The Arabic Language

in
, 
ìdan
‘if’ (< 
Arabic 
ʾin
, 
ʾiḏan
), 
sabòo dà
‘because’ (< Arabic 
sabab
‘reason’ + Hausa 
dà
) and 
lookàcii 
dà
‘when’ (< Arabic 
al-waqt
‘time’ + Hausa 
dà
).
The linguistic contact of Hausa with Arabic in Sudan exhibits the effects of 
extensive code-mixing. Here, Arabic nouns are always borrowed without the Arabic 
article, and Arabic verbs, which make up almost one-fifth of the total loan lexicon, 

---

Arabic as a World Language 
319
are completely integrated in the structure of the Hausa verb (Abu-Manga 1999), 
for example, 
halàkaa
‘to destroy’ (< Arabic 
halaka
), 
sàllamàa
‘to greet’ (< Arabic 
sallama
), 
káràntáa 
‘to read’ (< Arabic 
qaraʾa
). This integration even concerns the 
tonal structure of the verb: syllables that were stressed in Arabic tend to receive a 
high tone, and unstressed syllables a low tone, although the actual rules are quite 
complicated. In West African Hausa, verbal notions were occasionally borrowed, 
too, but usually by means of verbo-nominal compounds with the help of the verb 
yi
‘to do’, for example, 
yi kàráatuu
‘to read’ (< Arabic 
qirāʾa
‘reading’).
On the east coast of Africa, traders from South Arabia and Oman established 
contact with Swahili-speaking coast-dwellers. The name ‘Swahili’ derives from the 
Arabic word 
sawāḥil
‘coasts’, and was applied by the traders to those speakers of 
Bantu languages who came from the west to the east coast of Africa, settling there 
around the year 1000 
ce
between Somalia and Mozambique, in approximately the 
same period when the expanding Islamic traders arrived. Along the coast, a series 
of settlements and city-states were established in which commercial transactions 
between the traders and the Bantus took place. The Omani dynasty of Zanzibar, 
who came to control the area from the seventeenth century onwards, stimulated 
the Swahili traders to go looking for ivory and slaves in the interior, and this 
resulted in a wave of expansion of Swahili in the nineteenth century to as far 
west as Zaïre.
The intensive contacts between Arabo-Islamic culture and Swahili culture led 
to the development of a literary tradition in Swahili, whose earliest documents 
go back to the twelfth century. The language was written in Arabic characters 
and served as the medium for a large religious and secular literature. During the 
colonial period, English influence partially replaced that of Arabic. There used to 
be a certain tension between the original native speakers of Swahili on the coast, 
who were Muslims and favoured Arabic as a source language for cultural and 
linguistic borrowings, and the inhabitants of the interior, for whom Swahili was 
only a vehicular language and who were not usually Muslims. The latter resented 
the Omani domination of the recent past and resisted Arabic influence, turning 
instead to English. After the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, when the Sultanate of 
Zanzibar became a British protectorate, Arabic was replaced here and in the rest 
of East Africa in many domains by English and Swahili. In Zanzibar itself, Arabic 
remained the first official language up to the republican revolution of 1964, and 
even after that it continued to play a considerable role in education. In the rest 
of East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda), in spite of the fact that on average half 
of the population is Muslim, knowledge of Arabic usually remains restricted to 
Qurʾānic teaching in the so-called