Arabic

ARABIC

Language of Islam, the Qurʾan, and about 185 million people.

Arabic is a Semitic language and the major language of the modern Middle East; it is spoken by an estimated 185 million people. It spread throughout the region during the seventh century c.e., replacing in the Levant Aramaic—as well as non-Semitic languages—as Islam began its conquest and conversion. The Arabic language went as far east as Iran and as far west as all of North Africa, crossing Gibraltar to the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century.

Arabic is related to two Semitic languages still used in the Middle East: chiefly Hebrew in its ancient liturgical and modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) revival forms, but also Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. Arabic is classified as South Central Semitic, sharing features not only with Amharic but also with the ancient languages Geez and Akkadian. Some countries that are now home to predominantly Arabic speakers also have speakers of traditional, non-Semitic languages, such as Berber, Nubian, Kurdish, and Coptic.

Arabic has a special relationship to Islam; it is considered the divine language of Allah by Muslims. The language has therefore been constrained by reverence, with the liturgical or classical Arabic (called Fusha, the "purest" style) remaining basically unchanged since the revelation of the Qurʾan in the seventh century. Today's spoken Arabic is, however, considered corrupt, with diverse local vernacular versions used throughout the region.

Arabic script is written in phonetic symbols similar to Hebrew letters in that each symbol represents a letter and words are written and read from right to left. A feature of Arabic script is its use as an Islamic art form, since there is a religious pronouncement against rendering figures in art. Such calligraphy decorates books, buildings, banners, and jewelry; most words are so stylized that they cannot be read, but as they are often taken from the Qurʾan, their sources are recognized by most Muslims.

Arabic Dialects

The most noticeable linguistic situation in the Arab world is termed diglossia, which literally means "twin vocabularies," referring to the fact that every speaker of Arabic knows a local spoken vernacular and learns the formal Fusha in addition to it. Because of the historical spread of Islam and, with it, Arabic, the language has today been spoken for more than 1,300 years over a wide territory that includes parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. Despite the freezing of the literary grammatical style of Arabic, the colloquial versions, like all spoken languages, changed unfettered by normalized rules or classical prescriptions of correctness. Often speakers from one end of the region cannot understand speakers from another without difficulty, although they can understand the versions spoken in adjacent areas.

At the same time, Arabic is said to be the uniting factor of the modern Arab world—the one institution all Arabs share regardless of the cultures or subcultures of the countries they now inhabit. Where Arabic is the nation's official language, the classical style is used for government, religion, and schooling. No pressure seems to exist for adopting a type of "Esperanto" Arabic, or even agreeing on one dialect as the standard for all sophisticated communication.

With the advent of radio, television, and the broadcasting of news in literary Arabic, comprehension of that form has increased. Knowledge of other dialects has also been spread by the motion picture industry. For example, Egyptian Arabic (Cairene) has been used in the scripts of many movies, and television soap operas produced in Cairo have helped to familiarize many non-Egyptians with that dialect.

Of the large number of Arabic dialects, only a few have been given names and studied in any detail: Egyptian and Iraqi Arabic refer to the colloquial dialects of the educated classes of Cairo and Baghdad, respectively. Media broadcasts from country capitals have also become comprehensible to rural and nomadic speakers with access to radios, televisions, and video- and audiocassette recorders. Uneducated or rural vernacular dialects differ, though, sometimes dramatically, because many have developed in relative isolation. Nevertheless, speakers of similar backgrounds understand one another over short geographic distances.

The differences between dialects are mostly confined to vocabulary and the shifting or loss of some sounds. The Egyptian use of gim for jim or even djim is one of the best examples of a sound shift. Greater shifts have affected the entire sound of a dialect; for example, in North Africa, most short vowels have been lost and the stress of most words moved from the medial to the last syllable. This produces many words that start with consonant clusters. In contrast, the dialects of Cairo and those farther to the east have maintained most of the short vowels and lost mostly those at the end of the word, keeping the stress, as in Fusha, on the next-to-last syllable. Consonant clusters are generally limited to word-final positions and are no more than two consonants in length. In addition, word borrowing from other languages has occurred in both Fusha and the dialects. In some cases older Arabic words are used to meet the needs of modern life, but in others a borrowed word is used—the word for "telephone" might be written hatif ("one who calls out"), and it might be spoken as telefon.

Arabic-language academies exist—in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad—each attempting to minimize the use of borrowings. They publish lists of desired usages, but it is difficult to legislate language change.

Classical Arabic

Fusha, the high style, is characterized by a complicated system of conjugations that change the case of words, which are composed of three consonants (s-l-m, for example). Using prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, as well as a change of vocalization according to rules, is basic to all Semitic languages—and formal Arabic demonstrates this practice to a greater extent than any of the others. None of these case markings has survived in the dialects; however, the Qurʾan and children's books are published with them written in place so that they will not be read aloud incorrectly. Nevertheless, even the pronunciation of Fusha varies with the colloquial background of the speaker. Fusha is used in all writing that does not attempt to represent casual speech. In most novels the characters speak in Fusha, but cartoon characters speak in vernacular Arabic, as do actors in most modern plays, and some modern novels are written in dialect. The Arabic version of Sesame Street uses Fusha because it is the language style that children must learn to read.

Rise and Development of Arabic

The early history of Fusha is not clear. Before the appearance of Islam there are few traces of Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula, but it is clear from the language of the Qurʾan that an oral tradition of poetical style was well established before the revelation of that holy book. The language of the Qurʾan is not just a reflection of the dialect of the Hijaz (western Arabia, the original center of Islam); it is a style reflecting the koine of the poets, used for sophisticated performances of oral poetry at the markets to which the nomads came at least once a year. It is probably a combination of both language usages, which is why it is said to have been unique and miraculous at the time of Muhammad's reception of it.

Arabic script was already in use before the codification of the Qurʾan, but it was unified and provided with diacritical marks to resolve ambiguities in the holy text. As the Islamic conquests began in the seventh and eighth centuries, the language of formal usage was being standardized by grammarians in the towns of Basra and Kufa (Iraq). By the ninth and tenth centuries, this linguistic work was completed, and these rules became the standard by which to measure all future literary Arabic output. To this day, "correct" Arabic is measured by these rules, and they are maintained in the belief that to change them is to offend Allah, who produced them.

see also arabic script; calligraphy; hebrew; islam; qurʾan; semitic languages.

Bibliography

Bateson, Mary C. Arabic Language Handbook. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1967.

Bergstrasser, Gotthelf. Introduction to the Semitic Languages, translated by Peter T. Daniels. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983.

Killean, Carolyn G. "Classical Arabic." In Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 6: Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1971.

Omar, Margaret. From Eastern to Western Arabic. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1974.

Wright, C. Grammar of the Arabic Language, 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Carolyn Killean