Arabic language

Classical, Modern Standard, and spoken Arabic

Arabic usually designates one of three main variants: Classical Arabic; Modern Standard Arabic; colloquial or dialectal Arabic.

Classical Arabic (فصحى fuṣḥā) is the language found in the Qur'an and used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate. Classical Arabic is considered normative; modern authors attempt to follow the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh), and use the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisān al-Arab).


Based on Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic (فصحى fuṣḥā) is the literary language used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic.

According to Islamic scholars, Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic adopted several new Arabic style, words and linguistic tools from the Quran which uses Arabic as the medium of prophetic language.

Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to the many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many different regional variants; these sometimes differ enough to be mutually unintelligible and some linguists consider them distinct languages.[5] The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows,[6] as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media, such as poetry and printed advertising. The only variety of modern Arabic to have acquired official language status is Maltese, spoken in (predominately Roman Catholic) Malta and written with the Latin alphabet. It is descended from Classical Arabic through Siculo-Arabic and is not mutually intelligible with other varieties of Arabic. Most linguists list it as a separate language rather than as a dialect of Arabic. Historically, Algerian Arabic was taught in French Algeria under the name darija.
Flag of the Arab league, used in some cases for the Arabic Language.
Flag used in some cases for the Arabic Language

Like other languages, Modern Standard Arabic continues to evolve.[7] Many modern terms have entered into common usage, in some cases taken from other languages (for example, فيلم film) or coined from existing lexical resources (for example, هاتف hātif "telephone" < "caller"). Structural influence from foreign languages or from the colloquial varieties has also affected Modern Standard Arabic. For example, texts in Modern Standard Arabic sometimes use the format "A, B, C, and D" when listing things, whereas Classical Arabic prefers "A and B and C and D",[citation needed] and subject-initial sentences may be more common in Modern Standard Arabic than in Classical Arabic.[7] For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic is generally treated separately in non-Arab sources.
[edit] Language vs. dialect

The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia, which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their local dialect and their school-taught Standard Arabic. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. Arabic speakers often improve their familiarity with other dialects via music or film.

The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, similar to the issue with Chinese, Hindi vs. Urdu, Serbian vs. Croatian, etc. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a significant complicating factor: A single written form, significantly different from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites a number of sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak a single language, despite significant issues of mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions.

From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages. This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar -- perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to all non-Moroccans other than Algerians and Tunisians, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers. However, there is some mutual comprehensibility between conservative varieties of Arabic even across significant geographical distances, much as there is some mutual comprehensibility between Spanish and Italian, both conservative Romance varieties. This suggests that the spoken varieties, at least, should linguistically be considered separate languages.

On the other hand, a significant difference between Arabic and the Romance languages is that the latter also correspond to a number of different standard written varieties, each of which separately informs the related spoken varieties, while all spoken Arabic varieties share a single written language. Indeed, a similar situation exists with the Romance languages in the case of Italian. As spoken varieties, Milanese, Neapolitan and Sicilian (among others) are different enough to be largely mutually incomprehensible, yet since they share a single written form (Standard Italian), they are often said by Italians to be dialects of the same language. As in many similar cases, the extent to which the Italian varieties are locally considered dialects or separate languages depends to a large extent on political factors, which can change over time. Linguists are divided over whether and to what extent to incorporate such considerations when judging issues of language and dialect.
[edit] Influence of Arabic on other languages
Main article: Influence of Arabic on other languages

The influence of Arabic has been most important in Islamic countries. Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for languages such as Baluchi, Bengali, Berber, Catalan, Cypriot Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindustani, Indonesian, Kurdish, Malay, Marathi, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Rohingya, Sindhi, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Turkish and Urdu as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. For example, the Arabic word for book (/kitāb/) has been borrowed in all the languages listed, with the exception of Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese which use the Latin-derived words "libro", "llibre" and "livro", respectively, Tagalog which uses "aklat", Hebrew which uses "sefer" and Gujarati which uses "chopdi".

In addition, English has many Arabic loan words, some directly but most through the medium of other Mediterranean languages. Examples of such words include admiral, adobe, alchemy, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alkaline, almanac, amber, arsenal, assassin, banana, candy, carat, cipher, coffee, cotton, hazard, jar, jasmine, lemon, loofah, magazine, mattress, sherbet, sofa, sugar, sumac, tariff and many other words. Other languages such as Maltese[8] and Kinubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary or grammar rules.

The terms borrowed range from religious terminology (like Berber taẓallit "prayer" < salat), academic terms (like Uyghur mentiq "logic"), economic items (like English sugar) to placeholders (like Spanish fulano "so-and-so") and everyday conjunctions (like Hindustani lekin "but", or Spanish hasta "until"). Most Berber varieties (such as Kabyle), along with Swahili, borrow some numbers from Arabic. Most Islamic religious terms are direct borrowings from Arabic, such as salat 'prayer' and imam 'prayer leader.' In languages not directly in contact with the Arab world, Arabic loanwords are often transferred indirectly via other languages rather than being transferred directly from Arabic.

For example, most Arabic loanwords in Hindustani entered through Persian, and many older Arabic loanwords in Hausa were borrowed from Kanuri. Some words in English and other European languages are derived from Arabic, often through other European languages, especially Spanish and Italian. Among them are commonly used words like "sugar" (sukkar), "cotton" (quṭn) and "magazine" (maḫāzin). English words more recognizably of Arabic origin include "algebra", "alcohol", "alchemy", "alkali", "zenith" and "nadir". Some words in common use, such as "intention" and "information", were originally calques of Arabic philosophical terms.
See also: list of Arabic loanwords in English

Arabic words also made their way into several West African languages as Islam spread across the Sahara. Variants of Arabic words such as kitaab (book) have spread to the languages of African groups who had no direct contact with Arab traders.[9]

Arabic was influenced by other languages as well. The most important sources of borrowings into (pre-Islamic) Arabic are Aramaic, which used to be the principal, international language of communication throughout the ancient Near and Middle East, Ethiopic, and to a lesser degree Hebrew (mainly religious concepts).

As Arabic occupied a position similar to Latin (in Europe) throughout the Islamic world many of the Arabic concepts in the field of science, philosophy, commerce etc., were often coined by non-native Arabic speakers, notably by Aramaic and Persian translators. This process of using Arabic roots in notably Turkish and Persian, to translate foreign concepts continued right until the 18th and 19th century, when large swaths of Arab-inhabited lands were under Ottoman rule.
[edit] Arabic and Islam

Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an. Arabic is closely associated with the religion of Islam because the Quran is written in the language, which is nevertheless also spoken by Arab Christians, Mizrahi Jews and Iraqi Mandaeans. Most of the world's Muslims do not speak Arabic as their native language but many can read the Quranic script and recite the Qur'an. Among Non-Arab Muslims, translations of the Qur'an are most often accompanied by the original text.

Some Muslims present a monogenesis of languages and claim that the Arabic language was the language revealed by God for the benefit of mankind and the original language as a prototype symbolic system of communication (based primarily upon its syetem of triconsonantal roots ) spoken by man from which all other languages were derived, having first been corrupted.[10][11] Statements spread in later centuries regarding the Arabic language being the language of Paradise are not considered authentic according to the scholars of Hadith and are widely discredited.[12]
[edit] History

The earliest surviving texts in Proto-Arabic, or Ancient North Arabian, are the Hasaean inscriptions of eastern Saudi Arabia, from the 8th century BC, written not in the modern Arabic alphabet, nor in its Nabataean ancestor, but in variants of the epigraphic South Arabian musnad. These are followed by 6th-century BC Lihyanite texts from southeastern Saudi Arabia and the Thamudic texts found throughout Arabia and the Sinai, and not actually connected with Thamud. Later come the Safaitic inscriptions beginning in the 1st century BC, and the many Arabic personal names attested in Nabataean inscriptions (which are, however, written in Aramaic). From about the 2nd century BC, a few inscriptions from Qaryat al-Fāw (near Sulayyil) reveal a dialect which is no longer considered "Proto-Arabic", but Pre-Classical Arabic. By the fourth century AD, the Arab kingdoms of the Lakhmids in southern Iraq, the Ghassanids in southern Syria the Kindite Kingdom emerged in Central Arabia. Their courts were responsible for some notable examples of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and for some of the few surviving pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet.[13]
[edit] Dialects and descendants
Main article: Varieties of Arabic

Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken varieties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the North African dialects and those of the Middle East, followed by that between sedentary dialects and the much more conservative Bedouin dialects. Speakers of some of these dialects are unable to converse with speakers of another dialect of Arabic. In particular, while Middle Easterners can generally understand one another, they often have trouble understanding North Africans (although the converse is not true, in part due to the popularity of Middle Eastern—especially Egyptian—films and other media).

One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh, and North African kayən all mean "there is", and all come from Classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different.
Different Dialects of Arabic in the Arab World

The major dialect groups are:
Egyptian Arabic

    * Egyptian Arabic, spoken by around 80 million in Egypt. It is one of the most understood varieties of Arabic, due in large part to the widespread distribution of Egyptian films and television shows throughout the Arabic speaking world. Closely related varieties are also spoken in Sudan.

Maghrebi Arabic

    * Maghrebi Arabic includes Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Saharan Arabic, Tunisian Arabic, and Libyan Arabic, and is spoken by around 75 million North Africans in Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Niger, and western Egypt; it is often difficult for speakers of Middle Eastern Arabic varieties to understand. The Berber influence in these dialects varies in degree.[14]

Levantine Arabic

    * Levantine Arabic includes North Levantine Arabic, South Levantine Arabic, and Cypriot Arabic. It is spoken by almost 35 million people in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, The Palestinian territories, Israel, Cyprus, and Turkey. It is also called Mediterranean Arabic.

Mesopotamian Arabic

    * Iraqi Arabic, spoken by about 29 million people, with significant differences between the Arabian-like dialects of the south and the more conservative dialects of the north. Closely related varieties are also spoken in Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
    * North Mesopotamian Arabic, spoken by around 7 million people in northern Iraq, northern Syria and southern Turkey.

Gulf Arabic

    * Gulf Arabic (Khaliji Arabic), spoken by around 4 million people[15] in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Sultanate of Oman, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait,

Other

Other varieties include:

    * Yemeni Arabic, spoken in Yemen, southern Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, and Somalia.
    * Sudanese Arabic (19 million speakers), spoken in Sudan
    * Najdi Arabic (9.9 million speakers), spoken in Nejd, central Saudi Arabia
    * Hejazi Arabic (6 million speakers), spoken in Hejaz, western Saudi Arabia
    * Hassaniya Arabic (2,8 million speakers), spoken in Mauritania, some parts of Mali and Western Sahara
    * Shuwa Arabic (900,000 speakers), spoken in Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, and Sudan
    * Bahrani Arabic (310,000 speakers), spoken by Bahrani Shia in Bahrain, where it exhibits some differences from Bahraini Arabic. It is also spoken to a lesser extent in Oman.
    * Judeo-Arabic dialects
    * Central Asian Arabic, spoken in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, is highly endangered
    * Maltese, spoken on the Mediterranean island of Malta, is the only one to have established itself as a fully separate language, with independent literary norms. In the course of its history the language has adopted numerous loanwords, phonetic and phonological features, and even some grammatical patterns, from Italian, Sicilian, and English. It is also the only Semitic tongue written in the Latin alphabet.
    * Andalusi Arabic, spoken in Spain until 15th century, now extinct.
    * Siculo Arabic, spoken on Sicily, South Italy until 14th century, developed into Maltese language.
    * The Muslim Hui people in China had knowledge of archaic forms of Arabic. The Hui of Yunnan (Burmaese called them Panthays) were reported to be fluent in Arabic.[16] During the Panthay Rebellion, Arabic replaced Chinese as official language of the rebel kingdom.[17] In Tianjin, Hui could speak an old, archaic form of Arabic, when they met Arab Muslims in recent times, it was found out that Old Arabic and Modern Arabic were very different, so Modern Arabic is now being taught to Hui.[18]



Notes

   1. ^ a b Procházka, 2006.
   2. ^ Wright, 2001, p. 492.
   3. ^ "Arabic language." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Retrieved on 29 July 2009.
   4. ^ Versteegh, 1997, p. 33.
   5. ^ "Arabic Language." Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2009. Retrieved on 29 July 2009.
   6. ^ Orville Boyd Jenkins (18 March 2000), Population Analysis of the Arabic Languages, http://strategyleader.org/articles/arabicpercent.html
   7. ^ a b Kaye, 1991.
   8. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Maltese language – Britannica Online Encyclopedia". Britannica.com. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9050379/Maltese-language. Retrieved 2010-05-04.
   9. ^ Gregersen, 1977, p. 237.
  10. ^ James Coffman (December 1995). "Does the Arabic Language Encourage Radical Islam?". Middle East Quarterly. http://www.meforum.org/article/276. Retrieved 5 December 2008.
  11. ^ "Arabic - the mother of all languages - Al Islam Online". Alislam.org. http://www.alislam.org/topics/arabic/. Retrieved 2010-05-04.
  12. ^ Muhammad Saleh al-Munajjid (accessdate=2 August 2010). "Is the Arabic Language the Language of Paradise (هل اللغة العربية هي لغة أهل الجنة)". islamqa.com. http://www.islamqa.com/ar/ref/83262.
  13. ^ "A History of the Arabic Language". Linguistics.byu.edu. http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/arabic.html. Retrieved 2010-05-04.
  14. ^ Kaplan and Baldauf, 2007, p. 48. See also Bateson, 2003, pp. 96–103 and Berber: Linguistic "Substratum" of North African Arabic by Ernest N. McCarus.
  15. ^ Speaker numbers for Gulf Arabic
  16. ^ Albert Fytche (1878), Burma past and present, C. K. Paul & co., p. 301, http://books.google.com/books?id=K28oAAAAYAAJ&q=arabic#v=snippet&q=many%20of%20them%20are%20able%20to%20converse%20arabic&f=false, retrieved 2010-06-28
  17. ^ Journal of Southeast Asian studies, Volume 16, McGraw-Hill Far Eastern Publishers, 1985, p. 117, http://books.google.com/?id=3MJBAAAAYAAJ&q=Although+he+and+his+court+adopted+traditional+Chinese+dress,+he+decreed+that+his+subjects+should+use+the+Arabic+language+and+honour+Muslim&dq=Although+he+and+his+court+adopted+traditional+Chinese+dress,+he+decreed+that+his+subjects+should+use+the+Arabic+language+and+honour+Muslim, retrieved 2010-06-28
  18. ^ Michael Dillon (1999), China's Muslim Hui community: migration, settlement and sects, Richmond: Curzon Press, p. 155, ISBN 0700710264, http://books.google.com/?id=BwuSpFiOFfYC&pg=PA154&dq=hunan+uyghur#v=onepage&q=muslims%20in%20tianmu%20village%20in%20tianjin%20have%20used&f=false, retrieved 2010-06-28
  19. ^ Watson (2002:18)
  20. ^ e.g. Thelwall (2003:52)
  21. ^ Hetzron, 1997, p. 229.
  22. ^ Morphological Analysis of Arabic
  23. ^ Hanna, 1972, p. 2

References

    * Bateson, Mary Catherine (2003), Arabic Language Handbook, Georgetown University Press, ISBN 0878403868
    * Gregersen, Edgar A. (1977), Language in Africa, CRC Press, ISBN 0677043805
    * Grigore, George (2007), L'arabe parlé à Mardin. Monographie d'un parler arabe périphérique, Bucharest: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, ISBN 9789737372499, http://www.arc-news.com/read.php?lang=en&id_articol=1059
    * Hanna, Sami A.; Greis, Naguib (1972), Writing Arabic: A Linguistic Approach, from Sounds to Script, Brill Archive, ISBN 9004035893
    * Hetzron, Robert (1997), The Semitic languages (Illustrated ed.), Taylor & Francis, ISBN 9780415057677
    * Haywood; Nahmad (1965), A new Arabic grammar, London: Lund Humphries, ISBN 085331585X
    * Kaplan, Robert B.; Baldauf, Richard B. (2007), Language Planning and Policy in Africa, Multilingual Matters, ISBN 1853597260
    * Kaye, Alan S. (1991), "The Hamzat al-Waṣl in Contemporary Modern Standard Arabic", Journal of the American Oriental Society (American Oriental Society) 111 (3): 572–574, doi:10.2307/604273, http://www.jstor.org/stable/604273
    * Lane, Edward William (1893), Arabic English Lexicon (2003 reprint ed.), New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, ISBN 8120601076, http://www.studyquran.co.uk/LLhome.htm
    * Mumisa, Michael (2003), Introducing Arabic, Goodword Books, ISBN 8178982110
    * Procházka, S. (2006), ""Arabic"", Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.)
    * Thelwall, Robin (2003), Arabic, "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association a guide to the use of the international phonetic alphabet", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge), ISBN 0-521-63751-1
    * Steingass, F. (1993), Arabic-English Dictionary, Asian Educational Services, ISBN 9788120608559, http://books.google.com/?id=3JXQh09i2JwC&dq=Arabic+English+thirsty
    * Traini, R., Vocabolario di arabo, Rome: I.P.O.
    * Versteegh, Kees (1997), The Arabic Language, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 9004177027
    * Vaglieri, Laura Veccia, Grammatica teorico-pratica della lingua araba, Rome: I.P.O.
    * Watson, Janet (2002), The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198241372
    * Wehr, Hans (1952), Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart: Arabisch-Deutsch (1985 reprint (English) ed.), Harassowitz, ISBN 3447019980
    * Wright, John W. (2001), The New York Times Almanac 2002, Routledge, ISBN 1579583482