The Arabic Language

Chapter 6
The Structure of Arabic
6.1 Introduction
In his treatise on the Arabic language, the grammarian Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1005) 
passionately defends the uniqueness of this language, which, he claims, surpasses 
all other languages in excellence. His main argument is, obviously, that God has 
chosen this language for His last revelation, which means that it must be superior 
to all other languages. But, in addition, he sums up a number of traits that make 
Arabic a special language (
aṣ-Ṣāḥibī fī fiqh al-luġa
, ed. Chouémi, Beirut, 1964, pp. 
12ff., 42f.). The richness of the Arabic lexicon is far beyond that of other languages. 
The latter have, for instance, only one word for ‘lion’ or ‘sword’, whereas Arabic 
has dozens of synonyms for them. In addition to this lexical abundance, Arabic has 
special phonological rules to make the language easier to produce (‘lighter on the 
tongue’): it does not have consonant clusters, and through assimilation (
iddiġām
) 
adjacent consonants become more similar to each other. One of the things on 
which the Arabs pride themselves is the presence of declensional vowels (
ʾiʿrāb
). 
Ibn Fāris concedes that some people claim that the Greek philosophers, too, had a 
declensional system, but according to him, this is nonsense (
kalām lā yuʿarraju ʿalā 
miṯlihi
): those who make this claim have simply borrowed grammatical knowledge 
from the Arabs and attributed it to the Greeks.
In itself, a strong belief in the superiority of one’s own language is a well-known 
‘language myth’ (Ferguson 1959c), but in the Arabic context it is fuelled by a belief 
in the superiority of the religion. From a more sober perspective, Comrie’s (2008) 
comparison of Arabic with other languages of the world brings out a number of 
features that are indeed relatively rare; although having a declensional system 
is not one of them. His comparison is based on the 
World Atlas of Linguistic Struc
-
tures 
(
WALS
), an inventory of linguistic features in a database of more than 2,500 
languages, with an average of 400 languages per feature. In phonology, Comrie 
mentions the presence of a class of pharyngals and, as a negative feature, the 
absence of /p/ in Arabic, which is present in most of the world’s languages. Of 
special interest to general linguists are two other features of Arabic: emphasis 
and the stress system. Morphological features mentioned by Comrie include the 
non-concatenative morphology, including the formation of the so-called ‘broken 

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The Arabic Language
plurals’, and the verbal aspect. Special syntactic features include the constituent 
order and concomitant agreement rules, as well as the gender polarity in the 
numerals; the construct state; negation; and the presence of so-called ‘pseudo-
verbs’ in the dialects. Comrie also refers to a sociolinguistic characteristic of 
Arabic: the diglossia situation in the Arab world, which was one of the prime 
examples of Ferguson’s original proposal of this notion (see Chapter 13).
In an earlier article, Comrie (1991) had wondered about the lack of references 
to Arabic and its structure in general linguistic publications. Since the publica
-
tion of that article, the situation has changed considerably. Examples from Arabic 
are regularly cited in the literature, sometimes in combination with examples 
from Hebrew, which in some respects (e.g., the construct state) has a similar 
structure. In the present chapter, it is not our intention to give a sketch of the 
structure of Arabic (information on which can be easily found elsewhere), but to 
highlight some of the special features of Arabic, under the headings of phonetics/
phonology (section 6.2), word structure (section 6.3), morphology (section 6.4) 
and syntax (section 6.5).