The Arabic Language

Daf al-ʾiṣr ʿan kalām ʾahl Miṣr
(
The 
Removal of the Burden from the Language of the People of Egypt
), Yūsuf al-Maġribī (d. 
1019/1611) intends to record the way in which Arabic is spoken in Egypt. He criti-
cises some of the ‘errors’ that Egyptians make, but even when he disapproves 
of these ‘errors’, his examples are a precious source of information about early 
Egyptian Arabic:
The people in Egypt, including some of the elite, say without thinking, for instance 
fulān ʾad huwwā ʿamal kaḏā
‘someone acted like this’ or 
ʾad huwwā jā
‘look, he came’. 
There is no way of correcting such an expression; what they mean is 
hā huwa
or 
hāḏā 
huwa
. (
an-nās fī Miṣr yaqūlūna ḥattā baʿḍ al-ḫawāṣṣ bi-ġayr fikr fulān ʾad huwwā ʿamal 
kaḏā ʾaw ʾad huwwā jā maṯalan hāḏihi l-lafḏ̣a lā ḥīla fī taṣḥīḥihā wa-murāduhum maʿnā hā 
huwa ʾaw hāḏā
) (Yūsuf al-Maġribī, 
Ḍafʿ al-ʾiṣr
, ed. Zack, Leiden, 2009, f. 3b)
It would be wrong to assume that Yūsuf intended to write a dialect grammar; 
one could say, though, that he defends the Egyptian version of Classical Arabic, 
because whenever it is possible to find a Classical origin for a regional expression, 
he accepts it. 
In the nineteenth century, however, even in Egypt many people felt that the role 
of the Classical language as the uniting factor in the Arab world was threatened 
by too much attention to the dialects, symbols of the fragmentation of the Arab 
world. There was some truth in this suspicion, since the colonial authorities have 
been known to actively promote the use of the dialect. In Algeria, for instance, 
the French for some time outlawed the teaching of Classical Arabic, which was 
replaced by the Algerian dialect, and in Egypt the British authorities actively 
supported experiments by Orientalists to replace the Arabic script with the Latin 
script as a medium for the Egyptian dialect. As a result, dialectology became associ
-
ated with the divisive policy of the colonial authorities, and the dialectologist was 
regarded as a tool of imperialism. In addition, orthodox circles condemned any 
attempt to study the dialects as detrimental to the language of the 
Qurʾān
.
In the modern period, it remains difficult in the Arab world to arouse interest 
in the dialects as a serious object of study. Many speakers of Arabic still feel that 
the dialect is a variety of language without a grammar, a variety used by children 

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
175
and women. Even in universities there is a certain reluctance to accept dialect 
studies as a dissertation subject. This is not to say that there are no Arab dialec
-
tologists. Many Arab linguists have applied their expertise to their native dialect, 
and some of the best dialect monographs have been written by Arab linguists. 
But on the whole, one may say that the study of dialectology still suffers from the 
drawbacks mentioned here.
Apart from the ‘political’ problem in Arabic dialectology, researchers are also 
confronted by a general problem of dialectological research, that of the observ
-
er’s paradox. This is not a specific problem in the study of Arabic dialects, yet 
the study of these dialects is particularly affected by it. Researchers are always 
faced by a paradox in that they wish the speakers of the dialect to speak as infor
-
mally as possible, but it is precisely the attention to their speech that forces the 
speakers to upgrade their dialect and talk as ‘correctly’ as possible. In a situa
-
tion of diglossia (see Chapter 13), this ‘observer’s paradox’ is even more intense 
than elsewhere, since there is a constant temptation for the speakers to move 
upwards on the speech continuum, even without the presence of a dialectologist. 
The result is manifest in a considerable number of dialect monographs and collec
-
tions of dialect texts with traces of classicising. Dialect grammars often state, for 
instance, that the dialect has two ways of expressing possession, one with the 
Classical Arabic construct state and another with the analytic genitive. Such a 
statement is true as a synchronic observation, since many speakers indeed use the 
Classical construction because of the prestige of the standard language. But from 
a diachronic point of view, it would appear that the Classical construction is an 
intruder in the structure of the (sedentary) dialects. The degree of emphasis one 
places on the presence of both constructions in the dialect partly depends on the 
informants: when dialectologists choose to talk to the learned men of a village, 
they are bound to receive a highly upgraded kind of dialect in return. Incidentally, 
the grammatical descriptions often ignore the fact that the coexistence of the two 
constructions may bring about a new differentiation in function. In some dialects, 
the two possessive constructions have come to mark the opposition between 
alienable and inalienable possession (for instance, in Egyptian Arabic 
laḥmi
‘my 
flesh’/
il-laḥm ibtāʿi
‘my meat’).
The upgrading of local dialect forms does not always have to take the form of 
classicisms. In cases of competing forms, informants will often choose the one 
that is identical with the prestige dialect, either a local one or, more often, the 
dialect of the capital. This applies even to those instances where the prestige form 
is not identical with the Classical form, whereas the local form is. In areas where 
an interdental and a dental reflex of Classical Arabic /ṯ/ compete, the former is 
often avoided because it is associated with rural or Bedouin dialects, even though 
it is generally used in Qurʾānic recitation. Likewise, in some areas in the Egyptian 
Delta, the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/ are avoided in conversations with outsiders 
and replaced with Cairene /ē/, /ō/.

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176
The Arabic Language
One particularly striking example of this phenomenon is mentioned by Holes 
(1987: 74–6). Both in Kuwait and in Bahrain, the standard dialect realisation of 
Classical /j/ is /y/. In Kuwait, upgrading leads to the replacement of /y/ with /j/, 
which sounds more literate. In Bahrain, however, there is a Shiʿite minority that 
consistently uses /j/. As a result, Sunnites in Bahrain never use /j/ in upgrading, 
because this variant is associated with the non-prestige Shiʿite dialect, in spite of 
the fact that in Qurʾānic recitation they do use /j/ themselves.