The Arabic Language

Chapter 17
Arabic as a World Language
17.1 Introduction
At a rough guess, approximately 200 million people use a variety of Arabic as 
their mother tongue. But the domain of Arabic does not stop at the boundaries 
of the Arabophone area. Throughout history, speakers of Arabic have frequently 
come into contact with speakers of other languages and affected their language, 
in its vocabulary or even in its morphosyntactic structure. In situations of contact 
between speakers of two languages, the direction of the influence and its nature 
are determined by the relative prestige of both languages and by the history of 
their cohabitation. Wherever Arabic is spoken as a minority language in a region 
where another language is the prestige language, it is affected by the language 
of the host country, both in the so-called language islands and in the emigration 
(cf. above, Chapter 15). But as an international language it has in its turn affected 
other languages within its sphere of influence, in large parts of Africa, in Turkey, 
in Iran, in South Asia and in South-east Asia.
In these regions, Islam was introduced as the new religion, but the language of 
the Arabs did not supplant the indigenous language as it had done in the central 
areas. Farsi (New Persian), for instance, was originally the language of one of 
the peripheral areas of the Sasanian Empire, also called Dari, while the official 
language was Middle Persian (Pahlavi). Subordinate to Arabic during the first 
centuries of the Islamic conquest, Pahlavi continued to be used until the ninth 
century, but was supplanted in the tenth century by Farsi as the national language 
of Iran under the dynasty of the Samānids (cf. above, pp. 81f.). From the begin-
ning of the conquests Farsi had been used as the language of religious instruc
-
tion to those converts who had not (yet) mastered Arabic, and it is therefore not 
surprising that it became the carrier of the religious message even further east. In 
Asia, the role of Arabic was restricted to that of the language of the 
Qurʾān
; many 
Arabic loanwords in the indigenous languages, as in Urdu and Indonesian, were 
introduced through the medium of Persian.
In all Islamic countries, the influence of Arabic is pervasive because of the 
highly language-specific nature of Islam. Although in practice, local languages 
were used in religious instruction and even in recitation, many people believed 

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The Arabic Language
that the 
Qurʾān
could not be translated (see above, Chapter 5, pp. 80f.), and that 
those who converted to Islam had to learn its language. Ordinary believers, even 
when they did not learn to speak Arabic properly, held the Arabic text of the 
Qurʾān
in great awe. In all countries where Islam is a majority religion, religious 
instruction always involves a certain amount of instruction in Arabic. Even when 
most of the instruction and explanation of the text takes place in an indigenous 
language, children still learn to pronounce or write the text more or less correctly, 
often without really understanding it. In some countries, there is a whole network 
of Qurʾānic schools offering instruction in Arabic. Linguistically, the presence of 
Arabic as a religious language is seen above all in the vocabulary, in which Arabic 
words abound. In many of the languages involved, two layers may be distin
-
guished in the Arabic-based vocabulary. The first layer represents the original 
borrowings from the period of the Islamic expansion; these have usually been 
integrated completely into the lexicon of the language. The second layer consists 
of learned loanwords, which have been introduced recently by the scholarly elite, 
who aim to preserve to some degree the original Arabic pronunciation.
It would be too restrictive to see the influence of Arabic purely as a matter 
of religion. In large parts of the world, Arabic represented, and still represents, 
access to knowledge of a kind that is not available otherwise. The Swahili schol
-
arly tradition that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in 
the city-states of Lamu and Pate on the East African coast developed a mixed 
literary culture in which Arabic sources served as models for the production of 
Swahili writings. In contemporary times, young students in West Africa are eager 
to improve their proficiency in Arabic, because it gives them access to a much 
wider array of written sources than the restricted curriculum of the 
madrasa
s can 
provide them with.
It was precisely because of this role of Arabic as the language of both science 
and religion that Arabic script was often used to alphabetise indigenous languages. 
Major Islamic languages, like Persian, Turkish, Malay, Swahili and Urdu, were 
written with an adapted Arabic alphabet, which in some cases supplanted an 
existing writing system. Persian, for instance, used to be written with the Pahlavi 
script, but when Farsi became the new cultural language of the area, Arabic script 
was chosen as its medium.
In Africa, a large number of languages adopted Arabic script as their first 
medium of writing. These writing systems have become known collectively as 
ajami 
(< Arabic 
ʾaʿjamī 
‘foreign, non-Arabic’). The introduction of Arabic script for 
languages with a completely different phonemic inventory led to a number of 
sometimes very ingenious adaptations. Thus, for instance, the retroflex conso-
nants of Urdu are represented by their Arabic equivalents with a small super
-
script 
ṭāʾ
; in the same manner aspirated Urdu consonants are followed in the 
script by a letter 
hāʾ
. Many adaptations involved manipulating the diacritic dots, 
for example, a 
bāʾ
with two subscript dots to represent implosive [ɓ] in Hausa or 

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Arabic as a World Language 
315
a 
fāʾ 
with three dots to represent [v] in Kurdish. Even more ingenious devices had 
to be employed for the representation of vowels, of which there are only three 
in Arabic. One way to solve this problem is by using combinations of vowel signs. 
Thus, in Arabic-Afrikaans the combination of 
fatḥa 
and 
kasra 
is used for the vowel 
/e/ (Davids 2011: 180–8). In African languages, the so-called Warš dot is often used 
to represent the vowel /e/, for instance, in Tuareg (Kossmann and Elghamis 2014). 
This subscript dot – named after the Qurʾānic reader Warš (d. 197/812) – stems 
from the Maghrebi scribal tradition, which used it to indicate fronting (
ʾimāla
) of 
the vowel /a/ to [æ] in Qurʾānic manuscripts.
Arabic and Arabic script contributed to the development of literacy, and 
sometimes even to the development of a vernacular into a standard language. In 
South Africa, immigrant Muslims, most of them coming from South or South-east 
Asia, began to write materials for religious instruction in the spoken language of 
the Cape Colony, Afrikaans, using Arabic script. This gave rise to a body of litera
-
ture of Afrikaans in Arabic script, which has become known under the name of 
Arabic-Afrikaans. The codification of Afrikaans was to play a crucial role in its 
development as an official language, since up until then Afrikaans had merely 
been a spoken language lacking the prestige of the dominant standard language, 
Dutch. 
In this chapter, we shall take a look at the different modes of coexistence in 
those regions where Arabic did not become the dominant language and the effect 
of these linguistic contacts on the indigenous language.