The Arabic Language

10.3 Bedouin and sedentary dialects
We have seen earlier that the process of Arabicisation in the Islamic empire took 
place in two stages (Chapter 8). During the first stage, the sedentary dialects with 
their high rate of innovation came into being. The second wave of Arabicisa
-
tion brought the Bedouin dialects of Arabic all over the Arab world. Unlike the 
urban and rural sedentary dialects, the dialects of these new migrants had not 
yet changed in the constant interaction between people of different languages. 
In the early centuries of the Islamic empire the Bedouin dialects were regarded 
as the only true representatives of the Classical language. The Bedouin were 
supposed to speak pure Arabic – that is, with the declensional endings, 
ʾiʿrāb
, 
literally ‘making it sound like true Bedouin Arabic’ – but in the course of time the 
Arabic grammarians conceded that not even the Bedouin could escape the effects 
of sedentary civilisation. As early as the time of Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002), grammar-
ians could not help but notice the adverse effects of prolonged exposure to seden-
tary speech. Although some Bedouin tribes maintained a reputation of purity of 
speech, in reality they spoke a language that was no longer Classical Arabic – 

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
185
whether this happened before or after the advent of Islam remains disputed (cf. 
above, Chapter 3). In modern times, all dialects, regardless of whether they are 
spoken by the sedentary population or by nomads, are clearly of the New Arabic 
type, for instance, in that they do not have any declensional endings.
Yet in some respects the Bedouin dialects are more conservative than the 
sedentary dialects. By ‘conservative’ we mean that they did not partake in some 
of the changes that took place in the early urban centres, which are labelled here 
as innovative. Underlying this terminology is the assumption that the changes in 
the sedentary dialects are more recent and represent innovations that took place 
in areas with high rates of interaction. Obviously, if one regards the changes as 
the natural result of features already present in the pre-Islamic period, it does 
not make sense to speak about the difference between these two types in terms 
of retention and innovation, because they always coexisted.
Urban and rural dialects tend to form a continuum that is broken only by 
natural barriers or sometimes by national borders. Within the sedentary areas, 
it is difficult to distinguish discrete dialects. There are core areas, around polit-
ical and cultural centres, from which linguistic innovations fan out in a wave-
like pattern. Between adjacent core areas, transitional zones come into being as 
competing innovations clash. The Bedouin dialects, on the other hand, may be 
viewed as discrete dialects, which are maintained even when members of the 
Map 10.5 Tribal areas in North Arabia (after Ingham 1994c: xvii)

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186
The Arabic Language
tribe disperse over a large area. They reflect in their linguistic features the history 
of their migratory pattern. From the Najd area in Saudi Arabia, for instance, tribes 
such as the ʿAniza, Šammar, Muṭayr and Ḏ̣afīr migrated to the north and the east 
over a large geographical area, but their dialects still reflect the original kinship, 
in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the relations between the Indo-European 
languages in the old family-tree model (cf. above, p. 13, and see Map 10.5).
Outside the peninsula and in some regions within it, for instance, the Ḥijāz, 
the difference between the sedentary population and the nomads takes on a 
social significance, the Bedouin/sedentary dichotomy usually correlating with 
linguistic, and sometimes occupational or religious, contrasts. In other parts of 
the Arabian peninsula, especially in the northern Najd, the linguistic differences 
are between tribes, regardless of whether the members of the tribes lead a settled 
life or roam the desert. Some sections of the Šammar, for instance, are nomads, 
but regularly return to their sedentary kinsmen in the oases, with whom they 
form one tribe, both socially and linguistically.
Bedouin groups have always been involved in migratory movements, long 
before the advent of Islam. This pattern was continued in the conquests of the 
first centuries of the Hijra, and it did not stop there. Bedouin tribes continued 
to migrate from the peninsula in the centuries to follow. The eleventh-century 
invasion of the Banū Sulaym and the Banū Hilāl in North Africa is one more 
example of these migrations. In all such cases, the Bedouin immigration set in 
motion a process of Arabicisation in the countryside. The different linguistic layers 
in the Arab world that were the result of the migrations are not independent from 
each other and, although different in origin, the resulting dialects have often 
been subject to mutual influence. Some of the Bedouin groups eventually settled 
down and adopted a sedentary dialect. In other cases, as we have seen above, 
settled areas were Bedouinised secondarily, for instance, Marrakech in Morocco, 
il-Biḥēra in the western Delta in Egypt, some of the Arabic dialects in Israel, the 
speech of the Muslims in Baghdad, or the dialect of the Sunnites in Bahrain. As a 
result, it is impossible to set up a list of canonical features distinguishing Bedouin 
from sedentary dialects, although it is possible to speak of characteristic Bedouin 
features. In using these labels of ‘sedentary’ dialects and ‘Bedouin’ dialects, we 
should keep in mind that they cannot be interpreted as sociological or even socio
-
linguistic labels. A Bedouin dialect is not necessarily a dialect spoken by nomads, 
nor is a sedentary dialect necessarily spoken by an urban population. These labels 
serve solely to distinguish between dialects from the first stage and those from 
the subsequent stages of migration. The linguistic difference between the two 
types is confirmed by the history of the settlement.
With this proviso in mind, it turns out that the Bedouin dialects do have certain 
features in common, which distinguish them collectively from the sedentary 
dialects in the same area. The following features may be mentioned as generally 
typical of Bedouin dialects:

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
187
• 
Preservation of the interdentals: almost all Bedouin dialects preserve the 
Classical /ṯ/ and /ḏ/; the resulting phoneme from the merger of Classical 
/ ḏ̣/ and /ḍ/ is always /ḏ̣/ in these dialects, for example, in Najdī Arabic