The Arabic Language

fī ʾanna luġa ʾahl al-ḥaḍar wa-l-ʾamṣār luġa qāʾima 
bi-nafsihā
li-luġa Muḍar
). He explains that the way in which city people talk differs 
essentially from the language of the 
Jāhiliyya
(the language of Muḍar, the ancestor 
of the Qurayš through whom they traced their descent from ʿAdnān, the ancestor 
of all northern Arabs) and from the language of the contemporary Bedouin, for 
instance, by their omitting the declensional endings, a phenomenon called by the 
grammarians 
laḥn
. Each region has its own dialect, the Eastern dialects differing 
from the Western dialects, and the Andalusian dialect being different from both.
As we have seen above (p. 138), Ibn Ḫaldūn ascribes the changes in the Arabic 
language to the contact with the population of the conquered territories, and in 
this connection he again correlates the differences between the various dialects 
with the presence of other ethnic groups. Thus, the peculiarity of the dialect of 
the Maghreb is explained by him with a reference to the Berber presence: ‘it 
has become a different language, a mixed one, in which the foreign language 
dominates’ (
wa-ṣārat luġa ʾuḫrā mumtazija wa-l-ʿAjamiyya fīhā ʾaġlab
). Similarly, he 
says, the contact with speakers of Persian and Turkic has brought changes to the 
dialects spoken in the Islamic East.
In one passage, the historian demonstrates that he is very much aware of the 
peculiarities of Bedouin speech:
One of the phenomena that happen in the contemporary speech of these Arabs, 
wherever they dwell, is their special way of pronouncing the 
q
. They do not 
pronounce it at the place of articulation of the urban people, as it is mentioned in 
the books on Arabic, namely between the back of the tongue and the opposite point 
of the upper palate. They do not pronounce it at the place of articulation of the 
k
, 
either, which is somewhat lower than the place of the 
q
on the tongue and the upper 
palate, but they pronounce it at a place that is somewhere in the middle between 
the 
q
and the 
k
. (
wa-mimmā waqaʿa fī luġa hāḏā l-jayl al-ʿarabī li-hāḏā l-ʿahd mā kānū 
min al-ʾaqṭār šaʾnuhum fī n-nuṭq bi-l-qāf fa-ʾinnahum lā yanṭuqūna min maḫraj al-qāf ʿinda 
ʾahl al-ʾamṣār kamā huwa maḏkūr fī kutub al-ʿarabiyya ʾannahu min ʾaqṣā l-lisān wa-mā 
fawqahu min al-ḥanak al-ʾaʿlā wa-mā yanṭuqūna bihā ʾayḍan min maḫraj al-kāf wa-ʾin kāna 
ʾasfal min mawḍiʿ al-qāf wa-mā yalīhi min al-ḥanak al-ʾaʿlā kamā hiya bal yajīʾūna bihā 
mutawassiṭatan bayna l-kāf wa-l-qāf
) (
Muqaddima
, p. 557)
This is an accurate description of one of the best-known differences between 
Bedouin and sedentary speech, the realisation of /q/. We have seen above 

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174
The Arabic Language
(Chapter 7, p. 120) that in Sībawayhi’s description of the 
qāf
, it is classified as 
a voiced (
majhūr
) phoneme. Ibn Ḫaldūn does not mention that most sedentary 
dialects realised it as a voiceless phoneme, but emphasises the difference in place 
of articulation. In grammatical texts, one looks in vain for any reference to such 
variations in speech.
When in the nineteenth century European scholars started to become interested 
in the colloquial varieties of the Arabic language (cf. above, Chapter 1, pp. 6f.), this 
new trend did not always meet with approval in the Arab countries themselves. 
Since the dialects were a non-prestigious variety of the language, interest in their 
structure for its own sake was regarded as suspect. An exception is the situation 
in Egypt, where an interest in lexical regionalisms can be witnessed as early as 
the sixteenth century. In his dictionary entitled