Arabic Language

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The Qur‘an: an Encyclopedia

Arabic belongs to the South West Semitic languages, but is sometimes also described as an offshoot of the group of Central Semitic languages. ‘Arabs’ as inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula are already mentioned in Assyrian sources, but we know little about their language (or languages?). Epigraphic South Arabian and its modern dialects belong to a different cluster of Semitic languages. To differentiate South Arabian from Arabic, the latter is sometimes called ‘North-Arabic’, as is the language of some pre-Islamic inscriptions. One of the oldest documents of this Arabic proper is a funeral inscription in five lines, found in Namara (120 km south east of Damascus), in honour of the ‘king of the Arabs (dated 328 CE), written in Nabatean (i.e. in Aramaic) letters. It is generally assumed that part of what was centuries later codified as pre-Islamic bedouin poetry goes back to the sixth or possibly even the fifth century CE. The most important event for Arabic and its linguistic history, however, was the advent of the in the first third of the seventh century CE.

Our knowledge of what came to be known as Classical Arabic (al-lugha alal-fusha) rests: (1) on the as a recited and codified text; (2) on what was transmitted orally as preIslamic poetry, proverbial sayings and stories of bedouin intertribal warfare; and (3) on what the Arab grammarians and lexicographers in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries said they picked up as linguistic information from bedouins on the Arab peninsula. These three strands were interwoven and systematically described by Arab scholars in Basra and Kufa to form the corpus of Arabic grammatical and lexicographical works that enshrine Classical Arabic. The linguistic data available seem to show that this Arabic was ‘a supra-tribal unity, a language that served as a binding factor for all those who lived in the Arabian peninsula’ (Versteegh, 2001:37). Scholars are mainly divided on two interlinked questions: (1) was the Arabic as codified by Arabic scholarship identical with everyday spoken Arabic at the time or was there a poetic koinē which differed markedly from the spoken language?; and (2) does the language and/ or the orthography of the reflect the variant of Arabic spoken in Mecca or in the larger region of Hijaz?

The is the first Arabic document which mentions the Arabic language as such (lisanun 16.103). It stresses repeatedly that it was revealed in Arabic. 43.2–3 states: ‘By the clear book, behold, We have made it an Arabic haply you [pl.] will understand.’ The text which was revealed to the Prophet was ‘made easy’, because it was in Arabic: ‘Now We have made it [the ] easy by thy tongue that thou mayest bear good tidings thereby to the godfearing, and warn a stubborn people’ (19.97). The fact that this revelation was in Arabic was for the the major difference between Muslim revelation and all previous revelation: ‘We have sent no messenger save with the tongue of his people that he might make all clear to them’ (14.4). Enemies of the Prophet accused him of taking over revealed material from others: ‘And We know very well that they say: “Only a mortal is teaching him (i.e. the Prophet).” But the speech of him at whom they hint is barbarous and this is speech Arabic, manifest (mubin)’ (16.103). It follows that the revelation was at first directed at speakers of Arabic only. Not all speakers of Arabic were Muslims at that time, but all Muslims at the time of the revelation were speakers of Arabic.

The was for Arab grammarians, lexicographers and scholars of rhetoric the paradigmatic example of Arabic; its form and content were considered ‘inimitable’. Islamic dogma saw in the divine speech. Arabic was held to surpass not only all other utterings in Arabic but all that could be expressed in all other human languages. The could only be recited in Arabic, it could not be translated; translations were and are considered a kind of commentary. Ritual prayer (salat) had to be performed in Arabic. Because of the (d. 204/820) claimed that Arabic was the most perfect of all languages, which nobody but a prophet could master completely. Thus the became an immensely powerful linguistic matrix. However, there were and are numerous features of language and style that were never taken up as productive models in Classical Arabic.

Arabic was also the language of the words of the Prophet Muhammad, collected in hadith. It was the language of the sermon (khutba), and became the language of religious discourse and jurisdiction. Under the Umayyad (r. 65/685–86/705) Arabic superseded Greek as the language of administration. Under the influence of Islam in the conquered territories Arabic became the language of political power. It also became the language of a flourishing literature in prose and poetry.

The main motive behind the codification of the Arabic language by lexicographers and grammarians was to defend the pure Arabic language against linguistic corruption and to teach nonArab-speakers correct Arabic. Standardising, codifying, developing orthographic and orthoepic symbols were based on the absolute necessity to preserve the correct form and pronunciation of the The but with it also Classical Arabic as a whole, had to be protected against influences of Arabic dialects and against the influences of languages of subjected peoples in the new Arabo-Islamic empire, for example, Persian, Aramaic, Coptic or Greek. Soon urban forms of spoken Arabic were felt to be more open to ‘corruption’ than the language of bedouin tribes. The rift between the language of the city-dwellers and Arab nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes was to make a lasting imprint on the history of Arabic dialects. To this day these are often subdivided into urban, rural and tribal dialects. For large parts of the Near and Middle East, Classical Arabic became a religious and cultural lingua franca. It became the scholarly medium of Muslims all over the world. Arabic deeply influenced other languages spoken and written by Muslims. In the case of Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Pashto, Urdu and Haussa even the Arabic writing system was adopted. The Islamic vocabulary which has penetrated most languages spoken by Muslims to some degree is Arabic. It starts with religious formulas used in the ritual prayer and does not end with Muslim proper names.

The model of Classical Arabic was so powerful mainly because it was inspired by the In morphology and syntax the rules had been laid down once and forever by Arab grammarians. Strict linguistic norms assured linguistic unity over time and space, but on the other hand they blocked development and flexibility. This led in the course of centuries to a diglossia which is until today one of the most important features of the linguistic space of Arabic.

Diglossia in Arabic has often been described as a split between a written formal language which is also used for speech on formal occasions, on the one hand, and informal language, which is not written, on the other. The formal language is Classical Arabic; the spoken language is one of numerous different Arabic dialects. While we can be sure that such a situation characterized the choice of any speaker or writer of Arabic from times onwards at least, modern research has shown for the linguistic situation of modern Arab speakers that the term ‘diglossia’, which implies the existence of two different layers of language, is too simplistic. In reality, today one has to distinguish at least five socio-linguistic levels of Modern Arabic: the classical heritage; contemporary classical; the colloquial of the cultured; the colloquial of the enlightened; and the colloquial of the illiterate. Real speech moves inside this continuum, involves frequent code switching and moves freely between these registers. We can assume that this situation prevailed in Arabic in premodern times also.

The language of Classical Arabic was and is a language of the highest cultural prestige, but nobody speaks it as his or her mother tongue. It has to be acquired. The language spoken at home and in the market was and is one of the Arabic dialects; such a dialect is the first language of each Arab. As the means of informal communication it carries no prestige whatsoever. The gulf separating the formal and the informal mode of expression became historically wider and wider until the formal and the informal levels became mutually almost or totally incomprehensible. At the same time the differences between the Arabic dialects which were spread over a wide geographic area developed centrifugally even further. A speaker of a Moroccan dialect today cannot make himself understood to the speaker of an Iraqi dialect. They can communicate only if both have learned Classical Arabic. Whether modern means of communication, which are dominated by Modern Standard Arabic, will influence this pattern remains to be seen.

While the situation of diglossia accompanied Classical Arabic almost from the beginning, not all written communication in Arabic conformed to the norms of Classical Arabic grammar and lexicography as developed by Arab philology. As can be already seen from the earliest Arabic papyri from the middle of the seventh century, written Arabic could deviate in some or many aspects from these rules. In personal correspondence, in non-religious and non-literary writing, in works concerning geography or medicine, mathematics or botany, Arab philologists distinguished a ‘low style’ from an ‘elevated style’—the latter showing vernacular or otherwise incorrect, i.e. ‘faulty’, forms, words and syntax. It seems that Jews and Christian were often more tolerant in this respect than Muslim scholars. ‘Christian Arabic’ and ‘Jewish Arabic’ were special cases of a sub-standard Classical Arabic. Their distance from Classical Arabic grew when Arabic was written in non-Arabic letters; many Jews, for instance, wrote Arabic in Hebrew letters.

The term ‘Middle Arabic’ was coined by Western scholarship to designate this genre of written Arabic which would not or could not comply completely with the norms of Classical Arabic. ‘Middle Arabic’ does not mean a linguistic stage in a chronology between ‘Old Arabic’ and ‘Modern Arabic’, but an intended or unintended breach between a normative, often almost unattainable ideal of written formal Classical Arabic, on the one hand, and a lower, ‘incorrect’ style characterized by interference of the spoken informal language, on the other. Usually Middle Arabic is the consequence of inadequate mastering of or deliberate neglect of norms of Classical Arabic. This Middle Arabic is also characterized by pseudo-correct forms, which as such do not belong to either one of the two levels.

The normative pressure of Classical Arabic was lightest in the vocabulary. In areas outside the strictly legal and religious field, scholarly Arabic from the second/eighth century onwards underwent a massive influx of foreign words, loanwords and loan translations. Greek medicine, alchemy, botany, geography, astronomy, philosophy and other sciences were introduced into Arabic culture, Classical Greek and Hellenistic works were translated into Arabic. The centre of this activity was Baghdad in the third/ninth century. The translators, usually Syriac-speaking Christians, translated from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic and were encouraged by the Muslim rulers in the court. Aristotle and Plato, Galen and Hippocrates became part of Arabic culture.

Toward the end of the fourth/tenth century Arabic had to compete with other languages in the disintegrating Islamic empire. Under the Seljuks, Arabic as a language of court and diplomacy was gradually superseded by New-Persian, and with the fall of Granada (897/ 1492) Arabic ceased to be used in the Iberian peninsula. The Ottoman conquest of wide areas of the Near East (and Eastern Europe) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries included most regions in which Arabic was spoken. Ottoman Turkish was established as the language of administration and the language of the court. Arabic was still spoken widely and Classical Arabic did not disappear. But it receded, and lost much of its prestige as a culturally dominant language. For Muslims it never lost its strictly religious importance.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and under the onslaught of European colonialism, most Arabicspeaking intellectuals inside and outside the Ottoman Empire saw Arabic language and literature, Arabic culture and Arabic political life in a stage of deplorable decline and decadence. The countermovement to overcome this decadence was called ‘renaissance’ (Nahda). A very important element in this project was linguistic reform. The new ‘modern’ Arabic language was supposed to become a medium of natural sciences and political progress. At the same time it was also to be developed to compete with European literatures, poetry, prose and drama. The pioneers of the Nahda, therefore, encouraged and supported the translation of European books, technical and scientific, political and literary, into Arabic—mainly from French and English. This was the second systematic movement of translation into Arabic and became even more momentous than its predecessor in times.

The project was concerned with creating a new technical and scientific vocabulary, with introducing new literary genres such as drama and the novel, and with adopting new means of communication such as newspapers and journals. In all these areas the Nahda was successful. While the ideal of one Arabic written language was strenuously kept up, the model as such faded. Many Arab Christians were active in the Nahda movement. They were often as much pro-Arab as antiOttoman and played a leading role in the development of Arab nationalism. Arabic was at that time often seen less as the language of the but rather as the language of all Arabs regardless of their creed. Classical Arabic became the only common bond for the emerging Arab national states. The linguistic unity of Classical Arabic turned into a symbol of Arab cultural and political unity (Pan-Arabism). Many discussions dealt with the question of whether a foreign word should be taken over and possibly be Arabicized or whether a purely Arabic word or root should be given a new or extended meaning. Right up until today Arab academies propose lists of Arabic words recommended as translations for specialized English or French terms.

The discussion of how much linguistic and cultural reform was necessary and admissible led towards the end of the twentieth century to the widely debated question of how modernity and authenticity (asala) could be reconciled. While morphologically and syntactically the modern form of Classical Arabic, which is called Modern Standard Arabic (al-lugha has much in common with Classical Arabic, both vocabulary and idiomatic use have changed drastically. Arabic is today the official language of Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and in the territories administered by the Palestinian Authority. Arabic became in 1973 one of the official languages of the United Nations.

In the period of Arab conquests after the Prophet’s death (11/632) many newly conquered regions were Arabicized. Arabicization in some cases preceded Islamization, and in many cases was faster than Islamization. In Iraq and in Egypt, for example, after the Muslim conquest, numerous Jews and Christians did not convert to Islam but took over Arabic as their language. While Classical Arabic became the one language of formal discourse, the spoken language was not unified but was split instead into different regional vernaculars. The main factors that contributed to the development of a new type of colloquial Arabic (‘New Arabic’) were: (1) the variants of Arabic spoken by the conquering Arab tribes; and (2) the different sorts of diglossia that developed in different situations of linguistic interference with a variety of languages. There is no agreement among Arabists about exactly how this situation developed. Are all modern dialects to be traced back to one kind of spoken Arabic? It is generally admitted that long periods of diglossia between Arabic, on the one hand, and Berber, Coptic, Aramaic, Persian, etc., on the other, must have played a role. It seems probable also that the highly prestigious Classical Arabic always influenced in some way the different vernaculars. In the present time (2003), an Arabic dialect is spoken by an estimated 170 million Arabs.

Some important differences between most of the Arabic dialects of today and Classical Arabic are:

Edzard, L. (1998) Language as a Medium of Legal Norms: Implications of the use of Arabic as a language of the United Nations, Berlin: Dincker & Humblot.

Jastrow, O. (1984) ‘Ein islamischer Sprachraum? Islamische Idiome in den Sprachen muslimischer Völker’, in W. Ende and U.Steinbach (eds) Der Islam in der Gegenwart, Munich: C.H.Beck, 582–9.

Jenssen, H. (2001) ‘Arabic Language’, in EQ, Vol. 1, 127–35.

Versteegh, K. (2001) The Arabic Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

STEFAN WILD

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