The Arabic Language

Qurʾān
as we have it, the 
hamza
is always spelled with a small sign resembling an 
ʿayn
, 
which is usually carried by one of the semi-consonants or glides, 
w
, 
y
or 
ʾalif
. The 
semi-consonants probably represent the pronunciation of the word in the dialect 
of Mecca (see below, p. 49).
This example shows that the realisation of Arabic across the peninsula varied, 
and that the local realisation in Mecca differed from the language of the 
Qurʾān
as we have it. This led the German scholar Karl Vollers to go one step further in 
his theory about the relationship between the text of the 
Qurʾān
and the collo
-
quial speech of Mecca. In his book 
Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien
(
Vernacular and Written Language in Ancient Arabia
, 1906), Vollers claimed that the 
revelation had originally taken place in the colloquial language of the Prophet and 
the Meccans (
Volkssprache
). In his view, this colloquial language was the precursor 
of the modern Arabic dialects. During the period of the conquests, the text was 
transformed into a language that was identical with the poetic language of the 
Najd, called by Vollers 
Schriftsprache
. The differences between the two ‘languages’ 
included the absence of the glottal stop in Meccan Arabic, as well as the elision of 
the indefinite ending 
-n
(nunation) and the vocalic endings. The motive behind 
this transformation was, he asserted, the wish to raise the language of the 
Qurʾān
to the level of that of the poems. Those who were responsible for the alleged trans
-
lation were particularly strict in the matter of the 
hamza
and the case endings, 
whereas they allowed some of the other features, sometimes in the official text, 
and more often in the variants of the text. Vollers believed that the literature 
on the variant readings of the 
Qurʾān
preserved many traces of the underlying 
colloquial language.
It is certainly true, as Vollers says, that the correct declension of the 
Qurʾān
was a 
topos
in early Islamic literature. But in itself the attention that was given to 
this phenomenon in post-Islamic times does not tell us much about the linguistic 
situation in the pre-Islamic period. It can easily be explained by later linguistic 
developments in the period of the conquests: many people in the conquered terri
-
tories did not know Arabic very well and made mistakes when reciting the 
Qurʾān
. 
Therefore, those who cared about the correct transmission of the text were on 
their guard against mistakes in the use of declensional endings, and instructed 
people in the correct grammatical rules (see below, Chapter 5, p. 66).
In its extreme form, Vollers’ theory has been abandoned nowadays and the 
concomitant presupposition of a large-scale conspiracy in early Islam concerning 
the linguistic transformation of the text is no longer held by anyone. The delivery 
of a revelational document in a ‘vulgar’ variety of the language is hardly likely 
in itself. The existence of a poetic register of the language is undisputed, and 
it is not very likely that for the revelation anything but this prestigious variety 
of the language would have been chosen. The alleged traces of West Arabic can 

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Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period 
47
also be explained by the activities of the early copyists, who were familiar with 
the Meccan way of speaking and had to devise a way to record Eastern features 
such as the glottal stop in an orthographic system that had been invented for the 
Western way of speaking.
In spite of this rejection of the ‘translation theory’, the main point of Vollers’ 
theory, the distinction between a 
Volkssprache
and a 
Schriftsprache
, has remained 
the leading principle for almost all subsequent attempts by Western Arabists to 
explain the development of the Arabic language. In modern terms, we could say 
that the central tenet of these theories is that in the pre-Islamic period there was 
already diglossia, that is, a linguistic situation in which the domains of speech 
are distributed between two varieties of the language (cf. below, Chapter 13). In 
that case, the division would be approximately the same as it is nowadays in the 
Arabic-speaking world: a high variety as literary language and a low variety as 
colloquial language. In theories that take this view, the literary language is usually 
called ‘poetic koine’ or poetico-Qurʾānic koine (see below, p. 53).
A modern version of Vollers’ thesis is Owens’ view of the linguistic situation 
in the peninsula in the pre-Islamic period. He believes that both forms of Arabic, 
the ancestor of Classical Arabic and that of the spoken dialects, coexisted in 
pre-Islamic times. In his theory, spoken Arabic corresponded more to the original 
Semitic structure of the language, while the structure of poetic Arabic was innova
-
tory, for instance, by its use of case endings (see below, pp. 139f.).
In itself, it is not unreasonable to assume that there was an essential difference 
between poetic or literary language and colloquial language in pre-Islamic Mecca. 
After all, such a situation is found in other oral cultures as well. The question is, 
however, to what extent this difference corresponds to that between standard 
and colloquial language after the conquests. Contrary to the Arabic sources, the 
theory of a ‘literary’ language assumes that the case endings (
ʾiʿrāb
) were absent 
in everyday speech. In the next paragraphs we shall first look at the data from the 
literature on the dialectal variants (
luġāt
) of the Arab tribes. Then, we shall discuss 
reports about the language of the Bedouin after the conquests.