The Arabic Language

Chapter 7
The Arabic Linguistic Tradition
7.1 Introduction
Western grammars of Classical Arabic (see Chapter 6), almost without excep-
tion, use a Greco-Latin grammatical model and hardly ever mention the differ-
ences between this model and that of the Arabic grammarians. The choice of 
the Greco-Latin model serves a didactic purpose, because these grammars are 
intended for the teaching of Arabic to non-Arabophones, who are usually more 
familiar with the Greco-Latin model of school grammar. Either may be assumed 
to give an adequate description of the structure of Classical Arabic, but the frame
-
work of the Arabic grammarians served exclusively for the analysis of Arabic 
and therefore has a special relevance for the study of that language. From the 
period between 750 and 1500 we know the names of more than 4,000 grammar
-
ians who elaborated a comprehensive body of knowledge on their own language. 
In this chapter, we shall present some examples of their theories, which provide 
a novel way of looking at the language from the privileged point of view of its 
own scholars. Most Arabic grammars of Arabic follow the order established by 
the first grammarian, Sībawayhi (d. 177/793?), in his 
Kitāb
and start with syntax, 
followed by morphology, with phonology added as an appendix. The Western 
terms used here correspond roughly to the two traditional components of Arabic 
linguistics: 
taṣrīf
, usually translated as ‘morphology’, and 
naḥw
, usually translated 
as ‘syntax’ (the latter term is also used to denote the discipline of grammar as 
a whole). But whereas we assign to morphology the study of all alterations of 
words, the Arabic grammarians assign the study of declensional endings to 
naḥw
and all remaining changes in the form of words, for example, plural endings and 
derivational patterns, to 
taṣrīf
.
A remark is in order here concerning the practice of translating Arabic technical 
terms with technical terms from the Western model. The names of the compo-
nents of grammar illustrate the lack of correspondence between the two sets of 
terms. Another example is that of the term 
rafʿ
, usually equated with ‘nomina
-
tive’, which introduces a Greco-Latin view of ‘declension’ that is foreign to this 
framework. The term 
ʿamal
in Arabic grammar indicates the syntactic effect of 
one word on another; this term is often translated as ‘rection’, which suggests a 

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The Arabic Language
parallel with Greco-Latin grammar, or as ‘governing’, which inevitably suggests a 
parallel with modern linguistic theories. On the other hand, using only the Arabic 
terms makes it difficult to follow the discussion. For the sake of convenience, we 
have chosen in this chapter to provide the Arabic terms with English equivalents, 
on the understanding that these will not be taken as exact equivalents. Where 
necessary, the difference between the concepts involved will be mentioned.
The aim of linguistics in the Arabic tradition differed from that of modern 
linguistics. Traditionally, grammar is said to have been ‘invented’ in the first 
century of the Hijra, as a direct result of the many grammatical mistakes that 
the new converts to Islam made when speaking Arabic (see Chapter 4, p. 57). The 
name of ʾAbū l-ʾAswad ad-Duʾalī (d. 68/688?) is often mentioned in this connec-
tion. He is said at first to have refused to write down the rules of grammar when 
asked to do so by the caliph. But when he heard his own daughter say 
mā ʾaḥsanu 
s-samāʾi
‘what is the most beautiful thing in the sky?’, while what she meant to say 
was 
mā ʾaḥsana s-samāʾa
‘how beautiful is the sky!’, he realised that the ‘corruption 
of speech’ had started to affect native speakers as well. In reaction, so the account 
goes, he wrote the first grammatical treatise in Arabic (Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, 
Nuzhat 
al-ʾalibbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-ʾudabāʾ
, ed. Amer, Stockholm, 1963, p. 7).
This may create the impression that grammatical treatises were mainly 
normative, but actually this applies only to a limited set of so-called 
laḥn al-ʿāmma 
treatises, which aimed, indeed, at the correction of speech errors (see Chapter 8, 
p. 131). For most grammarians, starting with Sībawayhi, the aim of grammar lies 
somewhere else: its function is to explain the way the Arabs speak. There was no 
need for them to describe, let alone prescribe, the rules of language, since the 
Arabs were supposed to speak the language perfectly.
The grammarians had a fixed corpus of language at their disposal, consisting of 
the text of the 
Qurʾān
, pre-Islamic poetry and the idealised speech of the Bedouin 
(cf. above, Chapter 5). Since by definition the native speakers knew how to speak 
Arabic, the grammarians did not have to give instructions: their grammar was 
not a prescriptive discipline. It was not a mere description either. Since (the 
Arabic) language was a part of God’s creation, its structure was perfect to the 
tiniest detail, and the task of the grammarian was to account for every single 
phenomenon of the language, that is, to determine its status within the system 
of rules. Language was regarded as a hierarchically ordered whole, in which each 
component had its own function. Explanations often took the form of a compar
-
ison or analogy (
qiyās
). Structural similarity between two components implied 
a similarity in status, or, in the terminology of the grammarians, a gain or loss 
in rights. Thus, for instance, nouns have a primary right to case endings, while