The Arabic Language

laḥn al-ʿāmma
). But in spite of what 
the titles of these treatises might lead us to believe, they are not concerned with 
the colloquial language as such. Their aim is to preserve the purity of the standard 
language; and, while some of the mistakes they criticise may have been caused by 
interference of the colloquial language, it would be wrong to assume that we can 
reconstruct the vernacular on the basis of this material. A few examples from a 
sixth-/twelfth-century Andalusian treatise of this genre may suffice to demonstrate 
this. In his 
Madḫal ʾilā taqwīm al-lisān wa-taʿlīm al-bayān
(
Introduction to the Correction 
of Speech and the Teaching of Eloquence
’, ed. Pérez Lázaro, Madrid, 1990), Ibn Hišām 
al-Laḫmī (d. 577/1182) mentions a large number of ‘mistakes’ made by the common 
people (
yaqūlūna 
… ‘they say …’), and he gives the form that he regards as correct 
(
wa-ṣ-ṣawāb 
…): wrong vowels (
muqāmāt
instead of 
maqāmāt 
‘standing-places’; 
ḏihāb
instead of 
ḏahāb 
‘going away [verbal noun]’); wrong consonants (
sanbūsak
instead 
of 
sanbūsaq 
‘meat pie’; 
mutadaʿdiʿ 
instead of 
mutaḍaʿḍiʿ 
‘humbling’); inappropriate 
assimilations (
muštahid
instead of 
mujtahid 
‘exerting o.s.’); wrong form of the verb 
(
ʾarsā
instead of 
rasā 
‘to lay at anchor’); noun of place instead of noun of instru
-
ment (
maġsal
instead of 
miġsal 
‘wash-pot’); dropping of glottal stop (
ṯār
instead 
of 
ṯaʾr 
‘revenge’; 
riyya
instead of 
riʾa 
‘lungs’); wrong construction of the numerals 
(
ṯalāṯ šuhūr
instead of 
ṯalāṯat ʾašhur 
‘three months’). Some of these mistakes may 
have been inspired by the spoken language, but the author’s main concern is with 
mistakes that were made in writing. Thus, he also mentions cases such as 
ḥalwa
(with 
tāʾ marbūṭa
) instead of 
ḥalwā
‘candy’ (with 
ʾalif maqṣūra
), which in his time 
must have been purely a matter of orthography. The sum total of the mistakes 
may tell us something about the interference of the colloquial language in the use 
of Classical Arabic, but it does not provide a complete view of the structure of the 
vernacular of the time, let alone of the relative chronology of the changes.
An important source for our reconstruction of the colloquial in the early 
Islamic period is the corpus of so-called Middle Arabic texts, in the first place the 
papyri, and in the second place the more or less literary texts that contain many 
‘mistakes’ and deviations from Classical grammar. Some of these mistakes can, 
indeed, be explained as interference by colloquial speech, but since the written 
medium remained the domain of the Classical language, Middle Arabic texts 
cannot provide us with material to study the chronology of the development of 
spoken Arabic. What the written texts document are changes in the norms for the 
standard language. A striking illustration is the use of colloquial personal suffixes 
in North African Middle Arabic texts. While these texts exhibit fairly often the 
use of the first-person singular of the imperfect with 
n-
(in writing 
nqtl
‘I kill’), 
the use of 
n-…-ū
(in writing 
nqtlw
‘we kill’) for the first-person plural is much 
less common. It is reasonable to assume that the avoidance of the plural form 

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The Arabic Language
is connected with the fact that in Classical Arabic such a form cannot occur in 
writing, whereas the singular form is at least a possible word, even though it has 
a different meaning in Classical Arabic. When in later texts the plural form does 
occur, this cannot be taken to imply that it has recently been introduced in the 
colloquial language, but it simply means that the norms for the written language 
have changed, and the form has become less stigmatised (for more details about 
Middle Arabic, see below, Chapter 9).