The Arabic Language

8.3 Theories about the emergence of New Arabic
According to the Arabic sources, the language of the Arab tribes in the penin
-
sula was basically uniform, with only marginal differences. After the conquests, 
however, when the Arabs came into contact with people who spoke other 
languages, they transmitted their language to these people, who then started to 
speak Arabic with lots of mistakes. As a result, the language became corrupted 
(
fasād al-luġa
), and the grammarians had to intervene because the text of the 
Revealed Book threatened to become incomprehensible. This view is summed up 
by the famous historian Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 757/1356) as follows:
When Islam came and they [the Arabs] left the Ḥijāz … and started to mingle with 
the non-Arabs, their [linguistic] habits began to change as a result of the different 
ways of speaking they heard from those who tried to learn Arabic, for hearing is 
the source of linguistic habits. As a result of this influence, Arabic became corrupt 
… Their scholars began to fear lest the [linguistic] habit should become completely 
corrupted, and lest people should grow used to it, so that the 
Qurʾān
and the Tradi
-
tion would become incomprehensible. Consequently, they deduced laws from their 
[the Arabs’] ways of speaking, that were universally valid for this habit … and 
that could be used as a canon for the rest of their speech. (
fa-lammā jāʾa l-ʾIslām 
wa-fāraqū l-Ḥijāz … wa-ḫālaṭū l-ʿAjam taġayyarat tilka l-malaka bimā ʾalqā ʾilayhā s-samʿ 
min al-mustaʿribīn wa-s-samʿ ʾabū l-malakāt al-lisāniyya wa-fasadat bimā ʾulqiya ʾilayhā 
… wa-ḫašiya ʾahl al-ʿulūm minhum ʾan tafsuda tilka l-malaka raʾsan wa-yaṭūla l-ʿahd bihā 
fa-yanġaliqa l-Qurʾān wa-l-Ḥadīṯ ʿalā l-mafhūm fa-stanbaṭū min majārī kalāmihim qawānīn 
li-tilka l-malaka muṭṭaridatan ... yaqīsūna ʿalayhā sāʾir ʾanwāʿ al-kalām
) (
Muqaddima
, ed. 
Beirut, n.d., p. 546)
This quotation shows clearly that in the mind of the Arabs the changes in the 
language and the emergence of the colloquial varieties were linked with the 
polyglot composition of the Islamic empire and the introduction of Arabic as the 
new 
lingua franca
. 
Some scholars have attempted to explain the presence of numerous common 
features in the Arabic dialects as against the Classical language with a theory 
of monogenesis, which posits a single point of origin for the present-day 
dialects. According to Ferguson (1959a), for instance, the common ancestor of 
the dialects originated in the military camps in Iraq, where the speakers of the 
various pre-Islamic dialects mingled. The coalescence of these dialects led to the 
emergence of a military koine in which the common features developed. Specifi-
cally, Ferguson bases his theory on a list of fourteen features that, in his view, 
cannot be attributed to an independent, general trend in the development of the 
dialects, but must be assigned to a common ancestor, for instance, the use of the 
lexical items 
šāf
and 
jāb
, the disappearance of the dual in the verb and the pronoun, 
the merger of /ḏ/ and /ḏ̣/, and the merger of verbs with a third radical 
w
and 
y
.
A theory of monogenesis, such as Ferguson’s, proposes a common origin for the 
modern dialects in order to explain the features that they have in common against 

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
139
the standard language. Differences between the dialects are then explained as the 
result of a later process of divergence, possibly because of the substratal influence 
of the languages that were spoken in the various regions into which Arabic was 
imported. Critics of the theory of a common origin have objected to Ferguson’s 
theory that the resemblances could also be explained as either the product of a 
general trend, or as the result of a later process of convergence that homogenised 
the dialects in the various areas. Proponents of the idea of a general trend point 
out, for instance, that languages not related to Arabic have also lost their dual, 
just like the Arabic dialects, so that it is entirely possible that the dialects lost 
this category independently from each other. The main problem with the theory 
of a general trend is that the explanatory power of such a principle is minimal, 
since the mere fact that similar phenomena occur in different languages does not 
provide us with an explanation of the causes behind the change.
Other critics of a theory of common origin emphasise the role of conver
-
gence in the development of the language. According to Cohen (1970), the Arab 
armies consisted of a mixture of different tribes, so that the existing differ-
ences between the pre-Islamic dialects were levelled out. The new dialects in 
the conquered territories must have resulted from local, independent evolution. 
Later convergence resulted from the pervasive influence of Classical Arabic and 
the spreading of linguistic innovations from one, or several, cultural or political 
centres. These innovations were taken over by speakers accommodating to the 
language of prestige. Theories of convergence look upon the origin of the dialects 
as a polygenetic process: colloquial varieties sprang up independently in each 
region where the Arab armies came, hence the differences between them. As the 
result of later contact and convergence, they gradually became more similar to 
each other. In Edzard’s (1998) model for the genesis of the Semitic languages and 
the modern Arabic dialects, too, polygenesis is taken as the point of departure for 
later developments. But Edzard situates the differences in the period before the 
expansion of Arabic, while Cohen regards them as the products of independent 
evolution during the expansion.
One problem with convergence models is that, while some of the similarities 
between the dialects within one region can undoubtedly be regarded as conver
-
gence from one cultural centre, it would be difficult to explain in this way such 
common features as the genitive exponent, for which each individual dialect uses 
a different lexical item (see below, pp. 144–6).
Owens (2006) looks at the relationship between the dialects and Standard 
Arabic from a different perspective. In his model, the differences between the 
dialects, on the one hand, and Classical Arabic, on the other, were already present 
before the period of the expansion of Arabic. During the conquests they were 
exported by the Arab tribes. In his view, similarities between the dialects, even 
when they are geographically distant from each other, should be explained, not 
by a process of convergence, but by their descent from a common ancestor. Using 

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140
The Arabic Language
comparative–historical methods he seeks to reconstruct the common ancestor of 
the modern dialects, which he identifies as pre-diasporic Arabic, that is, the state 
of the language before the period of expansion, roughly the period between 630 
and 790. This variety of Arabic always coexisted with the variety that is repre
-
sented by the standard language.
According to Owens, in some respects the Arabic of the dialects may represent 
an older type of the language than Classical Arabic. A case in point is the absence 
of case endings in the modern dialects, which in his view is not an innovation 
in the language that originated in the period of the conquests, but may well go 
back as far as proto-Semitic. The development of case endings in some Semitic 
languages, such as Akkadian and Arabic, is regarded by him as a later innovation. 
Owens refers to the linguistic situation in Nabataean cities like Petra, where the 
two types of Arabic already coexisted, and claims that there is no reason to assume 
that in the peninsula there was only one type. Many linguists would probably agree 
with this distinction between two varieties in the period before Islam: a poetic 
language and a vernacular of the Bedouin tribes. Yet it is somewhat more difficult 
to accept that in claiming continuity in the transmission of the language Owens 
leaves the sociocultural circumstances of the acquisition process out of consider
-
ation, but relies, instead, on reconstruction. In his view, historical–comparative 
reconstruction provides the only valid way to measure the relationship between 
dialects. The statistical comparison of features in such distant varieties as West 
Sudanic Arabic and Uzbekistan Arabic, for instance, reveals surprising common
-
alities (2006: 155–65). In the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, it is usually claimed that 
it is related to Mesopotamian Arabic dialects. Yet, statistically, Uzbekistan Arabic 
turns out to have more in common with Western Sudanic Arabic. One example of 
this is the presence of the linker suffix