The Arabic Language

17.2 Arabic in al-
ʾ
Andalus
After the conquest of large parts of the Iberian peninsula in 711, the Arabs 
came into direct contact with a Romance-speaking population in Arab Spain 
(
al-ʾAndalus
), a contact which was to last until the end of the reconquest of the 
peninsula by the Christian kingdoms to the north in 1492. According to some 
scholars, during this prolonged contact the Arabic language all but replaced 
the native Romance language of the population under their sway. A contempo
-
rary witness, the ninth-century Paulus Alvarus from Cordova, complains that 
the Christian youths of his time were more interested in Arabic poetry than in 
knowledge of Romance (Wright 1982: 156–7). According to others, Arabic never 
ousted Romance as a colloquial language, and even Latin may have remained in 
use as a cultural language. Certainly, there are traces of Romance throughout the 
period of Arab domination in the peninsula, but after the conquest of Toledo in 
1085 by the Castilians its importance declined in those areas that remained in 
Arab hands, especially after the invasions of the Almoravids and the Almohads 
in the twelfth century. Yet, throughout the period of Islamic domination, there 
must have subsisted a considerable degree of bilingualism. The poets of 
zajal
, 
such as Ibn Quzmān (d. 555/1160), used dialect and in the 
muwaššaḥa
s we even 

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316
The Arabic Language
find Romance in the refrains (
jarchas
; Arabic 
ḫarja
) in the same way that poets of 
this genre in the east used the vernacular to close their poems. In the following 
instance of such a 
jarcha
, colloquial Arabic and Romance are mixed for stylistic 
reasons (Zwartjes 1997: 264):
álba díya esta díya / díya d-al-ʾanṣara ḥáqqa
bestiréy mew al-mudabbáj / wa-nišúqq ar-rumḥa šáqqa
‘A white day is this day / the day of Saint John, indeed
I shall put on my brocade dress / and break the lance’
In this poem the words 
álba 
‘white’ and 
díya 
‘day’ are Romance, and so is the 
verbal form 
bestiréy 
‘I shall put on’ and the pronoun 
mew 
‘my’; the rest of the 
poem is Arabic.
The local dialect of the petty kingdom of Granada, which survived until the 
end of the 
Reconquista
in 1492, contained a large number of Romance loans, as we 
know from the description of Pedro de Alcalá, who lists in his vocabulary of 1505 
words like 
xintilla
‘spark’ (Spanish 
centella
), 
banq
, plural 
bunúq
‘couch’ (Spanish 
banco
), 
cornéja
‘crow’ (Spanish 
corneja
), with Arabic plural 
carániç
and diminutive 
coráyneja
.
The Arabs called the Romance vernacular 
lisān al-ʿAjam
or 
ʿAjamiyya
‘language 
of the foreigners, non-Arabs’ and the assimilated bilingual speakers 
mustaʿribīn
‘those who have become like Arabs’ (hence their name in Spanish, 
Mozárabes
). 
When these people wrote down their own Romance language, they used the Arabic 
script; the literature in which their dialect has been preserved is often called 
aljamiado
(< 
al-ʿajamiyya
). There is another corpus of texts in Romance in Arabic 
script, the literature of the 
Moriscos
, the Muslims who stayed behind after the 
Reconquista
and compulsorily converted to Christianity in 1525 until their expul
-
sion from the peninsula (1609). Their use of the Arabic script does not mean that 
they knew Arabic: almost certainly some of them were monolingual in Romance.
The centuries of Arabic linguistic domination did not fail to affect the Romance 
language. The total number of Arabic loanwords in Spanish has been estimated at 
around 4,000; they cover almost the entire lexicon, but are particularly numerous 
in the domains of warfare (
alcázar
‘fortress’ < Arabic 
qaṣr
, 
almirante
‘admiral’ < 
Arabic 
ʾamīr
), agriculture (
albaricoque
‘apricot’ < Arabic 
barqūqa
, itself from Greek 
praikokkia
< Latin 
praecoquum
), commerce (
aduana
‘customs’ < Arabic 
dīwān
, 
almacén
‘warehouse’ < Arabic 
maḫzan
) and building (
albañil
‘mason’ < Arabic 
bannāʾ
). The 
majority of the loans are nouns, most of them borrowed together with the Arabic 
article 
al-
, but there are some adjectives of Arabic origin (e.g., 
mezquino
< Arabic 
miskīn
‘poor’, 
gandul
‘lazy’ < Arabic 
ġandūr
‘dandy’, 
azul
‘blue’ < Arabic 
lāzuward
‘lapis lazuli’). There are even a few verbs that were borrowed from Arabic, such as 
halagar
‘to caress’ (< Arabic 
ḥalaqa
‘to shave’). The two Spanish words for ‘so-and-
so’ are of Arabic origin, 
fulano
(< Arabic 
fulān
) and 
mengano
(< Arabic 
man kāna
‘who 
was it?’), and the Spanish interjection 
ojalá
‘may God will’ derives from the Arabic 

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Arabic as a World Language 
317
wašallāh
. There is one example of a suffix, 
-í
, that became moderately productive 
in Spanish; it occurs in the loanword 
baladí
‘insignificant’ (< Arabic 
baladī
‘rural’), 
but is also used in Spanish words such as 
alfonsí
‘belonging to king Alfonso’. There 
is, however, little evidence of syntactic influence of Arabic in Spanish. Perhaps the 
conjunction 
hasta
‘even, until’ was taken from Arabic 
ḥattā
. Semantically, Arabic 
influence may be seen in the large number of Spanish expressions containing 
God’s name.
From Spain, large numbers of Arabic words were transmitted to other countries 
in Western Europe. We have seen above (Chapter 1, pp. 1f.) that during the Middle 
Ages Arabic was regarded as the language of scholarship not only in al-ʾAndalus, 
but also in the universities of Western Europe. After the fall of Toledo, many 
Arabic texts on mathematics, medicine, alchemy and astronomy were translated 
into Latin, and in the process a host of Arabic technical terms were borrowed in 
their original form. In mathematics, for instance, most European languages took 
over the word 
algorithm
, derived from the name of al-Ḫwārizmī (d. 
c
. 232/850), 
whose book 
al-Jabr wa-l-muqābala
(
Restoration and Comparison
) lived on in the term 
algebra
. In astronomy, terms such as 
almanac
(< 
al-manāḫ
‘station of the Zodiac’), 
azimuth
(< 
as-samt
‘course, direction’), 
zenith
(< 
samt ar-raʾs
‘vertical point in the 
sky’), 
nadir
(< 
naḏ̣īr
‘opposite’), and the names of many stars, such as 
Betelgeuse
(< 
bayt al-Jawzāʾ 
‘Gemini’) and 
Aldebaran 
(< 
ad-Dabarān 
‘the Follower’), derive from 
Arabic. In medicine, many of the Latin terms that are still current are calques of 
Arabic terms that ultimately go back to Greek sources; thus, for instance, 
retina
and 
cornea
are translations of the Arabic words 
šabakiyya
and 
qarniyya
, rather than 
direct translations of the Greek terms 
amphiblēstroeidēs 
and 
keratoeidēs
. 
Spain, however, was not the only source of Arabic loans in the European 
languages. There were other routes through which they could reach Europe, 
primarily through Italy, either via Arab Sicily, or via Venetian and Genoan traders. 
In some cases, the phonetic form of the word betrays its Spanish or Italian 
provenance. The Italianised loans were usually taken over without the article, 
whereas Arabic loans in Spanish were often borrowed together with the Arabic 
article. Compare, for instance, the pairs Italian 
carciofo
(North Italian 
articiocco
)/
Spanish 
alcachofa
‘artichoke’ (< Arabic 
ḫaršūf
); 
cotone
/
algodón
‘cotton’ (< Arabic 
quṭn
); 
zucchero
/
azúcar
‘sugar’ (< Arabic 
sukkar
). In these three examples, the other 
European languages took the word from Italian.