The Arabic Language

Chapter 9
Middle Arabic
9.1 The definition of ‘Middle Arabic’
In the preceding chapters, both the development of literary Arabic and the 
emergence of colloquial Arabic have been discussed. A principal question that we 
should now address concerns the relationship between these two varieties of the 
language in the written production, both literary and non-literary, in early Islam. 
The language of many of the preserved written sources does not correspond to 
the form of Arabic as it was codified by the grammatical tradition. This applies 
both to the formal literary language of the later period and to the language of the 
early papyri. No grammarian, for instance, would ever use a form such as 
yaktubū
instead of 
yaktubūna
for the indicative of the verb, but this form regularly turns 
up both in the papyri and in some written texts. Since this is the form that the 
contemporary dialects use, the obvious conclusion is that this usage reflects the 
vernacular of the writer. In this chapter, we shall look at the source of the devia
-
tions from the Classical norm in written texts.
In modern studies of Arabic, the collective name for all texts with deviations 
from Classical grammar is Middle Arabic. The term in itself has led to a lot of 
ambiguity, and it is essential to explain first what it does not mean. In the history 
of English, Old English, Middle English and Modern English are distinguished as 
chronological periods, and it is tempting to take the term Middle Arabic to mean 
a stage of the language between the Classical period and the modern period, say 
between 800 and 1800. As a matter of fact, some writers use the term ‘Middle 
Arabic’ in this way. In his handbook of Christian Middle Arabic (1966–7: I, 36), 
Blau stated that ‘M[iddle] A[rabic] constitutes the missing link between C[lassical] 
A[rabic] and modern dialects’. In later publications, however, he has modified 
his use of the term, in order to avoid the misunderstandings that arise when 
Middle Arabic is treated as an historically intermediate stage. In contemporary 
Arabic texts, mistakes may occur just as easily as in the Classical period, and it 
would therefore be a mistake to assign any chronological connotation to the term 
‘Middle Arabic’. We shall see below that when we analyse mistakes in contempo-
rary texts, these turn out to be very much like those in Middle Arabic texts from 
the ‘Classical’ period. 

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Middle Arabic 
153
Some people regard Middle Arabic as a discrete variety of the language, a 
special brand of Arabic, situated between the Classical language and the collo
-
quial language. This is not in accordance with the true nature of these texts. 
Anyone wishing to write in Arabic does so with the Classical norm in mind. The 
amount of deviation or the distance from the colloquial varies with the degree of 
education of the author of the text. Thus, some Middle Arabic texts exhibit only 
an occasional mistake, whereas in other texts the entire structure of the language 
is almost colloquial. But even in the most extreme cases of colloquial interfer
-
ence the texts still cannot be regarded as truly dialectal, because they continue 
to be approximations of Classical Arabic, albeit with a lot of colloquial features 
thrown in. When in 1888 Landberg edited one of the first Middle Arabic texts to 
be published, he was convinced that he had found in the story of Bāsim a true 
specimen of Egyptian dialect. In reality, it is easy to see that although some of the 
passages of the story really sound Egyptian, in most cases its author was not able 
to escape, and probably did not even want to, the norms of written Arabic. But 
the novelty of finding dialectal expressions in a written text was still such that it 
is easy to understand why Landberg believed that this story had been recorded 
in ‘real’ dialect.
In every linguistic community, there is a certain distance between the colloquial 
language and the written norm, in spelling, lexicon and even in structure. But in 
those communities in which there is an institutionalised relationship between 
a high and a low variety (called ‘diglossia’; see below, Chapter 13), the distance 
between the written standard and normal everyday speech is very large. If in such 
a community the average level of education is low, access to the written language 
remains severely restricted. At the same time, the use of the written medium is 
automatically linked with the acceptance of the written norm: if one wishes to 
write in Arabic, one has no choice but to submit to the written norm. The problem 
is, of course, that the level of the written standard language is beyond the reach 
of most people. As soon as they start writing in Arabic, they make mistakes, which 
in many cases originate in their spoken language. An example is the merger of the 
two Classical phonemes /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ into colloquial /ḍ/, which leads to spelling 
errors such as