The Arabic Language

mā
, impera
-
tives 
imḍī
, 
jī
; feminine gender of 
ḫātam
‘ring’; asyndetic use of a hypotactic clause 
with 
ʾaṣlaḥ
):
fa-qāla r-Rašīd: ḏālika l-Malīḥ man huwa? ʾaḫbirnī bihi! fa-qāla: yā mawlānā mā yanfahim 
kalām Masrūr? fa-qāla: imḍī izʿaq bihi! fa-qāla Masrūr: mā ʾamḍī ʾilayhi, fa-qāla r-Rašīd: 
yā Jaʿfar, udḫul bi-llāh wa-ʾabšir man huwa llaḏī qad ḍaraba Masrūr wa-hāḏihi ḫātamī 
imḍī bihā ʾilayhi wa-jī bihi! fa-qāla Jaʿfar: yā mawlānā Masrūr yajī ʾaṣlaḥ!
‘Ar-Rašīd said: 
“Who is this Malīḥ? Tell me about him!”. He said: “My Lord, are Masrūr’s words not 
understood?” He said: “Go and frighten him!” Masrūr said: “By God, I’m not going!” 
Ar-Rašīd said: “Jaʿfar, by God, go in and see who it is that hit Masrūr; here is my ring, 
take it to him and bring him!” Jaʿfar said: “My Lord, it is better for Masrūr to go”.’ 
(Wehr 1956: 386.12–15)
The Arabian Nights differ from real folktales in that the latter stem from 
an oral tradition of folk poetry and folktales, told by professional storytellers 
wherever people were gathered in the marketplace. Presumably, these stories 
were originally told in the vernacular. When they were written down later by 
interested collectors, they did not escape the influence of the standard norm, so 
that in their present form they cannot be regarded as examples of pure colloquial 
speech. Many of these stories are still extant in manuscript form, especially in the 
libraries in Moscow and Cambridge.
Throughout history, poets have sometimes used the medium of colloquial 
Arabic to express their feelings. This led to some kind of literary vernacular 

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Middle Arabic 
159
rather than a true reflection of the colloquial as it was spoken by the poet and his 
audience. Such poems have been preserved, for instance, from the Iraqi poet Ṣafī 
d-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 
c
. 1350), who provides valuable evidence for the reconstruction of 
fourteenth-century Iraqi Arabic, for example, the sound shift 
r 
> 
ġ
, the use of the 
ending 
-ūn 
in the imperfect verb, and the use of 
fard 
as an indefinite article (Levin 
1975). The poems of the Egyptian poet ʿAlī ibn Sūdūn al-Bašbuġāwī (d. 868/1464) 
contain a large number of Egyptianisms, for example, undeclinable relative 
illī
, 
demonstrative 
dī 
(but always before the noun, never in postposition as in modern 
Egyptian), imperfects with the continuous marker 
bi-
, and many colloquial nouns. 
One remarkable trait of the preserved autographs of Ibn Sūdūn’s work is that 
they use many vowel signs; this makes it possible to trace the working of 
ʾimāla
, 
for example, in the feminine ending in 
ṭubaylih 
‘little drum’ (Vrolijk 1998: 143). It 
may be added that in one poem Ibn Sūdūn mimics the speech of a hunchback from 
Baghdad who pronounces 
r 
as 
ġ
, for example, 
ġabbī
, 
šāʿiġ 
instead of 
rabbī 
‘my lord’, 
šāʿir 
‘poet’ (Levin 1975: 266). It is obvious that these poets were perfectly aware 
of the interdialectal differences. Yet Vrolijk (1998: 136–7) is certainly right when 
he emphasises that these texts cannot be regarded as a faithful rendering of the 
colloquial language of the poet’s time.
Dialect poetry was particularly popular in the Maghreb, where it even infil-
trated Classical poems. In the genre known as 
muwaššaḥ
a
, it became customary 
to add a refrain in the colloquial language, either the Arabic colloquial or in some 
cases the Romance language spoken in Andalusia (the so-called 
jarchas
; cf. below, 
Chapter 17, pp. 315f.).
In the types of texts mentioned thus far, the colloquial elements were connected 
with their literary or narrative function. In Arabic scientific treatises, however, 
when the topic is exclusively technical and of no interest to the general intel
-
lectual elite, the colloquial elements are more or less accidental. In the fields of 
medicine or pharmacology, or in the field of the technical sciences such as mathe-
matics, astronomy or mechanics, the author was less constricted by the norms 
of the Classical language, and, if he preferred to follow the rules of his colloquial 
speech instead, nobody blamed him. In such texts, as in those texts whose author 
deliberately chose a more informal medium of expression, deviations from the 
Classical norm are widespread, but pseudo-corrections are seldom found.
As an example of ‘educated’ Muslim Middle Arabic, we quote here a passage 
from the memoirs of ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ (d. 584/1188):
fa-lammā waṣalnā ʿAsqalān saḥaran wa-waḍaʿnā ʾaṯqālanā ʿinda l-muṣallā ṣabaḥūnā 
l-ʾIfranj ʿinda ṭulūʿ aš-šams fa-ḫaraja ʾilaynā Nāṣir ad-Dawla Yāqūt wālī ʿAsqalān fa-qāla: 
irfaʿū, irfaʿū ʾaṯqālakum, qultu: taḫāfu lā yaġlibūnā l-ʾIfranj ʿalayhā? qāla: naʿam, qultu: lā 
taḫāf, hum yarawnā fī l-barriyya wa-yuʿāriḍūnā ʾilā ʾan waṣalnā ʾilā ʿAsqalān, mā ḫifnāhum; 
naḫāfuhum l-ʾān wa-naḥnu ʿinda madīnatinā?
‘When we came to Asqalon at daybreak 
and we put down our luggage at the prayer site, the Franks came on us at sunrise. 
Nāṣir ad-Dawla Yāqūt, the governor of Asqalon, came to us and said: “Take up, take 

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160
The Arabic Language
up your luggage!” I said: “You’re afraid the Franks will take them away from us?” He 
said: “Yes!” I said: “Don’t be afraid! They saw us in the desert and kept up with us 
until we came to Asqalon. We didn’t fear them then, so shall we fear them now that 
we are near our city?”’ (ʾUsāma ibn Munqiḏ, 
Kitāb al-iʿtibār
, ed. Qāsim as-Sāmarrāʾī, 
Riyadh, 1987, pp. 38–9)
In this fragment, we find the kind of language that could be expected from an 
‘Arab gentleman’ like ʾUsāma, who had studied grammar without becoming 
a purist. He had no qualms about leaving out accusative endings, using verb–
subject agreement, using 
ʾayy šayʾ
(i.e., 
ʾēš
) instead of 
mā
, connecting verbs with 
hypotactic clauses asyndetically, and using the imperfect verb ending 
-ū
instead 
of 
-ūna
. In his writing, he maintained a colloquial flavour without losing touch 
with the standard language, and felt free to bend the grammatical rules without 
appearing illiterate. The common feature between this kind of Middle Arabic and 
the texts mentioned above is the presence of deviations from standard grammar. 
But pseudo-corrections are completely absent from the prose of ʾUsāma and 
other writers like him.