Arabic (
العربية al-ʻarabīyah or
عربي/عربى ʻarabī ) (
[al ʕarabijja] (help·info) or (
[ʕarabi] (help·info)) is a name applied to the descendants of the
Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD. This includes both the literary language and the spoken Arabic varieties.
The literary language is called
Modern Standard Arabic or
Literary Arabic.
It is currently the only official form of Arabic, used in most written
documents as well as in formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and
news broadcasts. In 1912,
Moroccan Arabic was official in
Morocco for some time, before Morocco joined the
Arab League.
The
spoken Arabic varieties are spoken in a wide arc of territory stretching across the
Middle East and
North Africa.
Arabic languages are
Central Semitic languages, most closely related to
Hebrew,
Aramaic,
Ugaritic and
Phoenician.
The standardized written Arabic is distinct from and more conservative
than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as
diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.
Some of the spoken varieties are
mutually unintelligible,
[3] and the varieties as a whole constitute a
sociolinguistic language.
This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be
considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly
grouped together as a single language for political and/or ethnic
reasons, (
look below). If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a
dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it may be spoken by as many as 280 million
first language
speakers, making it one of the half dozen most populous languages in
the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety
would most likely be
Egyptian Arabic, with 95 million native speakers
[4]—still greater than any other Semitic language.
The modern written language (
Modern Standard Arabic) is derived from the language of the
Quran (known as
Classical Arabic
or Quranic Arabic). It is widely taught in schools, universities, and
used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media. The two
formal varieties are grouped together as
Literary Arabic, which is the official language of 26 states and the
liturgical language of
Islam.
Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of
Quranic Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has
discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer
have any counterpoint in the spoken varieties, and adopted certain new
constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new
vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the
post-Quranic era, especially in modern times.
Arabic is the only surviving member of the
Old North Arabian dialect group, attested in
Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions dating back to the 4th century.
[5] Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an
abjad script, and is written from
right-to-left. Although, the spoken varieties are often written in
ASCII Latin with no standardized forms.
Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the
Islamic world, like
Persian,
Turkish,
Bosnian,
Kazakh,
Bengali,
Urdu,
Hindi,
Malay and
Hausa. During the
Middle Ages,
Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in
science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European
languages have also
borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence, both in vocabulary and grammar, is seen in
Romance languages, particularly
Spanish,
Portuguese,
Catalan and
Sicilian, owing to both the proximity of European and Arab civilizations and 700 years of Muslim (
Moorish) rule in some parts of the
Iberian Peninsula referred to as
Al-Andalus.
Arabic has also borrowed words from many languages, including
Hebrew,
Greek,
Persian and
Syriac in early centuries,
Turkish in medieval times and contemporary European languages in modern times, mostly from English and
French
General
Introduction
The rise of Arabic to the
status of a major world language is inextricably intertwined with the rise
of Islam as a major world religion. Before the appearance of Islam, Arabic
was a minor member of the southern branch of the Semitic language family,
used by a small number of largely nomadic tribes in the Arabian peninsula,
with an extremely poorly documented textual history. Within a hundred years
after the death (in 632 C.E.1)
of Muhammad , the prophet entrusted by God to deliver the Islamic message,
Arabic had become the official language of a world empire whose boundaries
stretched from the Oxus River in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean, and had
even moved northward into the Iberian Peninsula of Europe.
The unprecedented nature
of this transformation--at least among the languages found in the
Mediterranean Basin area--can be appreciated by comparisons with its
predecessors as major religious/political vernaculars in the region: Hebrew,
Greek and Latin. Hebrew, the language which preserved the major scriptural
texts of the Jewish religious tradition, had never secured major political
status as a language of empire, and, indeed, by the time Christianity was
established as a growing religious force in the second century C.E. had
virtually ceased to be spoken or actively used in its home territory, having
been replaced by its sister Semitic language, Aramaic, which was the
international language of the Persian empire. Greek, the language used to
preserve the most important canonical scriptural tracts of Christianity, the
New Testament writings, had been already long been established as the
pre-eminent language of culture and education in Mediterranean pagan society
when it was co-opted by Christian scribes. By this period (the second
century C.E.), Greek had ceased to be the language of the governmental
institutions. Greek, however, had resurfaced politically by the time of the
rise of Christianity as a state religion under the emperor Constantine (d.
337 C.E.,)--who laid the groundwork for the split of the Roman empire into
western and eastern (Byzantine) halves. By the time of Muhammad's birth
(approximately 570 C.E.) Greek had fully reestablished its position as the
governmetnal as well as religious vernacular of the Byzantines.
Latin had for a time
usurped the predominance of Greek as a governmental and administrative
language when the Romans unified the region under the aegis of their empire,
and it would remain a unifying cultural language for Western Europe long
after the Roman empire ceased to exist as a political entity in that region.
The main entry of Latin, on the other hand, into the religious sphere of
monotheism was relatively minor, as the medium for the influential
translation of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Vulgate, that was
the only official version of scripture for the western Christian church
until the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century.
Hebrew, then, was a
religious language par excellence. Greek and Latin, on the other hand, while
making invaluable contributions to the corpus of religious texts used in
both Judaism (the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was the
scriptual text of choice among the Hellenized Jews of the Roman empire) and
Christianity, were each languages that had extensive imperial histories
which preceded (and followed) the rise of Judeo-Christian monotheism to
prominence in the Mediterranean and had strong cultural links to the pagan
world and sensibility of Hellenism. It is only against this backdrop that
the truly radical break with the past represented by the rise of Arabic as
the scriptural medium for Islam coupled with its adoption by the Umayyad
caliphs as the sole language for governmental business in 697 C.E. can be
appreciated.
Background
and History
Arabic belongs to the
Semitic language family. The members of this family have a recorded history
going back thousands of years--one of the most extensive continuous archives
of documents belonging to any human language group. The Semitic languages
eventually took root and flourished in the Mediterranean Basin area,
especially in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of
the Levant, but where the home area of "proto-Semitic" was located is still
the object of dispute among scholars. Once, the Arabian Peninsula was
thought to have been the "cradle" of proto-Semitic, but nowadays many
scholars advocate the view that it originated somewhere in East Africa,
probably in the area of Somalia/Ethiopia. Interestingly, both these areas
are now dominated linguistically by the two youngest members of the Semitic
language family: Arabic and Amharic, both of which emerged in the mid-fourth
century C.E.
The swift emergence and
spread of Arabic and Amharic illustrates what seems to be a particularly
notable characteristic of the Semitic language family: as new members of the
group emerge, they tend to assimilate their parent languages quite
completely. This would account for the fact that so many members of the
group have disappeared completely over the centuries or have become
fossilized languages often limited to mainly religious contexts, no longer
part of the speech of daily life. This assimilative power was certainly a
factor in the spread of Arabic, which completely displaced its predecessors
after only a few hundred years in the area where Arabic speakers had become
politically dominant . Thus all the South Arabian languages and Aramaic, in
all its varied dialectical forms, became to all intents and purposes "dead"
languages very soon after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E.
2 Arabic even did
the same thing to the Hamitic3
language of Coptic, which was the direct descendent of Pharaonic Egyptian
and still an important literary and cultural language at the time of the
Islamic conquest. Today it survives only as the religious language of the
Coptic Christian community of Egypt, who otherwise use Arabic in all spheres
of their everyday lives.
In contrast, when Arabic
has contested ground with Indo-European languages or members of other
distant linguistic families, like Turkish (which is a member of the Altaic
family of languages that originated in central Mongolia), its record has not
been nearly so successful. For example, when Arabic was introduced into the
Iranian Plateau after the fall of the Sassanian Empire to the Arab armies in
the 630s C.E., it seemed to overwhelmingly dominate the Indo-European
Persianate languages of the region for a while. But by the late 900s, a
revitalized form of the Old Persian (Pahlavi) language had decisively
re-emerged as not only a spoken language, but also a vehicle for government
transactions and literary culture as well. This "new" Persian has remained
dominant in this geographical region throughout succeeding centuries and the
modern Persian spoken today in Iran is virtually identical with it.
Arabic was not the first
Semitic language to exhibit this tendency to completely overwhelm its
predecessors. Aramaic, the language of various peoples living in Syria and
upper Mesopotamia, had pioneered this pattern long before, having displaced
(though not suddenly and not necessarily at the same time) both the Akkadian
language of the people who had ruled the Tigris-Euphrates basin after the
Sumerians (who spoke a non-Semitic language), and Hebrew and other Canaanite
tongues that had been used along the coastal strip of the Levant.4
By the time Jesus was born, for example, the Jews used either the Jewish
dialectical version of Aramaic or Greek for most of their writings and in
daily life. Similarly, the Aramaic dialect of the city of Edessa, known as
Syriac, became the language used by the Christian communities east of
Constantinople.
Even as the Aramaic
dialects grew to dominate the Levantine areas and became the lingua
franca of the Persian empire, in the south--less subject to the unifying
pressures of complex imperial systems of government and education--a much
more fluid and less textualized language situation prevailed. Old
civilizations had arisen on the southern fringe of the Arabian peninsula,
built on the profits of trade and commerce in the area, particularly the
long-distance incense trade. The succession of sedentary dynasties that
controlled this land of "Sheba" (or, more properly, Saba) used different
forms of a language usually called now "Old South Arabian" of which the
dominant dialect was probably Sabaic. Our main records of these languages
comes from inscriptions rather than written documents, so our knowledge of
how they first developed and later changed is necessarily sketchy. Farther
to the north, a tribal, nomadic lifestyle dominated, and although we have
fragmentary epigraphic records of some of the dialects these tribes used,
our current knowlege about the actual linguistic situation prevailing in the
area is even more incomplete than our knowledge of the South Arabian
kingdoms. 5
Although echoes of the
glorious past and great achievements of the Sabeans and other peoples of the
south would continue to resonate in the literature of the Arab Muslim world
throughout its long history, scholars of Arabic literary history have always
focused their attention on the nomadic northern Arabs in their accounts of
how this literature arose. The overriding reason for this is a linguistic
one: the tongue used throughout the Arab world today, and known as fusha
or "Standard Arabic," is the same language used by these northern Arabs,
crystallized in its written form in the revelations of the Qur’an as
recorded in the early 600s C.E..
Though the major southern
language, Sabaic, and Arabic are closely related to one another, they are
definitely separate languages, as different as modern-day English and
German, and probably just as often mutually unintelligible as not. Sabaic is
almost certainly the older of the two languages, being used for inscriptions
as early as 600 B.C.E., while the first evidence we have of Arabic as a
written language occurs 900 years later, in an inscription dating to 328
C.E. When the two languages mixed and met after the rise of Islam, however,
Northern (Mudari) Arabic--backed by the religious authority of the
Qur’an--supplanted its older cousin completely as a language of high
culture. Sabaic survives today only in isolated pockets of territory where
various dialectical versions continue on a purely spoken level. Written
communication in the south is all in Mudari Arabic. The relationship between
Mudari and Sabean--as well as the relationships among the other Semitic
languages can be seen in the following chart :
Although Mudari Arabic belongs to the South Semitic
branch of the Semitic language family (see chart), it seems to have shared
an unusually close relationship with a Western Semitic language as well:
Aramaic. This is largely due to the fact that the Nabateans--a northern
nomadic tribe that moved onto the fringes of the oikoumene in the
300s B.C.E. and settled down to control the northern terminus of the incense
route--seems to have spoken a language very close to Arabic, but they
used Aramaic as their official language of written communication.6
The reason why it is so
important to stress a close relationship between Arabic and Aramaic is that
the first documented example we have of Mudari Arabic--an epitaph from a
tomb about 100 kilometers southwest of Damascus--is written in the
(Nabataean) Aramaic alphabet, although the vocabulary and syntax is
virtually identical with the "classical" form of Arabic codified in the
Qur’an. This inscription, known as the "Namara inscription" for the place
where it was found, is important historically as well as linguistically. It
was discovered in April of 1901 by two French archaeologists, R. Dussaud and
F. Macler, in a rugged portion of southern Syria (about 60 miles southeast
of Damascus and almost due east of the Sea of Galilee). Namara was once the
site of a Roman fort, but while the archaeologists were exploring the area,
they came across a completely ruined mausoleum that was much older. This was
the tomb site of Imru’ al-Qays,7
the second king of the Lakhmid dynasty, an important family in northern
Arabia that at that time had been allied with the Byzantines and would later
move to the east (to the area around modern-day Basra) and become clients of
the Sassanian Persians.
The Namara inscription was
carved on a large block of basalt which had originally served as the lintel
for the entrance to the tomb. It identifies the occupant of the tomb as
Imru’ al-Qays, son of ‘Amr (the first Lakhmid king), calls him "king of the
Arabs," and gives some information about his notable exploits during his
reign. Then it gives what is perhaps the most important single piece of
information on the inscription: the date of the king’s death, 7 Kaslul
(December) of the year 223 in the Nabataean era of Bostra (=328 C.E.).
Presumably the tomb was constructed not long after Imru’ al-Qays’s death, so
this means we have a firm time frame in which to place the inscription.
In 1902 Dussaud published
a drawing of the original inscription in the Nabataean alphabet, a
transliteration of the characters into Arabic, and a tentative translation
of the result into French. His Arabic transliteration and the French
translation are given below:
Ceci est le tombeau
d’Amroulqais, fils de ‘Amr, roi de tous les Arabes, celui qui ceignit
le diadème (al-tadj), qui soumit les (Banou) ’Asad et (la tribu) Nizar
et leurs rois, qui mit en déroute Ma[dh]hij, jusque’à ce jour, qui
alla frapper Nedjrân, ville de Shamir, qui soumit la tribu de Ma‘add,
qui répartit entre ses fils les tribus et les départagea entre les
Perses et les Romains. Aucun roi n’a atteint sa gloire jusqu’à ce
jour. Il est mort l’an 223 le septième jour de kesloul. Que le bonheur
soit sur sa posterité!8
What was most striking
about this inscription for Dussaud and his fellow epigraphers was not only
that it pushed back the history of Mudari Arabic back almost 200 years
earlier than the previous oldest inscription, which had been dated to 512
C.E.,9 but that the
language was so close to the Arabic of the Qur’an. Apart from a few words,
like "bar" for "ibn" (son), which are clearly Aramaic, and some dialectical
forms, like "ti" for "dhi" (this) and "dh‚" for "alladhi" (which), the
vocabulary and syntax does not differ noticeably from the "classical" Arabic
of the sixth century C.E.
For over 80 years, this
was taken as the definitive rendering of the inscription, but in 1985 James
Bellamy of the University of Michigan published an article based on his
minute re-examination of the original stone, now located at the Musée de
Louvre in Paris. Professor Bellamy’s conclusions about the inscription being
in Mudari Arabic confirm Dussaud’s, but he has revised some of the latter’s
reading of individual words and phrases, to come up with a new rendering
that seems to have won fairly wide acceptance,10
The new version in Arabic transliteration, accompanied by Bellamy’s English
translation are given below:
This is the funerary
monument of Imru’u al-Qays, son of ‘Amr, king of the Arabs; and[?] his
title of honor was Master of Asad and Madhhij. And he subdued the
Asad¬s, and they were overwhelmed together with their kings, and he
put to flight Ma(dh)hij thereafter, and came Driving them into the
gates of Najran, the city of Shammar, and he subdued Ma‘add, and he
dealt gently with the nobles Of the tribes, and appointed them
viceroys, and they became phylarchs for the Romans. And no king has
equalled hisachievements. Thereafter he died in the year 223 on the
7th day of Kaslul. Oh the good fortune of those who were his friends!The dating on this
inscription allows us to conjecture that by this time (328 C.E.) Mudari
Arabic had become an independent language with many of the features we
associate with modern Arabic but manifestations of its use over the next
three centuries remain frustratingly fragmentary. Only in the mid-seventh
century do we begin to have more than isolated bits and pieces of epigraphic
evidence for its existence, and by this time the language had become the
preferred medium of communication for a growing empire, as well as a dynamic
and appealing new religion.
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