The Arabic Language

bint-ak
, 
bint-ik
‘your [masculine/feminine] 
daughter’ may be explained as cases of vowel harmony from older 
*bint-a-ka
, 
*bint-
i-ki
. The vowel between noun and suffix is a generalised case ending, which was 
selected on the basis of correspondence with the final vowel of the suffix. There-
fore, the case endings must already have become inoperative at a time when the 
short-end vowels were still pronounced, otherwise a form such as 
bint-ak
could 
not have arisen. Besides, the survival of fossilised case endings in some Bedouin 
dialects (cf. p. 193) is inexplicable if one assumes that the short vowel endings 
disappeared before the collapse of the case system.
The debate about the colloquial varieties in the 
Jāhiliyya
may be approached 
from yet another angle if we turn to the speech of the Bedouin in post-Islamic 
times. The Arabic grammarians believe that the Bedouin spoke ‘pure Arabic’ 
(
faṣīḥ
) and continued to do so after the conquests, at least for some time. In the 
words of Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 757/1356), the Bedouin spoke according to their linguistic 
intuition and did not need any grammarians to tell them how to use the declen
-
sional endings (see below, Chapter 10, p. 173). He clearly believed that in the first 
centuries of Islam, before Bedouin speech had become affected and corrupted 
by sedentary speech, it still contained correct declensional endings. The force 
of this argument partly depends on the value that we attach to reports about 
Bedouin purity of speech. According to these reports, it was fashionable among 

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Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period 
57
noble families to send their sons into the desert, not only to learn how to shoot 
and hunt, but also to practise speaking pure Arabic. Other reports come from 
professional grammarians who stayed for some time with a Bedouin tribe and 
studied their speech because it was more correct (
faṣīḥ
) than that of the towns 
and the cities.
Of course, these reports may also be regarded as symptomatic of the generally 
nostalgic attitude towards the Bedouin past and the desert. Besides, the Bedouin 
could have preserved certain forms of poetry with a Classical type of 
ʾiʿrāb
, just 
as they do nowadays in Central Arabia, while using a form of New Arabic in their 
everyday speech. Since the grammarians were looking for traces of 
ʿArabiyya
and 
often used transmitters of poetry as informants, they got exactly what they were 
asking for, which was not necessarily the colloquial speech of the Bedouin tribes 
involved. If one takes this view, the linguistic purity of the Bedouin becomes a 
mere 
topos
, along with stories about their chivalry, manliness and generosity. On 
the other hand, if we believe the reports by professional grammarians, we also 
have to believe that in the 
Jāhiliyya
Bedouin more or less spoke the same language 
as that of their poems, which in its turn was the language in which God revealed 
His last message to the world.
In the literature about the linguistic situation in the 
Jāhiliyya
, much impor
-
tance has been attached to reports about linguistic mistakes in early Islam. There 
is, indeed, a vast amount of anecdotes concerning the linguistic mistakes made by 
the 
mawālī
, the non-Arabs who had converted to Islam. It is commonly believed 
that these anecdotes document a state of confusion and corruption of the Classical 
language. Yet such reports do not necessarily support the view that the system 
of declension had become redundant. If anything, the point in the anecdotes is 
precisely that the target language of the newly converted, the language of the 
Arabs which they wished to imitate, still contained declensional endings.
In one story, someone makes a mistake in the Qurʾānic verse 9/3: 
ʾinna llāha 
barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūluhu
‘God keeps aloof from the polytheists, and so 
does His Prophet’, and recites 
ʾinna llāha barīʾun min al-mušrikīna wa-rasūlihi
with 
an incorrect genitive ending, thus uttering a blasphemous ‘God keeps aloof from 
the polytheists and from His Prophet’. In another example, a recent convert is 
reported to have said: 
tuwuffiya ʾabānā wa-taraka banūna
‘our father [accusative] 
has died and left sons [nominative]’ (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, 
Nuzhat al-ʾalibbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt 
al-ʾudabāʾ
, ed. Amer, Stockholm, 1963, pp. 6–7). While the first example may have 
been fabricated, the second one clearly shows a tendency on the part of the 
non-Arab client to use hypercorrect endings (otherwise he would have said 
banīna
in the accusative as well). In both Ibn al-ʾAnbārī’s and Ibn Ḫaldūn’s account of the 
history of the Arabic language, a link is made between the corruption of speech 
and the beginnings of the grammatical tradition (cf. below, Chapter 7).
The first written examples of wrong case endings stem from the first half of 
the first century of the Hijra. In two Egyptian papyri, dating from year 22 of the 

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58
The Arabic Language
Hijra, that have been examined by Diem (1984), we find the proper name 
ʾAbū 
Qīr
in a genitive position and the hypercorrect expression 
niṣfu dīnāran
‘half a 
dinar’. Many more mistakes may be cited from later papyri (cf. below, Chapter 
9, pp. 157f.). These papyri were written in a bilingual context, and, as the scribes 
may have been bilingual, such early mistakes cannot be taken as proof of the 
disappearance of the case endings before the period of the conquests. On the 
contrary, the occurrence of hypercorrect forms suggests that the target language 
still contained a case system.
What, then, may we conclude about the presence or absence of diglossia in the 
pre-Islamic period? One point is certain: there are no traces of pseudo-corrections 
in the poems preserved from the pre-Islamic period. Such forms are usually a 
corollary of a sharp divergence between a literary norm and a colloquial variety 
(cf. below, pp. 153f.), and their absence would seem to point to a more widespread 
usage of the case endings than the limited one advocated by the proponents of 
the ‘poetic koine’. One could, of course, object that any errors would have been 
weeded out by later collectors of poetry and copyists anyway. But the general 
conclusion must be that even when some of the changes that Arabic underwent in 
the post-Islamic period may have been present in pre-Islamic speech, the funda-
mental structural differences between the Old Arabic of the pre-Islamic period 
and the New Arabic represented by the contemporary dialects still need an expla
-
nation. The emergence of this new type of Arabic in the period of the conquests is 
characterised not only by the disappearance of the declensional system, but also 
by a complex of other features (cf. the discussion in Chapter 8).