The Arabic Language

4.3 Theories about the language of the 
Jaˉhiliyya
For the Arabic grammarians, the dialects of all tribes belonged to what was 
basically one language. In spite of the various 
luġāt
in the literature, they do not 
accept a major dichotomy between a ‘literary’ language and everyday speech. 
Western scholarship has often been sceptical of this conception of the devel-
opment of Arabic. Although Vollers’ theory, with its distinction between a 
Volkssprache
and a 
Schriftsprache
in pre-Islamic Arabia, has been abandoned, most 
contemporary Arabists still disagree with the Arabs’ view on the fundamental 

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Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period 
53
unity of the three varieties of everyday speech, the language of the 
Qurʾān
and 
the language of the poetry.
Even those linguists who do not fully subscribe to Owens’ views on the struc
-
ture of pre-diasporic Arabic (see above, p. 47), assume that in the 
Jāhiliyya
collo
-
quial and ‘literary’ language had already diverged. In Western publications, the 
colloquial varieties of the tribes are usually called ‘pre-Islamic dialects’; the 
language of the 
Qurʾān
and poetry is often designated ‘poetico-Qurʾānic koine’ or 
‘poetic koine’ (in German publications 
Dichtersprache
). The theory of the poetic 
koine emphasises the role of the poets, 
šuʿarāʾ
, which means ‘those who have 
knowledge, who are aware’. According to Zwettler (1978: 109), they were special-
ists in an archaic form of the language and the only ones who were still able to 
handle the complicated declensional endings. In this view, the case system was 
beyond the reach of ordinary speakers and could be acquired only by professional 
poets and their transmitters (
ruwāt
, plural of 
rāwī
) after intensive training.
This view of the linguistic situation before Islam has its natural corollary in 
the theories about the emergence of the new type of Arabic in the period of the 
Islamic conquests. Most linguists believe that the changes that took place in the 
transition from Old Arabic to New Arabic, including the disappearance of the 
declensional endings, were the continuation of a process that had already begun 
in the pre-Islamic dialects. Since our information on these dialects is limited, we 
have to turn to other evidence in order to find out whether the later changes can 
indeed be traced back to pre-Islamic times; in particular, whether the Bedouin 
used declensional endings in their colloquial speech.
One source of additional evidence is the pre-Islamic inscriptions. Yet we 
have seen above (Chapter 3) that they do not provide conclusive evidence for or 
against the existence of declensional endings. In the inscriptions, no declensional 
endings are used, either because the language they represent did not have such 
endings, or because this language distinguished between contextual forms with 
endings and pausal forms without endings, of which only the latter were used in 
writing. There is some evidence that the variety of Arabic that is reflected in the 
Nabataean inscriptions retained fossilised endings in some words. Theophorics, 
that is, proper names construed with the name of a deity, very often end in 
-y
, for 
example, 
ʿbdʾlhy
(ʿAbdallāh), and the elements 
ʾabū
and 
ibnū
in compound names 
are almost always spelled with 
-w
in all syntactic contexts. The usual conclusion 
is that these are not really genitive or nominative case endings, and that in this 
variety of Arabic the case endings had been lost before the first century bce
. On 
the other hand, we should bear in mind that most of the inscriptions stem from a 
border area where Arabs had been in contact with other peoples for centuries; it 
may well be the case that the language reflected in these inscriptions underwent 
changes that were similar to those that affected the language of all Arabs after 
the conquests, in particular the loss of the case endings. Since the tribes in the 
North Arabian desert were in touch with an Aramaic-speaking sedentary popula-

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54
The Arabic Language
tion, a type of New Arabic may have become current in the trade settlements of 
the North Arabian/Syrian desert long before Islam.
A second possible source of evidence is the orthography of the Qurʾānic text. 
The language of the