The Arabic Language

Chapter 10
The Study of the Arabic Dialects
10.1 The Study of the Arabic Dialects
In the preceding chapters, we have concentrated on the features that the Arabic 
vernaculars or dialects have in common as against the Classical Standard language. 
In that context, we have shown that they represent a different type of Arabic, 
rather than just a modified version of the Classical language. In this chapter and 
the next the focus will be on differences between the dialects, in particular, the 
geographical variation and the separation into several dialect areas. The issue of 
the sociolinguistic variation between the dialects and the standard language will 
be reserved for Chapter 13.
The systematic study of dialect geography is a typical invention of Western 
European nineteenth-century linguistics. But it would be wrong to suppose that 
the Arabs themselves were not aware of the variation in speech in the Arabo
-
phone world. We have seen above that grammarians accepted the variation in the 
pre-Islamic dialects and even collected the variants, because in their view these 
belonged to the corpus of pure Arabic speech (p. 45). They were not interested, 
however, in the urban dialects that arose all over the empire. In accordance with 
their views on the Arabic language, they regarded these as erroneous and refrained 
from mentioning them in their writings. But those outside the grammatical tradi
-
tion did show an interest in the linguistic differences between the various parts of 
the empire and their causes. At an early date, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868) informs us that 
‘the people in the cities talk according to the language of the Bedouin immigrants 
that had settled there, which is why you find lexical differences between the people 
of Kūfa and Baṣra and Syria and Egypt’ (
wa-ʾahl al-ʾamṣār ʾinnamā yatakallamūna ʿalā 
luġat an-nāzila fīhim min al-ʿArab, wa-li-ḏālika tajidu l-iḫtilāf fī ʾalfāḏ̣ min ʾalfāḏ̣ ʾahl 
al-Kūfa wa-l-Baṣra wa-š-Šām wa-Miṣr
) (
al-Bayān wa-t-tabyīn
, I, ed. as-Sandūbī, Beirut, 
n.d., p. 38). In Kūfa, he adds, the immigration of Persians to the city brought in a 
number of Persian words: the inhabitants of this city say 
jahār-sūj
(Persian 
čahār
‘four’ + 
sū(j)
‘road’) where the Basrans say 
marbaʿa
for a crossroads, and they use 
words such as 
ḫiyār
instead of 
qiṯṯāʾ
‘cucumber’, and 
wāzār
instead of 
sūq
‘market’ 
(Persian 
ḫiyār
, 
bāzār
). The books of Arabic geographers and travellers sometimes 
inform us about different pronunciations and lexical variation in the areas they 

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
173
visited. The most extensive description of regional linguistic differences in the 
Islamic empire is given by al-Muqaddasī (d. 335/946) in his
 Kitāb ʾaḥsan at-taqāsīm 
fī maʿrifat al-ʾaqālīm
(
The Best Arrangement for the Knowledge of the Regions
). For all the 
provinces visited by him, he systematically discusses their linguistic peculiarities 
and supplies a list of lexical and phonetic regionalisms.
In other writers, the emphasis is on the social distribution of linguistic features. 
Ibn Ḫaldūn (
Muqaddima
, ed. Beirut, n.d., pp. 558–9) has a chapter dedicated to the 
differences between sedentary and Bedouin speech, entitled ‘The language of the 
sedentary population and the city-dwellers is an independent language, differing 
from the language of Muḍar’ (