The Arabic Language

lingua franca
of the area. 
Middle Persian (Pahlavi) was used as an administrative language in the regions 
under Sasanian control. Arabic was spoken by a sizeable portion of the popula
-
tion, most of them nomadic tribes who dwelt in Iraq. Some of the Arabic tribes 
had become sedentary, such as the Banū Tanūḫ, who inhabited an entire quarter 
of the city of Aleppo at the eve of the conquest. The majority of these tribes had 
converted to Christianity a long time ago, in particular those tribes that formed 
the state of al-Ḥīra, which the Persian kings used as a buffer between themselves 
and the Bedouin tribes of Arabia. Some of the tribes of north and east Arabia, even 
though their core area lay within the peninsula, had frequent contacts with the 
Mesopotamian tribes.
In Syria, Greek remained in use for some time as the language of administration, 
but was replaced by Arabic at the end of the first century of the Hijra (Chapter 5, 
p. 65). Syriac continued to be used by the Christians as a spoken language until the 
eighth century 
ce
, and as a literary language until the fourteenth century. In its 
spoken form, it has remained in use in a few isolated linguistic pockets: Western 
Aramaic in the village of Maʿlūla in the mountains of the Antilebanon; Central 
Aramaic, or Ṭurōyo, in Ṭūr ʿAbdīn in western Kurdistan. Eastern Aramaic, usually 
called Assyrian or Neo-Syriac, is still spoken by approximately 300,000 people in 
Iran, Turkey and Iraq, and by immigrants from Iraq in Syria and the Caucasus. 
Almost all of them belong to a Christian community.
The history of Persian is a special case. During the first century of Islamic rule, 
the Middle Persian language (Pahlavi) was still used as an administrative language, 

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128
The Arabic Language
but after the reforms of ʿAbd al-Malik it was replaced by Arabic; in Ḫurāsān at a 
somewhat later date, 124/741, than in western Iran. After that, it remained in 
use only as a written language in the circles of the Mazdaean priests, and Arabic 
reigned supreme as the administrative, literary and religious language. By the 
third/ninth century, Arabic had become the language of culture and literature. A 
large part of the relevant Iranian literature had been translated into Arabic, and 
Persian intellectuals, even when they proclaimed their ethnic distinctness in the 
movement of the 
Šuʿūbiyya
(p. 81), accepted Arabic as the natural language of 
Iranian culture.
The spoken language of the Iranian provinces was a different matter, however. 
Arabic had been the language of the Arab settlers in some of the towns and of those 
Arab tribes that came to live in Ḫurāsān. But, by the eighth century, these Arabic-
speaking immigrants had taken over the colloquial language of the majority of 
the population, the dialect known as Dari, or Parsi-i dari, which had been in use 
as the spoken language of the court in Sasanian Iran and which represented the 
colloquial register of Middle Persian. With the spread of Islam, Dari was adopted 
by an increasing number of people and eventually ousted all the other local 
dialects. By the ninth century, most inhabitants of the Iranian provinces spoke 
Dari, albeit with a measure of regional variation. We shall see below that, starting 
at the courts of some of the independent dynasties in the Islamic East, Persian 
in its colloquial form regained its position as a language of literature during the 
ninth and tenth centuries (cf. Chapter 17, pp. 321f.).
In Egypt, as in Syria, Greek was the language of a small, Hellenised elite, and it 
also served as the language of administration. The mass of the population spoke 
Coptic, which had become a literary language by the ninth century when the 
Bible was translated into the Sahidic dialect of Coptic in Upper Egypt. It served 
as a religious language for the common believer, who certainly did not under
-
stand Greek. When ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ started the conquest of Egypt in 640 with a 
small group of 4,000 soldiers – later reinforced with an additional 12,000 – he 
followed the pattern of the settlement policy in Iraq and made the military camp 
of al-Fusṭāṭ his centre of administration. Very soon, Copts came to live here, too, 
and the contacts between Coptic-speaking inhabitants and Arabic-speaking garri-
sons all over the country increased. Once the country had been incorporated into 
the Islamic empire, further migration of Arabian tribes took place on an irregular 
basis.
During the early centuries of Islamic domination of the country, Coptic patri
-
archs had to communicate with the Arab conquerors through interpreters, but 
by the tenth century the Coptic bishop Severus of Eshmunein (or Sāwīrus ibn 
al-Muqaffaʿ) complained that most of the Copts no longer understood Greek or 
Coptic and were able to communicate in Arabic only (Griffith 1996: 25). Accord-
ingly, he was one of the first Coptic authors to write exclusively in Arabic. This 
probably means that in Lower Egypt all Christians had switched from Coptic 

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
129
to Arabic. In Upper Egypt, Coptic may have survived somewhat longer, but by 
the fourteenth century Coptic had become limited to a few small pockets in the 
countryside and to the clergy in the monasteries. A German traveller, Johann 
Michael Vansleb (d. 1679), reported meeting speakers of Coptic in a few villages in 
Upper Egypt (Worrell and Vycichl 1942), but it is more likely that by this time the 
use of the language had become restricted to the liturgy in the Coptic Church, as 
it is now. The period of Coptic/Arabic bilingualism in Lower Egypt, which lasted 
about two centuries, was shorter than the period of bilingualism in Syria; this may 
be responsible for the limited influence of the language in the Egyptian Arabic 
dialect (cf. pp. 143f., 209). Even the number of loanwords from Coptic is surpris
-
ingly low, about 180 according to a recent estimate (Behnstedt 2006).
The Arabicisation of North Africa is a special case, since it took place in two 
distinct waves which were centuries apart in time. During the first Arab invasion 
of North Africa, the few urban centres that were left after the wandering of the 
peoples in the fourth and fifth centuries ce
were occupied by the Arab armies. But 
the most important centre for the dissemination of Arabic culture and language 
became a new city, the military camp of Qayrawān, which soon grew into the 
most important city of North Africa. In Qayrawān, as in other urban centres, 
Arabic soon became the language of communication. The geographer al-ʾIdrīsī 
(twelfth century) reports that in his time there were still speakers of some form 
of Romance (