The Arabic Language

10.2 The classification of the dialects
Dialect atlases remain the most important tool for dialect geography and dialect 
classification. At the moment, atlases are available for only some of the areas of 
the Arabophone world. The oldest atlases were made of the Syro-Lebanese area 
by Bergsträßer (1915) and of the area around Ḥōrān and Palmyra by Cantineau 
(1940, 1946), a remarkable achievement for that time. In the modern period, the 
geographical distribution of the Egyptian dialects of the Šarqiyya was studied by 
Abul Fadl (1961), and a complete atlas of all Egyptian dialects (except Cairene) 
was produced by Behnstedt and Woidich (1985, 1987, 1988, 1994). Behnstedt also 
produced an atlas of the North Yemenite dialects (1985, 1992), and an atlas of the 
Syrian dialects (1997). In Tunisia, a large-scale project to establish an 
Atlas linguis
-
tique de la Tunisie 
(ALT), headed by Taïeb Bacouche, was initiated in 1997 to record 
all dialectal variation in Tunisia on the basis of questionnaires. Other projects 
are in various stages of execution, such as the 
Atlas linguistique des parlers du nord-
ouest marocain 
(Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat), the 
Atlas linguistique du Maghreb
, 
for which a questionnaire has been designed (Caubet 2000–1), and the 
Atlas of 
the Arabic Dialects Spoken in Northern Israel
(Talmon 2002). For other areas in the 
Arabic-speaking world, there are partial maps and dialect monographs, but on 
the whole the dialect map of the Arabophone world exhibits large blank spaces, 
especially so in the case of the Arabian peninsula. Even in the case of Egypt, our 
knowledge of varieties other than Cairene Arabic was sketchy until fairly recently.
With the help of dialect maps the distribution of certain features over an area 
is reproduced by means of isoglosses, imaginary boundaries drawn on the map. 
Their value depends to a great extent on the density of the points on which infor
-
mation is available. Typically, these isoglosses occur in bundles, and when the 
bundle is strong enough – that is, when enough features roughly share the same 
boundaries – it becomes possible to distinguish between dialect areas that differ 
markedly from other areas. This phenomenon is best seen in the case of geograph
-
ical obstacles such as mountain ranges, which act as a boundary between areas.
In traditional dialect geography certain isoglosses have always been perceived 
as more important than others (e.g., the voiced versus unvoiced realisation of 
/q/). There is, however, no 
a priori
reason why one isogloss should be selected 
as the main basis for classification rather than others. The choice of isoglosses 

---

The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
177
as distinguishing markers determines the classification of the dialects. In recent 
dialect geography new methodologies have been introduced to avoid the problem 
of assessing the relative weight of isoglosses. In these dialectometrical methods 
all variables have an equal weight. They are used in combination to calculate the 
linguistic distance between points on a dialect map, and from this a new map 
is constructed that visualises the relationship between dialects (Behnstedt and 
Woidich (2005: 106–35). One of the objections to dialectometrical methods is the 
indifference of this method towards the nature of the variables. However, it turns 
out that it is usually enough to calculate the linguistic distance on the basis of a 
limited number of variables. According to Behnstedt and Woidich, the number of 
necessary variables lies between 200 and 300, after which the addition of more 
variables does not change the map substantially. One important result of such 
maps is that they visualise the isolated position of some dialects. In a compar
-
ison of the dialects of the Egyptian oases (Behnstedt and Woidich 2005: 107–18), 
for instance, the dialectometrical maps show clearly the isolated position of the 
dialect of Farafra within the dialects of the oases, and that of Daḫla East within 
the dialects of the Daḫla oasis.
Most dialect maps focus on phonological or morphological features. Classifying 
varieties on the basis of lexical items may, and often does, lead to results that differ 
from the usual classification. Until recently, lack of resources made it difficult to 
assess lexical variation. The word atlas by Behnstedt and Woidich (2011, 2012) seeks 
to remedy this by presenting all the available evidence in the form of lexical maps 
covering the entire Arabic-speaking world. This