The Arabic Language

5.3 The standardisation of the language
Even before the language shift of the 
dīwān
, Arabic was used as a written 
language: the earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Hijra, and at the end of 
the first century of the Hijra quite a number of papyrus texts must have been 
circulating. The language of these papyri is highly irregular from the point of 
view of the codified grammar of Classical Arabic, but the fact that they contain a 
large number of hypercorrections demonstrates that the scribes tried to emulate 
a linguistic ideal. In Chapter 9, on the so-called Middle Arabic texts, we shall deal 
with the linguistic features of the corpus of papyri. In this chapter, our main 
purpose is to sketch the process of standardisation that was soon under way.
The Qurʾānic language, though virtually identical with the language of 
pre-Islamic poetry, has a typically religious flavour, manifesting itself in peculiari-
ties of style and language that must have been absent in other registers. Likewise, 
the language of the poems was marked by poetic licence that did not occur in 
ordinary language. Although both sources constituted a model for correct Arabic, 
they could hardly serve as a model for ordinary prose. The arbiters of linguistic 
correctness, the Bedouin, were frequently called in to help in linguistic matters, 

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The Arabic Language
but they were in no position to enforce a standard language, if only because 
of their own linguistic differences. We have seen above (Chapter 4) that in the 
period of the 
Jāhiliyya
the language of the various tribes varied to a certain extent; 
and, even though it is reasonable to assume that there were no real problems of 
communication, there was no general standard either. On the other hand, the 
growing sedentary population with a more or less complete command of the 
language was very much in need of such a standard, but could hardly be expected 
to devote themselves to decisions about linguistic correctness. As a matter of fact, 
their slipshod use of the language for practical purposes, as in the texts that we 
find in the papyri, was one of the reasons for a growing concern on the part of 
those who regarded themselves as the true heirs of Bedouin civilisation, the pure 
Arabs. In the account of Muslim historians, ‘corruption of speech’ was the main 
motive behind the ‘invention’ of grammar, which is attributed to various people, 
among them ʾAbū l-ʾAswad. The historicity of this account is doubtful (see below, 
Chapter 7, p. 108); it probably reflects later views about the development of the 
grammatical standard (Talmon 1985). Yet it can hardly be denied that in the early 
decades of Islam there was an increasing call for specialists who could provide 
adequate teaching in Arabic. Grammarians must have played an important role in 
the standardisation of the language. The earliest scholarly efforts concerned the 
exegesis of the Revealed Book, but since students of the language of the 
Qurʾān
could hardly ignore that other source of pre-Islamic Arabic, the poems, very soon 
the two main components of the corpus of texts that were to become canonical for 
the linguistic study of Arabic were combined in the writings of the grammarians.
The first grammarian to give an account of the entire language in what was 
probably the first publication in book form in Arabic prose, Sībawayhi, was not of 
Arab stock himself, but a Persian from Shiraz (see Chapter 7). His example set the 
trend for all subsequent generations of grammarians. The grammarians believed 
that their main task was to provide an explanation for every single phenomenon 
in Arabic, rather than a mere description, let alone a set of precepts on how 
to speak Arabic correctly. Consequently, they distinguished between what was 
transmitted and what was theoretically possible in language. In principle, they 
accepted everything that was transmitted from a reliable source: the language 
of the 
Qurʾān
, which was sacrosanct; everything that had been preserved from 
pre-Islamic poetry; and testimonies from trustworthy Bedouin informants. In 
this framework, even singularities or deviant forms were incorporated without, 
however, being accepted as productive forms that could constitute the basis for 
a theoretical linguistic reasoning. Such a distinction is characteristic of Islamic 
science as a whole, where