The Arabic Language

Chapter 8
The Emergence of New Arabic
8.1 The linguistic situation in the Islamic empire
The period of the Islamic conquests immediately after the death of the Prophet in 
10/632 constituted a drastic change in the history of the Arabic language. Within 
a few decades, speakers of Arabic had spread over an enormous territory and 
imposed their language on the inhabitants of the conquered countries. Speakers 
of Arabic had been resident in Syria and Egypt before Islam (see above, Chapter 
3), but their language had never been a language of prestige outside the penin
-
sula, and consequently there had never been an incentive for non-Arabs in these 
countries to learn Arabic. In this chapter, we shall look at the consequences of 
the process of Arabicisation after the conquests for the structure of the language. 
First, we shall describe the linguistic situation in the conquered territories; then 
the changes in the language will be discussed; finally, we shall look into the expla-
nations that have been advanced for these changes. 
The historical details of the conquests are known from the detailed accounts of 
the Muslim historians, but much less is known about the process of Arabicisation. 
In the earliest stages of the conquests, the military efforts of the Islamic authori-
ties in Medina were aimed at the political control of the Arabic-speaking tribes, 
first within the peninsula during the so-called 
ridda
wars, and then outside the 
peninsula, where since time immemorial Arabic-speaking tribes had roamed the 
Syrian desert and Iraq. The initial motive behind the conquests may have been 
the idea that all Arabic-speaking peoples should be united under the banner of 
Islam, while the conquest of the neighbouring sedentary areas occurred more or 
less as an afterthought.
Because of the lack of relevant documents, it is hard to tell what the rate of 
Arabicisation was, and in most cases we can only make a guess as to the period 
of time that was needed for Arabic to be adopted as the main language of the 
empire. We do know that Arabicisation was much more complete, and possibly 
even progressed at a faster rate than the process of Islamicisation. There were 
probably material advantages in conversion to Islam, for instance, the dispensa
-
tion of the poll tax (
jizya
) and the loss of minority status as 
ḏimmī
, but on the whole 
the prevailing tolerance on the part of the Muslims towards Christians and Jews 

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
127
did not generate an urgent need to convert to Islam. As a result, language became 
a binding factor for the Islamic empire to a far greater degree than religion. Even 
nowadays there are large groups of Christians, and to a lesser degree Jews, in the 
Arabic-speaking countries whose mother tongue is Arabic just like that of their 
Muslim neighbours.
The linguistic situation in the incipient Islamic empire is relatively well known. 
In the Arabian peninsula, the only ‘foreign’ language encountered by the Arabs 
was South Arabian. The language was no longer used in its epigraphic form, but 
some varieties must have remained in use as a colloquial language, since in a few 
linguistic pockets South Arabian languages are still spoken today by some tens of 
thousands of speakers in the provinces of Mahra (Yemen) and Ḏ̣ufār (Oman), and 
on the island of Suquṭra. These modern South Arabian languages probably do not 
derive directly from Epigraphic South Arabian, but represent isolated forms that 
were never touched by Arabic influence until the modern period. Six different 
languages have been identified so far (Mehri, Ḥarsūsī, Baṭḥarī, Jibbālī, Soqoṭrī 
and Hobyōt), all of them incomprehensible to a speaker of Arabic. We have seen 
above (p. 44) that in al-Hamdānī’s (d. 334/946) description of the linguistic situa-
tion in the peninsula they are characterised as 
ġutm
‘incorrect, indistinct’, and 
distinguished from varieties of Arabic that had been influenced by South Arabian.
In Iraq, most of the population spoke Aramaic, the