Hassaniya Arabic and Maltese are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official status.[67] The Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write Hassaniya[24] Maltese is spoken in (predominantly Catholic) Malta and written with the Latin script. Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic, though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors," many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not a type of Arabic.[23]
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. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically, means the one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic.[68] In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on the region may be mutually unintelligible.[69][70][71][72][73] Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own.[74] 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.[citation needed]
After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and re-emphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the Arabic language in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used.[121][122] There was also the idea of finding a way to use Hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet, but this was seen as too complicated to use.[121][122] A scholar, Salama Musa agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in science and technology. This change in alphabet, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words that made it difficult for non-native speakers to learn.[121][122] Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for Romanization.[121][123] The idea that Romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al-Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo.[121][123] However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet.[121][123] In particular, the older Egyptian generations believed that the Arabic alphabet had strong connections to Arab values and history, due to the long history of the Arabic alphabet (Shrivtiel, 189) in Muslim societies.
Abstract: During the medieval period, Arabic, the holy language of Islam, became a lingua franca for many people in the Middle East. Even Jewish communities, who still copied their Bible in Hebrew and Aramaic, adopted Arabic as the language of everyday life. Thousands of Arabic manuscripts produced and consumed by medieval Jews have thus survived in the Cairo Genizah, a hidden repository of manuscripts preserved by the Jews of Old Cairo. Among them, we find the work of Jewish scribes writing in an Arabicised and Islamicised context, producing unique manuscripts that preserve their particular Arabic dialects. We also find Islamic texts, undoubtedly produced by Muslims, that were acquired and used by Jews. This talk explores both of these types of Arabic manuscripts to show what they can teach us about the linguistic and theological interactions between two different religious groups.
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The Department is pleased to announce that Jonathan Owens, from the University of Bayreuth, will be coming to CU to give a LingCircle talk on historical linguistics, drawing on data from Arabic. Information about the talk can be found below:
While not unique in this respect, Arabic is a language whose size, expanse and historical attestation allows a wide geo- and diachronic panorama. From this perspective, stability is arguably a more prominent property than change. This suggests that historical linguistics is fruitfully conceived of as ascertaining what happensto a language in a given period (ca. 1500 years in the current case) and demands that not only change be accounted for, but also stability.
The objective of this work is to investigate the linguistic structure of Iraqi Arabic or what is known as Mesopotamian Arabic. The paper presents an overview of some of the fundamental analyses of Iraqi Arabic - Mesopotamian Arabic. This article is concentrated on the most important parts of the language which are the phonological, morphological, and syntactical features. The paper not only examines the linguistic feature of Iraqi Arabic but it also, discusses how Iraqi Arabic dialect is different from Modern Standard Arabic with data that are not considered before and with certain new theoretical proposals. The researcher analysis the three dialects, which are Baghdadi, Southern, and Maslawi dialect and provides an important data for each dialect. Unlike Modern Standard Arabic, Iraqi Arabic went through many changes. Phonologically, Iraqi Arabic has more consonants than Modern Standard Arabic, and a few additional long vowels. Many sounds have been replaced with different sounds. In addition, the words in Iraqi Arabic does not end with vowels. Therefore, words end with consonants rather than vowels in Iraqi Arabic. Morphologically, Iraqi Arabic is different from Modern Standard Arabic in the present progressive tense. In Iraqi Arabic, the tenses are formed by adding a prefix to the conjugated stem of the verb, which cannot be found in Modern Standard Arabic. Syntactically, Iraqi Arabic differs from Modern Standard Arabic in two ways: first, there is no case marking; Iraqi Arabic does not show overt cases as it is found in Modern Standard Arabic. Second, Iraqi Arabic lacks agreement. Iraqi Arabic does not always follow the structure of verb-subject order as found in Modern Standard Arabic. The verb usually has full agreement with the subject in both orders, subject-verb, and verb-subject. Finally, Iraqi Arabic has an interesting feature which is head movement that cannot be found in Modern Standard Arabic as Soltan argues. This is can be shown in the following example: [The student seems that ____ he read the book.] Among the other issues that the author discusses in this study is the history of Iraqi Arabic. In addition to the features of Iraqi Arabic and the effects of other languages, such as Turkish and Semitic languages on Iraqi dialects.
This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history.
The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.
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