The Arabic Language

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 dramati
-
cally 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 Arabic Language
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 classi
-
cised, 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 agree
-
ment 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 Fergu
-
son’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