The Arabic Language

particle 
d-
in sentences such as 
d-āna
‘it’s me’, 
d-buk w-úll
‘is it your father or not?’, 
húma d-el-ḫāwa
‘they are brothers’. This particle may have its origin in a Berber 
particle 
ḏ-
, although some of its uses are paralleled in Egyptian Arabic. 
In the examples mentioned from Djidjelli Arabic, the Berber connection is 
obvious, since most of the speakers of the dialect speak Berber as well, and the 
phenomena concerned do not occur elsewhere. In many cases, however, the 
original language has disappeared completely, as in the case of Syriac or Coptic. 
When interference of such a language in the development of Arabic is claimed, 
one speaks of substratal influence. This influence is much harder to prove than 
that of an adstratal language. Phenomena that appear in a certain region and 
could in principle be attributed to substratal influence sometimes appear in other 
regions as well, where the substratal language concerned was never spoken. In 
Egyptian dialects, for instance, the interdentals have shifted to dentals, and it 
has sometimes been claimed that this was caused by the substratal influence 
of Coptic. But the disappearance of the interdentals is a widespread phenom
-
enon in all sedentary dialects of Arabic, even in places where Coptic was never 
spoken. The shift from interdentals to dentals can, therefore, not be attributed to 

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The Arabic Language
substratal influence alone, but must be regarded as an instance of a more general 
process of second-language acquisition, in which marked phonemes like the 
interdentals were replaced by unmarked ones, just as the emphatic or pharyngal 
consonants disappeared in some of the Arabic linguistic enclaves (cf. below, pp. 
277, 285).
A similar situation of bilingualism to that in North Africa must have existed in the 
Syrian area between Aramaic and Arabic, and still exists in the linguistic enclaves 
in the Qalamūn mountains north of Damascus where Western Neo-Aramaic is 
spoken in three villages around Maʿlūla. The Arabic dialects in the neighbour-
hood of these villages exhibit several traces of Aramaic influence. According to 
Arnold and Behnstedt (1993), isoglosses of possible Aramaic traits in these dialects 
increase in frequency as one approaches the area where Aramaic is still spoken. 
They conclude that for a long time, possibly until the fourteenth century, Aramaic 
remained the language of the entire region, but that it was gradually forced back 
towards its present small area. Some of the phenomena in the Arabic dialects 
in this region may help to clarify the question of Aramaic substratal influence 
in Syrian dialects. Arnold and Behnstedt show, for instance, how the personal 
pronoun of the third-person plural 
hinne
, suffix 
-hun
(Damascus 
hǝnne
, suffix 
-hon
) 
could have originated in a bilingual environment, in which the Aramaic forms 
hinn
, suffix 
-hun
were current.
Other phenomena in Syrian dialects that have been attributed to Aramaic 
substratal influence include the voiceless realisation of /q/, the elision of 
unstressed short /u/ and /i/, and the shift from interdentals to dentals. But 
the general occurrence of these phenomena in many other areas of the Arabic-
speaking world obviates the need for such an explanation. This is not to say that 
the presence of substratal languages was completely immaterial. Obviously, when 
speakers of a language having interdentals started learning Arabic, they had no 
reason to shift to dentals. But for speakers of languages like Coptic or Syriac, 
which had no interdentals, there was nothing in their own language to prevent 
them from following the general tendency of simplifying the articulation of the 
interdentals. In this sense, we may say that the structure of Coptic and Aramaic 
reinforced a change that was already taking place. 
In an article that appeared in 1979, Diem (1979a) follows up on all the alleged 
cases of substratal influence in the Arabic dialects. He allows the attribution 
to substratal influence only on two conditions: first, the presence of a certain 
phenomenon in a modern dialect as well as in the original language spoken in 
the region; and, second, the absence of this phenomenon in any other region. 
His conclusion is that in most of the alleged instances similar developments can 
be attested in other dialects as well, where the same substratal language was 
not present, so that the explanatory power of a theory of substratal influence is 
minimal. Only in a few cases does he concede that the structure of the language of 
the conquered population may have affected the development of the local dialect, 

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
143
for example, the split of the phoneme /ā/ into /å̄/ [ɒː] and /ǟ/ [æː] (or /ō/ and 
/ē/) in North Lebanese dialects (cf. pp. 198f.), and perhaps the elision of /a/ in 
open unstressed syllables in these dialects, which may have been influenced by 
the phonemic structure of the Aramaic dialects spoken in this area. In the case 
of Berber influence in North Africa, Diem mentions cases such as the affricated 
realisation of /t/ as [ts] and the loan pattern