabic suddenly being spoken by large
numbers of non-natives speakers, who did outnumber the native speakers of
Arabic, produce a drastic change in Arabic regardless of the relationship
between the spoken the dialects and the poetic language? Return to Table
of Contents
This paper will summarize
the views of prominent scholars on this question and suggest possible areas of
further inquiry, speculation and debate. For purposes of this paper I want to
define a few terms in the following way:
- 1) The Poetic KoinŽ: The "written" language at the time of the prophet and
the language of the Pre-Islamic poetry, abbreviated PK.
- 2) Old Spoken Arabic: a blanket term for the spoken tribal dialects in
pre-Islamic Arabia, abbreviated OSA.
- 3) Old Arabic: the blanket term for pre-Islamic Arabic, which encompasses
both the Poetic KoinŽ and Old Spoken Arabic, not abbreviated.
- 4) Al-cArabiyya: The language of poetry, public formal address, literary
and scientific discourse and religious exposition in the Muslim World that was
formalized and then cast in stone sometime after the Islamic expansion, not
abbreviated.
- 5) Written Middle Arabic: Arabic from the Middle Ages written by
non-Muslims with many elements that were grammatically incorrect for
Al-cArabiyya, abbreviated WMA.
- 6) Spoken Middle Arabic: the postulated dialects spoken during the Middle
Ages, abbreviated SMA.
- 7) New Spoken Arabic: the modern day dialects used in ordinary spontaneous
speech, movies and other informal speech acts, abbreviated NSA.
- 8) Modern Standard Arabic: the modern literary language which is arguably
derived from Al-cArabiyya, abbreviated MSA.
- 9) New Arabic: a blanket term which encompasses Modern Standard Arabic and
New Spoken Arabic, not abbreviated.
- 9) KoinŽ II: a postulated common spoken language of unknown origin used by
the conquering Arab armies during the Islamic expansion, abbreviated KII.
- 10) KoinŽ III: a postulated common spoken trade language used in
Pre-Islamic Arabia in the larger commercial centers and in the caravans
involved in the trans-Arabia shipment of merchandise, possibly heavily
affected by the Nabatean dialect, and known in Mecca, abbreviated KIII.
To review, the types of known and postulated forms of Arabic discussed
in this paper are: PK, OSA, Al-cArabiyya, WMA, SMA, NSA, MSA, KII and KIII. As
anyone who has tried to learn Arabic knows, defining Modern Arabic is not an
easy task. There are at least 4 major dialect groups of varying degrees of
mutual intelligibility. Each dialect differs from the written form to such a
degree that a person from the US who only learns Modern Standard Arabic will
arrive in the Arabic-speaking world with virtually no useful conversational
skills. While most Arabophones would probably understand such a person just
fine, he/she would be lucky to understand one reply in twenty. However, MSA is
perceived to be the real language, and no one will be insulted by a skilled
attempt to speak MSA. A surface explanation for this is that Al-cArabiyya became
locked in as the language of the Quran and great effort went into maintaining it
as the linguistic ideal, which amounted to forging it in stone. The dialects on
the other hand had no official status and could therefore develop without
restraint. This combined with ever decreasing literacy rates and a decline in
intellectual and mercantile activity in the period prior to and coincident with
the European expansion of the 18th and 19th century led to a general atomization
of the Arabic dialects. It seems as if the one thing upon which all informed
sources agree is that this explanation is inadequate to explain in-depth the
situation for Arabic.Return to Table
of Contents
I cannot help but throw in a few
words of caution here. The situation for Arabic as it spread out from the
Arabian Peninsula at the time of the Islamic conquests was quite complex. In
addition the linguistic situation of the conquered territories was if anything
even more complex, especially in the core area of the Middle East, which is
Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia.
In Egypt the common language was some form of Coptic, which was a direct
descendant of the Egyptian language used by the Pharaohs. Coptic was also used
as a liturgical language by the Egyptian Christian Orthodox Church. Egypt was
also part of the Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire as it is variously
called. The Hellenistic culture in Egypt went back 900 years to when Alexander
the Great conquered Egypt. What this means is that not only was Greek used as
the language of administration there was also a Greek speaking population which
lived in Egypt at the time of the Islamic conquest.
The situation in the Levant was even more complex. The Jewish people spoke
Aramaic as their native tongue, but used Hebrew as their liturgical language.
Some of the Christians had developed Syriac, a special form of Aramaic which
served as both their literary and liturgical language, but spoke some dialect or
other of common Aramaic. Greek was the language of the administration. In the
areas which bordered on the desert in what is now the Sinai Desert of Egypt, the
Negev Desert of Israel and most of Jordan and the Golan region of Syria, the
Ghassanids spoke Arabic.
In Mesopotamia Pahlavi was spoken by the population and was also the official
language of administration. Pahlavi is the ancestor of modern Persian. Hebrew
was the liturgical language of the Jews, and Aramaic was spoken by some elements
of the population. Syriac was used as a liturgical language by the Christians
and Arabic was spoken by the Lakhmids. I think that it is very interesting that
in both the Byzantine and the Sassanid empires in Iraq/Persia there were Arabs
gradually filtering in from the Arabian Peninsula.Return to Table of
Contents
Many differing conjectures have emerged about the linguistic
situation at the time of the prophet and the inception of Islam. Each
explanation attempts to describe the linguistic situation in the Arabian
Peninsula just prior to the Islamic expansion.Return to Table
of Contents
Chaim
Rabin puts forth the view that at the time of the Quran there was already a
distinct linguistic split between what he calls the Poetic KoinŽ (PK) and the
different tribal dialects (OSA). The Poetic KoinŽ was not a spoken language at
all, but had evolved strictly as a vehicle for the poetry at the fairs.
Alongside the PK there were different tribal dialects of Old Spoken Arabic with
varying degrees of mutual intelligibility. This Poetic KoinŽ which Rabin
postulates was already a literary language, was used by Meccans for business,
and by proselytizing Christians. Nowhere does Rabin argue that the diglossia
situation was so bad that the Poetic KoinŽ had to be treated as a separate
language from the tribal speech systems.Return to Table
of Contents
Corriente's article focuses primarily on the evidence of the early Arabic
grammarians, and his major goal is to examine the pile of evidence in an attempt
to deduce the source of the Poetic KoinŽ. He states, almost as an aside that the
urban dialects of Syria-Palestine and Iraq might have been derived from the
i'rabless Nabati Arabic, which had crept into Syria and Iraq prior to the
Islamic expansion. Based on this, the question to ask is how far north and west
had Nabati or Lakhmid/Ghassanid Arabic spread before the advent of Islam?
Corriente uses the evidence of the grammarians to conclude that the declensional
endings were still in use in the Bedouin dialects for two hundred years or so
after the Islamic expansion from the Arabian Peninsula. He concludes that there
were two main dialect groups, Eastern and Western, both of which were different
from the Poetic KoinŽ. Corriente's assertions and arguments most closely
resemble the general view expressed in the lectures in class by Professor
Cadora. Corriente makes a pretty strong case that Old Arabic (i.e. pre-Islamic
Old Spoken Arabic + the Poetic KoinŽ) was in flux and was not as uniform as the
Classical Arabic that became codified by the grammarians during the early
Abbasid era. In fact he posits the existence of i'raab bearing and i'raabless
Arabic existing at the same time, if not in the same place. His whole article is
built around the premise that Classical Arabic did not become codified until the
8th or 9th century.Return to Table
of Contents
Versteegh
argues that the Old Spoken Arabic and the Poetic KoinŽ which existed at the time
of the prophet and shortly thereafter was a single language which he calls Old
Arabic. Any variation which existed was not beyond the range of the normal
linguistic variation found in any living language. His basic position is that
the descriptions and conclusions of the early Arab grammarians about the Arabic
language are reliable and should be used as real evidence for determining the
state of early Classical Arabic. His strongest argument for the unity of Old
Arabic is the evidence of the early grammarians. In his first chapter he does
not state how quickly the changes take place, but he does characterize these
changes as radical and far-reaching. Versteegh asserts that the changes between
Old Arabic and New Arabic (his terminology) are so deep that New Arabic
constitutes a new language type. Blau, as well, argues that Old Spoken Arabic
and the Poetic KoinŽ were in essence the same language. His evidence is the lack
of pseudo-corrections in the Quran. He also argues that the poets would not have
been able to correctly compose the Jahiliyya poetry if they were not comfortable
using the features of the Poetic KoinŽ. What Versteegh and Blau argue for, using
scientific terminology, is very reminiscent of the received truth about Arabic
in the Arab world. The pure Arab mother tongue got altered irretrievably by the
muwallad who could not master its complexities and subtleties.Return to Table
of Contents
Zwettler
takes the position that the Poetic KoinŽ was a very ritualized form. In this
regard it could be compared with the Greek in which Homer composed the Iliad and
the Odyssey. The features of this kind of poetic language used in a tradition of
oral poetry are 1) the preservation of archaic features, 2) the formulaic use of
set phrases and 3) the borrowing of virtually synonymous words from other
dialects in order to preserve rhyme and meter. Viewed in this way one can only
conclude that the Poetic KoinŽ was a hodgepodge containing many features which
never coexisted at any one time, in any one dialect. It would thus be full of
archaic forms from every era and haphazard borrowings from every dialect and
could never represent any single stage of any single dialect.
Zwettler goes on to argue that even though the poets could compose poetry
correctly using i'raab, this does not prove that they spoke the Poetic KoinŽ as
their native language. To drive home this point he also presents the argument
that the later poetry tended to use, more often than in the old poetry, rhyming
schemes that did not depend on knowing the i'raab well. The point here is that
the later poets didn't necessarily have such a good knowledge of the grammar of
language of the Poetic KoinŽ. Only a very specialized expert composed poetry,
and the formulaic nature of the poetry assured the poet of being able to mimic
older formulas which came equipped with the correct i'raab. He further casts
doubt on the validity of the grammarians' accounts about the "purity" of Bedouin
speech by contending that the grammarians only sought out those Bedouin
informants who knew how to recite the oral poetry. What we actually have is not
representative samples of natural Bedouin speech, but rather samples from
Bedouin informants trained in producing the old oral poetry.Return to Table
of Contents
Ziadeh uses the
evidence of the multiple forms of broken plurals to argue that extensive cross
dialect borrowing occurred in Jahiliyya poetry. He also argues that sometimes
the poet would just invent forms in order to get the correct rhyme and meter. He
seems to support Zwettler's argument that the Poetic KoinŽ was a language that
became increasingly artificial during the pre-Islamic period. Zwettler and
Ziadeh both seem to be aiming their arguments at Blau, in an effort to show that
the use of "correct" Poetic KoinŽ does not mean that the Poetic KoinŽ was the
poets' native vernacular.Return to Table
of Contents
Cadora makes
the point that in the history of the "culture area" there is a persistent and
consistent process whereby groups of people change ecological structure.
Linguistic change always accompanies these changes in ecological structure. The
three structures in the Middle East are Bedouin, rural and urban. The general
trend is for a group to move from Bedouin to rural and then from rural to urban,
with intervening transitional structures in between the three main structures.
For instance a band of Bedouin herders may chance upon a particularly choice
patch of grazing land with a permanent water supply, and since there is no
reason to move on, they have by doing this opted to become sedentary herders. It
can be argued that this transitional stage must occur when making the transition
from nomadic herder to settled farmer. The next phase after having become
settled herders is to plant some beans, watermelons and/or wheat. The pattern
can run in reverse as well, i.e. a group can go from urban to rural and
eventually end up as Bedouin, perhaps as the result of a major catastrophe.
However, the overall trend is to move from Bedouin to rural and then from rural
to urban. The point is that the linguistic variation in pre-Islamic Arabia was
at least as dependent on the ecological structure of the speech community as it
was upon geographical location or tribal affiliation of the speech community.
Linguistic change, both external and internal, always accompanies a change in
the ecological structure of the community. In Cadora's view there was an
inherent variability of the Arabic language based on community type. This
situation has existed for as long as there has been anything that can be called
Arabic.Return to Table
of Contents
Return to
Table of Contents
This leads us directly into debate over the nature of
the changes which occurred during and after the Islamic conquests. How did
Arabic change after the conquests? What, if anything happened to OSA and the
Poetic KoinŽ as they developed into Al-cArabiyya and Spoken Middle Arabic? How
does the history of these developments affect the modern linguistic situation of
the Arabophone world? What is the developmental relationship between New Spoken
Arabic/Modern Standard Arabic and OSA/PK?Return to Table of
Contents
On the one extreme we have the scholars who claim that PK and
OSA have always been different from each other and the PK is a created form.
These scholars also claim that the modern dialects (NSA) exhibit features which
are a continuation of tendencies which existed in OSA. In this general view
diglossia in Arabic pre-dates Islam. The scholars who want to show that
diglossia pre-dates Islam want to show that the declensional endings for mood
and case (i'raab) had already been lost at the time of the prophet Mohammed.
This loss of the declensional endings is sometimes also described as spoken
Arabic's change from being a synthetic language, to being an analytic language.
In this regard neither Zwettler nor Ziadeh put any effort into explaining the
diglossia situation in Modern Arabic (NSA+MSA) other than to suggest that it
existed all along and therefore needs no further explanation.
Corriente and Rabin both put great effort into trying to prove that the
i'raab had been lost in common speech by the early 7th century CE. They do not
directly address the issue of what other changes occurred concurrently with the
loss of the i'raab. They are obviously of the opinion that everything else
follows from the loss of the i'raab. If pre-Islamic OSA did not have i'raab then
diglossia always existed, and the great gap between the spoken and written forms
today is strictly due to the arrested development of MSA and the continued
evolution of the dialects which has spanned a period of 1,416 years.Return to Table
of Contents
Versteegh and Blau very definitely state that
OSA and PK were one and the same language. Versteegh hedges a little bit and
talks about registers and special forms for special uses but he clearly states
his belief that the these two forms were complementary to each other and cut
from the same cloth. Versteegh's theory is pretty involved but briefly
summarized states that the varieties of New Arabic are all based on innovations
and processes which occurred after the Islamic conquests. Blau doesn't go into
so much detail but insists that we must not overestimate any alleged difference
between the Poetic KoinŽ and the tribal vernaculars. Blau, like Versteegh, is
very clear that the changes occurring between Old Arabic and Middle Arabic, to
use Blau's terminology, are far reaching and occurred as the result of the
Islamic conquests. They both say that Old Arabic and the post-Islamic Arabic are
two different kinds of languages. Blau's article "The Beginnings of the Arabic
Diglossia. A Study of the Origins of Neoarabic" seems to be mainly aimed at
going after Ferguson's proposed KoinŽ II theory.Return to Table
of Contents
Ferguson in his article "Diglossia"
is attempting to define diglossia in general, and does not limit the discussion
to Arabic alone. His thesis is that diglossia generally occurs in situations
where 1) there is a large body of literature to which the community is very
attached because it is culturally defining, 2) literacy rates are low. and 3)
the literature has been around for a number of centuries. He also posits that
diglossia tends to be relatively stable. He wrote another article called "The
Arabic KoinŽ," which both Versteegh and Blau critiqued sharply. In this article
he argues that diglossia was well developed at the time of the Islamic
conquests, but that the conquests caused a linguistic leveling or new KoinŽ
(KoinŽ II). KoinŽ II was used by the military for inter-tribal communication and
for communicating with non-Arabs in the military camps in the newly conquered
territories shortly after the Islamic conquests. The modern dialects which
developed outside the Arabian Peninsula are all descendants from this new KoinŽ
II rather than being derived from Al-cArabiyya or the Poetic KoinŽ. He makes a
pretty strong case that the dialects outside the Arabian Peninsula must have had
a single source.Return to Table
of Contents
It was also conjectured during
Cadora's Winter '96 lectures at the University of Michigan that there may have
been a verbal pre-Islamic KoinŽ III. This Arabic was heavily influenced by
Nabatean Arabic and was used for inter-tribal spoken communication on caravans
of a mixed tribal nature and in major commercial centers, especially to
communicate with non-Arabs or Arabs who were already living outside of the
Arabian peninsula. This Arabic had lost the i'raab and may even have been a
pidginized form. It can be conjectured that it played a role in the formation of
Ferguson's KoinŽ II.Return to Table
of Contents
In my
opinion there is a lot that needs to be explained, no matter which theory we
choose. So far no particular theory explains everything to my satisfaction. I
agree with Versteegh when he says that the disappearance of the declensional
endings is the least of the changes. As Rabin points out, one cannot convert
dialectal Arabic into Fusha by appending the declensional endings.Return to Table of
Contents
Several
hurdles immediately present themselves when we attempt to gather information
about the state of pre-Islamic Arabic. To begin with, the Arabic script was
borrowed from Nabatean. The Nabateans had originally used it for writing
Aramaic, not Arabic. This script did not have all the of the consonants that
existed in Arabic. The dots which differentiate between t,b and th or j,H and x
had not been standardized yet. Thus the script is ambiguous. Another point about
the script is that it was written without marks for showing the short vowels. As
if all of this wasn't bad enough, the Arabs of the peninsula tended to write on
perishable items, such as palm fronds or tree bark. There are very few
pre-Islamic Arabic writing samples. To make matters worse almost all of the
Arabian Peninsula has been closed to archeological investigation until very
recently. The vast majority of the samples available carry almost no information
about one of the most hotly debated issues, namely was there i'raab or not? Blau
analyzed a sample of Arabic that had been fortuitously written with Greek script
from the 8th century CE in which the i'raab were absent. Even in this case this
is not certain evidence for the loss of inflectional endings. The scribes using
the Greek letters may have been merely mirroring the practice in Arabic of not
marking the endings. So we have disputable evidence that if the i'raab were
present prior to Islam, they may have disappeared very shortly afterwards.
The point here is that there is very little hard direct evidence. We are
forced to reconstruct and make conjectures and see what fits into this puzzle
which has many missing pieces. In the final analysis we must admit that we may
never know with any certainty the truth about how Modern Arabic was formed from
the earlier stages of the language.Return to Table
of Contents
Having said all of that let us examine the arguments in the light of what
evidence there is. My strongest argument against the inherent unity of old
Arabic is that the all of the urban dialects outside the Arabian Peninsula have
a common way to negate verbs and nominal sentences. The verb is negated by
surrounding the verb with ma .... sh. To negate a nominal sentence one prefaces
it with some variant of mish or mush. It is true that in the peninsula other
rules apply. For this reason I like Ferguson's article and chart #10 that was
handed out in class with the Poetic KoinŽ and KoinŽ II. Classical Arabic formed
in parallel with KoinŽ II sometime around the formation of Islam and the modern
dialects are formed out of KoinŽ II. It explains how a change in such a
fundamental feature as verb negation could have happened to all non-peninsular
dialects, even though they all have had separate evolution. Versteegh's position
that there was only one language at the time of the Quran does not adequately
account for this feature. Blau's explanation that this development is recent and
caused by diffusion does not adequately account for why this feature is in
nearly every non-peninsular urban dialect.
I do think that Versteegh's arguments in chapter 2 for the abruptness of the
transition from Old Arabic to New Arabic are very persuasive. The dialects
exhibit fundamental structural differences from the Fusha. If we are to believe
the Arab Grammarians from the 9th century, the common urban language was already
hopelessly removed from the standard of the Quran and the pre-Islamic poetry.
How different from what Corriente and Rabin are saying is Versteegh's assertion
that there was only one language at the time of the prophet? The question that
needs to be answered is, were the dialects mutually intelligible with each other
and the Poetic KoinŽ? If yes, then I think I can allow Versteegh his assertion
that there was only one language with different "registers" as he calls them.
Even without the mutual intelligibility of the pre-Islamic dialects there still
seems to be a real concern on the part of the grammarians that if they didn't do
something quick that the meaning of the Quran would be lost. This would seem to
indicate that the language had indeed undergone a noticeable and therefore
radical change in a very short period of time, merely 200 years. On this point
of mutual intelligibility, I did observe when I was in the Middle East that
Egyptians and Jordanians could talk to each other in dialect, and as far as I
could tell they weren't adjusting their dialects for each other. This points to
another interesting consideration not discussed in any of the literature
reviewed here, namely that the Arabic language community seems capable of
handling a certain amount of inherent variability. The problem exists mainly for
me as an outsider. Due to the fact that I haven't been exposed to this
variability since birth, I have a lot of catching up to do when thrust into this
environment.
I think there are many issues that are still debatable. If Arabic did not
undergo rapid change, why then are some of the features of the dialects which
differ from Old Arabic identical with each other? If New Arabic did evolve
slowly from a pre-existing situation of diglossia, why then were the 9th century
grammarians so intent on "preserving" the language of the Quran? Corriente
mentioned them in passing, but what was the role of the Nabateans if any, in the
spread and development of New Arabic?
So how do we make sense out of all this? Obviously some very knowledgeable
people have devoted their lives to arguing these issues. For one thing everybody
seems to be arguing as if each theory is mutually exclusive of all other
theories. I want to point out that Versteegh's theory of pidginization and
creolization followed by gradual decreolization does not necessarily rule out
Ferguson's KoinŽ II. The presence or absence of i'raab in Old Spoken Arabic does
not rule out the existence of a poetic KoinŽ that was understood, in a passive
way by all, but produced only by the tribal rawi.Return to Table
of Contents
Based on my
current understanding of the evidence summarized so far in this paper, I think
that the following scenario seems to fit the facts as I know them from the class
readings and lectures. There was diglossia at the time of the prophet, or more
precisely, there was a high degree of linguistic variability in Old Arabic.
Probably a noticeably higher degree than found in most languages but not as
severe as it exists in New Arabic. Specifically the different dialects were less
diverse than they are today, but having said that there was no dominant dialect
nor linguistic center. Mecca may have been in the process of becoming the
dominant cultural linguistic center but it had not yet achieved full dominance.
The linguistic variability was defined in terms of ecological structure and to a
lesser degree by geography and then by tribal affiliation. In any event we
cannot use Ferguson's definition of diglossia, unless we also define the
Jahiliyya poetry as being a defining set of literature. The existence of a low
literacy rate is the second point of Ferguson's diglossia definition and it
doesn't quite seem to apply. Literacy rates were low, but the exact place of
writing in pre-Islamic Arabia is not clear.
The Poetic KoinŽ was not representative of any single dialect or any single
era. It had higher status than any dialect. It was not yet as standardized as
Al-cArabiyya was to become. It was used for the qasidas, oration and fortune
telling. It had existed for at least two centuries if not much longer. The Quran
was an innovative use of this form of the language. There may or may not have
been a "market language" (KoinŽ III). There was evidence of writing but the only
samples that have survived are grave markers and other inscriptions on
monuments. If we could obtain samples of any possible written commercial records
it would undoubtedly reveal to us a lot about 1) the existence of a market
language and 2) the syntax of the lower status languages in pre-Islamic Arabia.
The Islamic conquests put the Arab armies in charge of a very large empire.
Arabophones were vastly outnumbered. The new converts to Islam learned Arabic in
very informal and untutored settings. According to both Goldschmidt in A Concise
History of the Middle East and Hourani with A History of the Arab Peoples,
Arabic did not replace the native languages in the conquered territories for at
least 200 years. What this means is that the number of non-native speakers of
Arabic vastly outnumbered the native ones. There was also the phenomenon under
the Umayyids of the military town kept separate from the local population. This
combined with the wholesale taking of local wives produced whole generations of
children who were nominally Muslim and Arab but who learned their first language
from their mothers, who most likely didn't speak Arabic very well. Arabic was
also being used for writing laws, explaining theology, and translating Greek
science and philosophy. New words had to be coined or borrowed. This is not the
ordinary course of ecological change. All of the Arabs whether Bedouin, farmer,
or urbanite had become almost overnight the ruling class of a huge empire. Why
shouldn't linguistic change accompany this momentous change in ecological
structure? To claim that this upheaval in the social and political fabric of the
Arab peoples did not make a mark on their language seems absurd.Return to Table
of Contents
I want
to combine Versteegh's explanation with Ferguson's explanation. The radical
changes which occurred to Arabic took the form first of abrupt pidginization and
creolization which was followed by a long period of gradual decreolization. The
spoken language to which this process of pidginization, creolization and then
gradual decreolization occurred was Ferguson's KoinŽ II. I think this accounts
for the features that are common to all dialects but differ from Old Arabic,
which is what Ferguson was aiming at. It also accounts for those features where
each dialect is different from Old Arabic and is different from the other
dialects as well, which is what Versteegh was aiming at. In fact Versteegh uses
this anomaly to try to discredit Ferguson's theory.
I differ with Versteegh's analysis where he wants to say that the dialects
developed out of Old Arabic, and that this Old Arabic was the same language as
the Quran. Ferguson's arguments in his article "Grammatical Agreement in
Classical Arabic and the Modern Dialects" are very convincing.
Ferguson points out that the only category for which duals exist in modern
Arabic dialects is the noun, and that it invariably takes plural agreement. This
is very different from Old Arabic and MSA which have dual categories in the
verb, pronoun and adjective. In MSA and Old Arabic a dual noun takes dual
agreement with the verb, pronoun and adjective which makes it a separate
category from singular and plural. In MSA there is a complex set of rules for
verbal agreement, and adjectival agreement with the noun. If the verb precedes
the noun it takes gender but not number agreement. Non-human plurals take
feminine agreement with adjectives. Dual nouns apparently break this rule by
invariably taking dual agreement with adjectives regardless of their
human/non-human status, but verbs which precede dual nouns only take gender
agreement. In the New Spoken Arabic dialects adjectival agreement with non-human
plurals can be plural or feminine. It is generally safe in the dialects to give
feminine adjectival agreement to non-human plural nouns because even if this is
not correct for that dialect it can be taken as a "classicism". However, in the
modern dialects dual nouns always take plural agreement. It is hard to imagine
that this exact feature could have developed independently in so many different
places. Ferguson's argument is very persuasive that the New Spoken Arabic
dialects have a common source and that this source is different from the Poetic
KoinŽ.Return
to Table of Contents
Ann Miller in her article "The
Origin of the Modern Arabic Sedentary Dialects" in Volume 19 of Al-cArabiyya,
1986 also makes the suggestion that we should combine theories. Although I don't
agree with all of her conclusions it is very interesting that other people
surveying this topic have proposed combining selected theories. She proposes
combining Corriente's theory with those of Blau and Cohen. Her basic position is
that New Arabic pre-dates Islam and that there is no solid evidence for a common
origin of the modern dialects. However she also states that we may never know
the truth about the origin of the Arabic dialects, until more evidence surfaces.
A major part of her article is devoted to compiling a list of the arguments
against Ferguson's KoinŽ II. Without double checking her sources I will
reiterate that I find Ferguson's arguments very persuasive about the common
source for the non-peninsular sedentary dialects.Return to Table
of Contents
It seems likely that the
Nabatean style of Arabic had more than its share of influence on KoinŽ II. The
first areas conquered were inhabited by Arabs who spoke Nabatean Arabic. The
Arabs had controlled the desert trade routes out of Arabia into Damascus and
Jerusalem. These places must have had Arab speaking populations as well, who
spoke this Nabatean variety. I think these people must have occupied a special
place, because they were more or less linguistically competent in both
communities. I don't know what the evidence is with regards to their
participation in the Islamic conquests after they had themselves been conquered.
I still think that as potential linguistic intermediaries between the conquering
Arabs and the other conquered peoples they were in a unique position to leave
their mark on the form of the language that the conquered peoples learned.
Furthermore, I want to point out that they were the source of the Arabic script
and they had at one time controlled the trade out of the Arabian Peninsula into
the Mediterranean. Their influence on shaping pre-Islamic Arab culture has been
underestimated in my opinion. How to prove it is the question here.Return to Table
of Contents
In all of
the preceding discussion people have argued back and forth about the importance
of the loss of i'raab and the importance of when it happened. This is the litmus
test for when Arabic started to change and how much influence the conquests had
on the development of the dialects and the atrophying of Al-cArabiyya. This is
also the dividing line between Old Arabic, the synthetic language, and New
Arabic, the analytic language. Allow me to point out that Arabic still has many
synthetic features. It may not have case endings or verbal mood endings, but it
still does have bound morphemes. If anything some items that were not clitics in
Al-cArabiyya are now bound to the modified lexical item in New Arabic. For
instance in every dialect I know the indirect object 'li' is now an enclitic
which is attached to the verb, since it affects stress and intervenes betweeen
the negating 'sh' morpheme. To illustrate, "he wrote to me" is "katabli" with
the accent on "tab". "He didn't write to me" is "makatabliish", with the accent
on the "liish" part of the form. Anyway it seems likely that some of the urban
varieties with close contact to the Levant had already lost the i'raab without
really leaving the linguistic community of the Poetic KoinŽ. The ambiguity of
the script makes it seem to me that the i'raab were part of the variation. That
is to say pausal forms were read in connected speech by certain parts of the
community. If everybody read texts fully vowelled why was the 'n' of indefinite
tanwin not included in the script?Return to Table
of Contents
Here in twentieth century North America we live in a
relatively linguistically homogenous society. Diglossia, and linguistic
variability seems scary to us. In the Middle East this is nothing new. The
territories conquered by Arabs, as I have mentioned previously, were not
linguistically homogenous. They all had at least two important languages other
than Arabic in use at the time of the conquests. Furthermore throughout history,
the written forms were the domain of a very few specialists, priests and
scribes. That the written form was different from the spoken form, was not very
important. The modern ideal of universal literacy and the accompanying idea of a
unified national language which is closely bound to the written form, is a
recent innovation, which developed in Europe during the reformation. Generally
the invention of the printing press is given credit for this innovation, but I
also think that Protestantism's insistence on personal knowledge of the faith
may have had a hand in developing the vernaculars into written languages as
well. In a certain sense Arabic was, until very recently, operating according to
the old linguistic paradigm. The literary language was the domain of the
educated elite, thus, it didn't matter that it did not reflect the linguistic
reality of the vernacular forms.Return to Table of
Contents
Let us re-examine the concept 'diglossia' with
respect to Arabic and see if it is an appropriate label for Arabic's linguistic
situation. Diglossia as defined by Ferguson is the word for the linguistic
situation where two different linguistic varieties live side by side. One form
is the "high" variety and the other is the "low" variety. The model for this
situation is that there are two distinct but related languages which operate in
the same linguistic community. One variety is the "native" language and the
other variety is an acquired variety which is learned in school. The learned
variety has more cultural status than the "native" variety. In this model of
diglossia, the speaker is in essence bilingual and must possess two complete
grammars in his/her head in order to function linguistically in that community.
Does this situation accurately describe the reality of Arabic? I have yet to
talk to the Arab who views his/her dialect and MSA as separate languages. If we
build our model taking into account this personal perception, what we get is
that each individual speaker has only one grammar. This grammar has lots of
sociolinguistic production and parsing rules which account for the inherent
variability of the language. One person's personal grammar may be very different
from another person's personal grammar with education level being as important a
factor as geographic location, ecological niche or religious affiliation.
Following this line of reasoning then, we might find groupings of people with
similar personal sets of grammar rules. We could create categories of people
whose rules for the "low" variety are very similar to each other. These
categories would tend to follow geographic boundaries and to some extent
ecolinguistic categories. In contrast, we could separate out people into groups
of those whose rules for the "high" variety are nearly identical. These groups
would tend to transcend geographic boundaries and would more closely correspond
to educational and ecolinguistic categories. What we end up with is many
overlapping sets. Viewed along the entire continuum of sociolinguistic rules we
can probably come up with as many sets of grammars as there are native speakers
of Arabic. Viewed along another dimension we have dialects which are grouped
according to professions transcending national boundaries. This fits in very
nicely with Cadora's theory of ecolinguistics. This model of "one person/one
grammar" describes a very different and much more dynamic situation than what is
described by the concept of diglossia.
This model of "inherent variability" is of course highly speculative and can
only be proven after much research. However, it also fits in with what Versteegh
is saying, because it models the mix of dialect and MSA (heavily favoring MSA)
which is the final stage in his three phase process of pidginization,
creolization and gradual decreolization. Since this process occurs over a large
geographic area it is not surprising that there is a lot of regional variation.
According to Ferguson's diglossia theory diglossia will become unstable when
literacy rates increase. Lacking precise statistics I will make the unsupported,
but probably safe, claim that literacy rates have by and large greatly increased
in Arab World since World War II. Thus, even according to Ferguson's original
theory of diglossia, New Arabic's current situation can no longer be described
as diglossia because literacy has become more widespread recently. Therefore we
need to come up with a new model and some new terminology. From my perspective
the model of "inherent variability" with a large set of accompanying
socioloinguistic rules is as good a place to start as any.Return to Table
of Contents
Languages other than Arabic have been subject to some
of the same influences. For instance there is Latin. Latin, like Arabic, was the
language of conquering armies and, like Arabic, the size of the conquered
peoples' population was much larger than the size of the conquering armies.
Eventually the conquered peoples became incorporated into the empire as citizens
and adopted the language and customs of the conquerors. The relationship between
the developing Romance languages and High Latin in the Middle Ages fits
Ferguson's definition of diglossia almost perfectly, i.e. it possessed a large
body of literature spanning many centuries combined with a very low literacy
rate. There was a high variety of the language and there were low varieties
which were used for most ordinary conversation. To my knowledge this is usually
attributed to the fact that High Latin was frozen in time by the body of Latin
literature at first and then by the Catholic Church. Because of this Vulgar
Latin evolved out from under it, eventually becoming many separate
geographically dispersed languages.
The New Spoken Arabic dialects have evolved unchecked while at the same time
great care has been taken to keep Al-cArabiyya the same. This situation when
viewed completely separately from any other consideration would seem very
analogous to what happened to Latin as the Romance languages evolved. There is
no arguing with the fact that left to their own devices languages do evolve. The
Romance languages have evolved away from the highly synthetic Latin language.
None of the Romance languages have preserved the case ending system, nor the
mostly free word order that existed in Latin. To my knowledge folks don't argue
about whether or not there was diglossia in Latin during the time of Caesar, or
do they?
Another language which it would seem on the face of it to be undergoing some
of the same influences as Arabic did is English. Today as I write this paper
more than half of the people who use English in their day to day business are
not native speakers. Admittedly most of these people have learned English in a
tutored way. We don't have a situation where a large segment or even majority of
the next generation is learning English from a mother who doesn't really know
English very well. However, I am also running on the assumption that English is
not changing very rapidly. English is part of the modern tradition which allows
the written form of a given language to evolve more or less at the same rate as
its spoken form. Now, I can still read English texts from 200 years ago, but if
I go back farther than that it starts to sound odd to me. I can understand it,
but I would never talk that way. I'm not sure I can trust my perception that
English is not changing quickly.
I think it would be instructive to compare and contrast the spread of Latin
and the development of the Romance languages with the spread and development of
Arabic, for similarities and for differences. I also think it would be
instructive to compare and contrast the development of post World War II Modern
English with the spread of Arabic in the first 100 years of the Islamic
conquests.Return to Table
of Contents
Furthermore there is a lot of work to be done documenting the
changes currently in progress with Arabic. Can we document the post World War II
changes to Arabic? Are these changes uniform throughout the Arab World? It seems
to me that by studying the current developments in Arabic we can test the
soundness of the decreolization part of Versteegh's hypothesis. If his theory is
true we would expect that the increased literacy rates in the Arab World are
increasing the rate of decreolization in Arabic dialects. I would expect that
according to Versteegh's theory, everything else being equal, the higher the
literacy rate, the more pressure exists on that dialect in the direction of MSA.
We should be able to study a dialect for the current direction of the changes
taking place and determine if it is moving toward a local prestige dialect or
toward MSA or toward both at once. If we suppose that Versteegh's theory is
absolutely true then we would expect that the dialects are collapsing in the
direction of MSA. If this is not the case we should then be able to either voice
serious objections to this part of his theory or propose other influences which
exert greater pressure on the dialects than MSA does. If we can observe the same
trends in more than one dialect we should be able come to some definite
conclusions.
On another front we can study the Arabic based creoles in the Sudan and
perhaps in the horn of Africa to determine if they have developed according to
Versteegh's model, although this seems less clear cut than testing the
decreolization prediction. If we are lucky we might be able to observe
first-hand the process of Arabic's continuing spread down the Nile in the Sudan,
although this seems more like a long-term project spanning several
generations.Return to Table
of Contents
In this paper I have briefly outlined
some of the more prominent theories about the history and development of Arabic
from the pre-Islamic period to the modern day. A lot of controversy surrounds
this topic. The evidence is scanty and much of what is debated is speculative in
nature. I have made a case that some of these theories are not mutually
exclusive. In particular, we can explain a lot if we combine Versteegh's theory
of pidginization, creolization and decreolization with Ferguson's KoinŽ II
theory. I have outlined a few avenues for further research and have asked a few
pointed questions.
I have outlined a proposal for a new way of looking at the relationship
between the dialects and MSA which transcends the concept of diglossia. This
idea is not originally mine, and I must give credit to Frederick Cadora who
introduced me to it in the Fall of 1995 during the course of his "Phonology,
Morphology and Syntax of Arabic" seminar at the University of Michigan. This
model seems superior because it is a more holistic model and fits with the
native speakers' perception that they only speak one language.
There is obviously a lot of work to be done in all of these varying areas of
proposed research and investigation. This work should be done, and the debate
should continue. Nevertheless, I will reiterate, in the final analysis we must
admit that we may never know with certainty the truth about how Modern Arabic
was formed from the earlier stages of the language.Return to Table
of Contents
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