The Arabic Language

al-lisān al-laṭīnī al-ʾifrīqī
) in Gafsa (Prevost 2007: 472–3), but it is rather 
more likely that he actually heard some variety of Berber. Most of the countryside 
and the nomadic population of North Africa remained Berber-speaking until the 
second invasion in the eleventh century, when the Bedouin tribes of the Banū 
Sulaym and Banū Hilāl entered the Maghreb. These tribes originally came from 
Syria and North Arabia; they were joined by a third tribe, that of the Maʿqil, of 
South Arabian origin. They had migrated first to Egypt, but had been sent away 
by the Fāṭimid caliphs, no doubt because the presence of so many nomads had 
become a threat to Egyptian society.
The total number of Bedouin coming to North Africa was estimated by contem
-
porary sources at 1 million (out of a total population of 6 million), but their 
invasion was not a single event. It took the Bedouin two years to reach Tunisia, 
but about a hundred years to come to Algiers, and eighty more years to reach 
Oran. Morocco had been invaded by them somewhat earlier. Parts of the Maʿqil 
confederation conquered Mauritania, where their dialect is still spoken nowadays 
under the name of Ḥassāniyya (cf. below, pp. 214–16). Wherever they went, the 
Bedouin tribes became an important military factor. They were not interested 
in political power as such, but the political landscape in North Africa with its 
numerous dynastic quarrels enabled them to switch alliances frequently.
The result of the invasion of the Bedouin tribes was that a large part of the 
Berber population in the countryside took over the Arabic language. Nowadays 
the Berber languages are found almost exclusively in mountainous areas where, 

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130
The Arabic Language
even after the second wave of Arabicisation, many people continued to speak 
Berber. In Morocco (
al-Maġrib al-ʾaqṣā
), the process of Arabicisation took place 
at a slower rate than in the rest of the Maghreb (
ʾIfrīqiyā
). Qayrāwān and other 
cities had been established in the same way as the army camps in Egypt and in 
the eastern part of the empire. These cities were inhabited by mixed populations, 
who quickly adopted Arabic. In Morocco, there were far fewer urban centres and 
they were inhabited by a more homogeneous, Arabophone population. As a result, 
it took much longer for Arabic to spread among the population at large (Rosen
-
berger 1998).
Nowadays, a considerable percentage of the population of the Maghreb still 
speak Berber (Tamazight) as their first, or even as their only, language. No exact 
figures about the number of speakers are available, partly because of the lingering 
taboo on Berber language and culture (cf. below, Chapter 14, pp. 271–3), but the 
usual estimates are 40–45 per cent for Morocco, 30 per cent for Algeria, 5 per cent 
for Tunisia and 25 per cent for Libya. In Egypt, Berber is spoken only in the small 
oasis of Siwa. These percentages reflect the local differences in settlement and 
diffusion of the Arabic language.
The conquest of North Africa was the starting point of the conquest of the 
Iberian peninsula and the subsequent attempt to penetrate Europe. From 711 
onwards, the Arab presence in al-ʾAndalus, as the peninsula was called in the 
Arabic sources, was uninterrupted until 1492, and Arabic very soon became the 
administrative, religious, cultural and even colloquial language of most of Spain 
(cf. below Chapter 17, pp. 315–17). The island of Malta was conquered in 256/870 
by the Aghlabid emirs in present-day Tunisia; the further history of the Arabic 
language on this island will be dealt with below (Chapter 15, pp. 276–9).
In the early stages of the conquests, Arabic was disseminated primarily from 
the cities, either existing ones like Damascus, or the military centres that were 
established all over the empire. Most contacts with the indigenous population took 
place in these camps, which soon grew into new cities and towns, such as Baṣra, 
Kūfa, al-Fusṭāṭ and Qayrawān. In these centres, the necessary contacts between 
conquered and conquerors in matters of taxation, trading and administration 
led to some kind of linguistic accommodation on the part of the conquered. In 
Arabic geographical literature, the difference between the speech of the seden-
tary population and that of the Bedouin is mentioned frequently (Chapter 10, pp. 
172–4), but the only linguistic sources that we have about the kind of Arabic that 
was spoken between non-Arabs and Arabs are the numerous anecdotes about the 
speech of the early converts. The standard form of an anecdote is that a client 
(
mawlā
), that is, a recently converted non-Arab, comes to the caliph and attempts 
to speak in correct Arabic, without success (cf. above, p. 57). What these anecdotes 
document is not the actual colloquial speech of the new converts, but their efforts 
to adopt the standard language in certain situations. They confirm that, for 
the newly converted, the standard language with the declensional system was 

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
131
available as a model: mistakes in the use of case endings occur only when people 
attempt to imitate a model in which these endings occur.
Throughout the history of Arabic philology, treatises have been written about 
the linguistic mistakes of the common people (