The Arabic Language

15.4 Anatolian Arabic
After the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia in the eleventh century, not all traces of 
Arabic dialects disappeared. When in the course of the next centuries Turkish 
became the official language of the Seljuks and later of the Ottoman Empire, 
Classical Arabic remained the language of religion and, to a certain degree, that 
of culture; the status of colloquial Arabic, however, changed drastically. Most 
speakers eventually switched to Turkish or Kurdish, but in a few areas in central 
Anatolia some communities retained the use of Arabic as their home language, 
most speakers being bilingual or trilingual.

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The Arabic Language
In Jastrow’s classification (1978) of the Mesopotamian 
qǝltu
dialects, the Anato
-
lian Arabic dialects constitute one of the three subgroups. The total number of 
speakers is around 140,000, most of whom are bi- or trilingual in Arabic, Kurdish 
and Turkish. The majority of the speakers are Muslims; most Anatolian dialects 
spoken by Jews and Christians have either become extinct, or their speakers 
have emigrated. The dialects are subdivided into five groups: Diyarbakır dialects 
(spoken by a Jewish and Christian minority, now almost extinct); Mardin dialects; 
Siirt dialects; Kozluk dialects; and Sason dialects. There are two larger cities where 
Arabic is spoken, Mardin and Siirt, although in the latter Arabic is being replaced 
gradually by Turkish. 
Compared with the other dialects of the 
qǝltu
group, the Anatolian dialects 
have deviated much more from the Classical type of Arabic. There are various 
distinctive markers that immediately classify a dialect as Anatolian, such as the 
suffix 
-n
instead of 
-m
in the second- and third-person plural (e.g., in Mardin 
Arabic 
baytkǝn
‘your house’, 
baytǝn
‘their house’), and the negation 
mō
instead 
of 
m
with the imperfect. But these traits are minor details compared with some 
other features that contribute to the exotic character of Anatolian Arabic.
There is a great deal of variation between the dialects, both in phonology and 
in morphology. The Arabic interdentals, for instance, have developed differently 
in each dialect: in Mardin /ṯ/, /ḏ/, /ḏ̣/; in Diyarbakır /t/, /d/, /ḍ/; in Siirt /f/, 
/v/, /ṿ/; in Kozluk/Sason /s/, /z/, /ẓ/ (for instance, 
ḏ̣ahǝr
, 
ḍahǝr
, 
ṿahr
, 
ẓahǝr
, all 
from Arabic 
ḏ̣
ahr
‘back’). This demonstrates the fact that they have gone through 
separate developments.
In morphology, too, there is a great deal of variation between the dialects. 
The genitive exponent, for instance, differs: some dialects use a reflex of 
*ḏī-la
(relative pronoun + preposition 
li-
‘for’), for example, 
dīla
, 
ḏīl
, 
ḏēl
; others use a 
combination of 
lē
+ 
l-
, for example, 
lē
(before pronominal suffixes 
līl-
) in Daragözü. 
The Anatolian dialects are particularly rich in verbal particles. They not only have 
an aspectual prefix for the actual present (
kū-
), but also a prefix for the future (
ta-
, 
tǝ-
< 
ḥattā
‘until’; sometimes 
dǝ-
), the continuous past (
kān
, 
kǝn
, 
k
), the perfect (
kǝl
,