The Arabic Language

ḏ̣
arab
‘he hit’/
ḏ̣
ill
‘shadow’ as against Classical Arabic 
ḍaraba
/
ḏ̣
ill
.
• Voiced realisation of /q/ as /g/ (cf. above, Chapter 7, p. 120); already in the 
Classical period, the voiced realisation of the /q/ was regarded as a shibbo-
leth for the Bedouin character of a dialect; it may have been the original 
pronunciation of this phoneme in Classical Arabic (cf. above, Chapter 2, 
p. 24).
• Preservation of the gender distinction in the second- and third-person plural 
of pronouns and verbs; thus, for instance, the dialect of the Najd distinguishes 
between 
ktibaw
‘they wrote [masculine]’ and 
ktiban
‘they wrote [feminine]’, 
where related dialects in Iraq have only 
ktibaw
without gender distinction, 
as in all sedentary dialects in the Arab world.
• The third-person singular masculine of the pronominal suffix in the seden-
tary dialects is 
-u
, 
-o
; in the Bedouin dialects it is usually 
-ah
, 
-ih.
• 
The use of the dual in the nouns is much more widespread in the Bedouin 
dialects than in the sedentary dialects.
• In most Arabic dialects, the prefix vowel of the verb is 
-i-
, a phenomenon 
already found in some of the pre-Islamic dialects (
taltala
), but some of the 
Bedouin dialects of North and East Arabia have 
-a-
as prefix vowel; in the Najdī 
Arabic paradigm the alternation (apophony) of the preformative vowel still 
reflects the situation in some of the pre-Islamic dialects (cf. above, Chapter 
3): in this dialect, 
a
appears before imperfect stem vowel 
i
, and 
i
before 
a
, for 
example, 
yaktib
‘he writes’, but 
yismaʿ
‘he hears’.
• 
There is a tendency in the Bedouin dialects towards a more frequent use 
of the direct annexation in possessive construction; although all Bedouin 
dialects have a genitive exponent, they tend to restrict its use both semanti
-
cally and syntactically to a larger extent than the sedentary dialects do; in 
North Africa, the Western Bedouin dialects distinguish themselves from the 
sedentary dialects in the same area by not using the genitive exponent 
d-
, 
dyal
, but 
ntāʿ
.
• 
The agreement with inanimate plurals in the Bedouin dialects is with the 
feminine singular, as in the Classical language, rather than with the plural.
These features are characteristic of almost all Bedouin dialects. In addition, there 
are specific features characterising the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian peninsula, 
which will be dealt with below (Chapter 11). In general, the distinction between 
Bedouin and sedentary dialects is made on the basis of a few criteria, the most 
important being the voiced realisation of the Classical /q/ and the preservation 
of the Classical interdentals; in morphology, the gender distinction in the plural 
of the verb is often regarded as an important criterion.

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188
The Arabic Language
The conservatism of the Bedouin dialects contrasts with the reduction or 
simplification of linguistic structure in those areas where there is intensive inter-
action between Bedouin and sedentary population, for instance, in southern Iraq, 
along the Gulf coast and even in Mecca, which has a mixed population with many 
immigrants from outside the peninsula. In comparing the Bedouin dialects in the 
peninsula with the related dialects outside the peninsula, Ingham (1982) points 
out that many of the conservative traits of the Arabian dialects, such as the reten
-
tion of the internal passive and causative, the gender distinction in the second-/
third-person plural of the verb, the indefinite marker 
-in
and the epenthetic 
vowel in final clusters, as in 
šift
/
šifit
‘I saw’, 
galb
/
galub
‘heart’, tend to disappear 
the farther away one gets from the Bedouin heartland, as happens in the Mesopo
-
tamian and Gulf varieties of the Central Arabian dialects.
Bedouin dialects are found both in the Eastern Arab world and in the West. The 
Eastern Bedouin dialects are those spoken in the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf 
states, the Syro-Mesopotamian desert, and southern Jordan, the Negev and the 
Sinai. This area is actually a kind of dialect continuum, in which it is difficult to 
distinguish discrete dialects. Two migratory movements, one from central Arabia 
(Najd) to the north, another from southern Mesopotamia to the Gulf, disrupt the 
geographical partition in this area. There is a large degree of interdependence 
between the settled areas and the nomadic tribes that are attached to them, 
even when they originally come from elsewhere. In southern Mesopotamia, the 
nomads dominated the settled population and took over as rulers when they set 
up their summer camps in the settled areas instead of going back to the Najd. In 
the oral literature of these tribes, or rather tribal units, composed of groups of 
different origin, there are frequent references to earlier dwellings. In Syria, there 
is a continuous process of migration between the peninsula and the Syrian 
bādiya
. 
We have seen above (pp. 15–17) that, according to some theories, the Semitic 
languages developed in just such a permanent process of interchange between 
desert and settled area.
Because of their constant migrations, it is difficult to set up geographically 
delimited dialect areas for Bedouin dialects; in fact, in most cases it is impossible 
(cf. Ingham 1982). Only in those cases where there are clear-cut geographical or 
political barriers is it possible to speak of a discrete dialect zone. The speakers 
themselves very often have a clear intuition of the differences between dialects, 
but the problem is that such judgements are usually based on idiosyncratic features 
or lexical items. When there are no barriers, the dialect zones gradually merge, 
creating transitional zones for each individual feature between them. For the 
sedentary groups, ethnic origin is not a determining factor, and their acceptance 
or rejection of innovations is based on the relative force of attraction of different 
cultural/political centres. In the case of nomadic groups, the ethnic origin and the 
tribal relations are of the utmost importance in classifying the dialects, so that it 
is impossible to define them only geographically. An exception is formed by the 

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
189
area of the Jabal Šammar in northern Saudi Arabia, which, thanks to its location 
within easy reach of grazing grounds, has maintained a stable population with 
both nomadic and sedentary sections of the tribe of the Šammar.
The Western Bedouin dialects are spoken all over North Africa. Usually they are 
divided into two groups: the dialects of the area in which the Banū Sulaym settled 
(Tunisia, Libya and western Egypt); and those that belong to the territory of the 
Banū Hilāl (western Algeria and Morocco). In this entire region, there was a large 
chronological distance between the early conquests and the later introduction 
of Bedouin dialects, in the far west more than four centuries. This chronological 
distance may explain the lesser degree of conservatism in the Bedouin dialects 
of North Africa: they stem from tribes that, prior to their migration to North 
Africa, had already long been subjected to influence from sedentary speakers. 
The chronological distance may also explain why, in spite of the different origin 
of the sedentary and the Bedouin dialects, it is still possible to speak of a dialect 
area in North Africa and in Egypt. All dialects of North Africa, for instance, exhibit 
the central feature of the North African dialects, the prefix 
n-
of the first-person 
singular of the imperfect verb. These dialects arrived when there were already 
prestigious cultural and political centres; and although the Bedouin represented 
the new military power in the region, they could not avoid the centripetal influ-
ence of the sedentary dialects.