The Arabic Language

ʾǝžāna 
makatīb ktīr
/
ʾǝžǝtna makatīb ktīr
‘many letters reached us’. This pattern may seem 
to conform to the Classical Arabic pattern, and one might, therefore, be tempted to 
attribute it to interference from the standard language. Yet Ferguson believes that 
it cannot be regarded as a reintroduction of the standard pattern, since contrary 
to expectation the dialect pattern of plural agreement, 
ʾǝžūna makatīb ktīr
, instead 
of disappearing, is gaining in popularity over the Classical pattern. The point of 
Ferguson’s argument is that it should not be taken for granted that all movement 
on the continuum between dialect and standard is upwards. In some contexts, 
it is perfectly possible that there is a movement towards the dialect pattern. In 
other cases, interference from the standard language leads to a redistribution of 
grammatical functions. In the case of the agreement in Syrian Arabic, there is 
probably a semantic difference in that the plural is used for countable entities, 
whereas the feminine singular is used for non-countable or collective plurals. In 
the absence of a reliable corpus of dialect speech, which would allow frequency 
counts, it is hard to judge the validity of this particular argument.

---

The Emergence of New Arabic 
149
A second argument against the interference of Classical Arabic calls into 
question the capacity of the standard language to affect the structure of the collo-
quial language. Diem (1978) points out that historically in most dialect areas there 
are two layers. The first wave of conquests led to the emergence of urban dialects 
with a high rate of innovation. These spread in the form of urban koines over 
the area immediately adjacent to the cities. The urban dialects were superseded 
by a second wave that was much more gradual: the steady migration of Arabian 
tribesmen to areas outside the Arabian peninsula. In Mesopotamia, for instance, 
the older layer of sedentary 
qǝltu
dialects was partially covered by a second layer 
of Bedouin 
gilit
dialects. In Lower Egypt, a sedentary dialect was introduced 
during the first conquests, but the countryside and Upper Egypt were Arabicised 
by later migrations of Bedouin tribes from the peninsula. In North Africa, the 
Arabicisation of most of the countryside was not accomplished until the invasion 
of the Banū Hilāl in the eleventh century. In Diem’s view, this second wave of 
Arabicisation achieved a measure of homogeneity of Arabic dialects within each 
area that was absent before the Bedouin immigration. Compared with the devel
-
opment of the Aramaic dialects, which produced widely differing Eastern and 
Western varieties, Arabic dialects, in spite of their differences, are remarkably 
uniform typologically. In Diem’s view, this is the result of convergence during the 
formative period, which prevented too large a deviation from the target. In this 
process, the Bedouin dialects that broke up the sedentary koines played a much 
more important role than the Classical language. 
Others, for instance Holes (1995a), add to these objections considerations of 
a sociopolitical nature: the situation in the early Islamic empire was such that 
simplified varieties of Arabic did not get a chance to develop into full-blown 
vernaculars. He assumes that in the early stages of the conquests linguistic 
accommodation did take place, but neither the linguistic data nor the historical 
record supports the existence of an environment in which the simplified varieties 
could be maintained over time. According to Holes, the early papyri (cf. below, 
p. 157) document a transitional phase on the road to standardisation, in which 
the linguistic norms were still unstable. In his view, the language of the papyri 
does not document any drastic breakdown of the language, and accordingly he 
opts for a gradual evolution of the language towards the present colloquial type 
for most speakers, while only a few professionals among the population learnt 
the standard language. Most people, he maintains, were not in contact with any 
model of the Classical language. In short, Arabic, when it was learnt, was learnt 
as a foreign language rather than as a makeshift variety.
One way of reconciling the two views on the possibility of influence by the 
standard language could be to speculate that it was the second wave of Arabi
-
cisation that was responsible for the reintroduction of Classical features. The 
Bedouin speakers involved in the second wave of migration had not yet been 
affected by sedentary speech patterns and were able to impose the patterns of 

---

150
The Arabic Language
their own dialects. Secondary Bedouinisation is not an uncommon phenomenon 
even in more recent times, when Muslim urban populations shifted to a Bedou
-
inised dialect, whereas the Christians and Jews stuck to their urban dialect. As 
for the Bedouin speakers themselves, even today some of them have managed to 
escape sedentary interference to some extent (cf. Chapter 10, pp. 186f.). Besides, 
in the course of time the scale of prestige has changed. In the early period of the 
Islamic conquests, the urban dialects almost certainly did not have the kind of 
prestige that they enjoy nowadays, so that they were not likely to affect the way 
of speaking of the Bedouin. At a later stage, the urban centres became the focus of 
Islamic civilisation and the seat of power, so that the Bedouin could hardly avoid 
the interference of urban speech.
In general, we must conclude that too little is known about the process of 
classicisation to determine the extent to which it may have influenced the growth 
of the dialects. Since we know only the output of the process of change which 
Arabic underwent after it was exported from the Arabian peninsula, namely, the 
modern dialects, the question of interference on the part of the Classical standard 
is crucial if we wish to extrapolate from the structure of the modern dialects to 
the early vernacular varieties of the language during the first centuries of the 
Islamic era. On the other hand, none of the existing theories about the emergence 
of the new dialects – monogenesis, substratal influence, convergence, natural 
development, general trends – offers a comprehensive explanation of the evolu-
tion of the dialects, although each of them explains a subset of the phenomena 
in this process. In the present state of affairs, we have to conclude that historical 
linguistics alone cannot provide a satisfactory answer. Much more information 
is needed about the sociolinguistic context of the early Islamic empire and the 
pattern of settlement in each particular area. Even more help may be expected 
from general models to explain the evolution of languages.