The Arabic Language

(illi) 
ʾult
i
 
 li 
l-muʿallim
 
what 
REL 
tell.PERF.2s to 
ART-teacher
 
‘what was it you told the teacher?’
Such alternatives exist in all spoken languages as discourse phenomena that have 
to do with emphasis, highlighting, topicalisation and so on. Speakers of Coptic 
were used to a language in which there was no fronting of interrogatives, as in (8):
(8) 
ek-čō 
de 
ou
 
2ms-say 
TOP 
what
‘What are you saying?’
Here the interrogative pronoun o
u
remains 
in situ
at the normal position of the 
object instead of being fronted. When these speakers became acquainted with 
the two alternatives of Arabic, they were likely to choose the alternative that was 
more similar to their own language, even though in Arabic this was the marked 
option (for a similar explanation of word order in Uzbekistan Arabic, see below, 
p. 287).
Substratal influence is not a sufficient explanation for the differences between 
the dialects, but neither is convergence for the common features. Typical 
examples of structural changes that took place in virtually all dialects, but with a 
different realisation, are the possessive construction and the aspectual particles. 
New Arabic was characterised by the disappearance of the case endings, often 
quoted as the most characteristic difference between colloquial and standard 
language. We have seen above (Chapter 4, p. 56) that there are several reasons 
why this process cannot be explained by purely phonetic reasons. In all dialects, 
the genitive case in the possessive construction was replaced by an analytic 
possessive construction, as in (9a,b):
(9a) 
bayt-u 
l-malik-i
house-NOM ART-king-GEN
‘the house of the king’ (Classical Arabic)
(9b) 
il-bēt 
bitāʿ 
il-malik
ART-house POSS 
ART-king
‘the house of the king’ (Egyptian Arabic)

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The Emergence of New Arabic 
145
In the analytic construction, the meaning of possessivity is indicated with 
a possessive marker, 
bitāʿ 
(also called ‘genitive exponent’), which replaces the 
Classical Arabic possessive construction and genitive case ending. This construc
-
tion is found in all dialects, with the exception of some Bedouin dialects, but they 
differ with regard to the form of the possessive marker, as shown in Table 8.1.
Egyptian Arabic (Cairo) 
bitāʿ
Syrian Arabic (Damascus) 
tabaʿ
Moroccan Arabic (Rabat) 
dyal
, 
d-
Maltese 
taʾ
Sudanese Arabic 
ḥaqq
Chad Arabic 
hana
Cypriot Arabic 
šáyt
Baghdad Muslim Arabic 
māl
qəltu
Arabic 
līl
Table 8.1 Genitive exponents in Arabic dialects
The second phenomenon of pluriform development of a common feature is 
connected with the loss of the modal endings. In Classical Arabic, there is a 
distinction in the imperfect verb between 
yaktubu
(indicative), 
yaktuba
(subjunc
-
tive) and 
yaktub
(jussive). In the dialects, the morphological category of mood has 
disappeared, and in the singular the form is always 
yaktub
. In most dialects, this 
form has acquired a modal meaning. In Egyptian Arabic, for instance, 
tišrab ʾahwa?
means ‘would you like to drink coffee?’. For aspectual distinctions the dialects 
have developed a new system of markers, originally auxiliary verbs or temporal 
adverbs, which became grammaticalised as part of the morphology of the verbal 
form (see Table 8.2).
continuous/habitual 
future
Syrian Arabic (Damascus)