The Arabic Language

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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Middle Arabic 
155
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 imper
-
fects 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 intro
-
ducing 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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156
The Arabic Language
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 recon
-
struct 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 develop
-
ment 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 transcrip
-
tions 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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Middle Arabic 
157
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 transcrip
-
tions date from later periods and are therefore not very helpful in any reconstruc
-
tion 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.