When the Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet, it described itself as being ‘ arabiyyun ‘Arabic’ and mubinun ‘clear’. The two attributes are intimately connected, as for instance in Q 43/2 -3 ‘By the clear Book: We have made it an Arabic recitation in order that you may understand’ ( wal-kitabi l-mubini: ‘inna ga’alnahu qur’anan ‘arabiyyan la’allakum ta’qiluna ). All later generations have believed that its text was the best example of the ‘Arabiyya, the language of the Arabs; in fact, that its style and language could not be imitated because of its clarity and correctness ( ‘i’gaz al-Qur’an ). The Qur’an does not use the word ‘Arab, only the adjective ‘arabiyyun . The plural noun ‘A’rab indicates the Bedouin tribes who lived in the desert and resisted the message of the Prophet, as for instance in Q 9/97 al-’A’rabu ‘ashaddu kufran wanifaqan ‘the Bedouin are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy’. In combination with the word lisan, the adjective ‘arabiyyun indicates a supratribal unity, a language that served as the binding factor for all those who lived in the Arabian peninsula, as opposed to the ‘Agam, the non-Arabs who lived outside it and spoke different languages. In pre-Islamic poetry, the term ‘Arab has this same sense of Arabs as an ethno-cultural group.

In early Islamic terminology, a distinction was made between the ‘Arab, the sedentary Arabs in cities such as Mecca and Medina, and the ‘A’rab ‘Bedouin’. The latter term carried a negative connotation because of its use in the Qur’an . After the period of the conquests, however, the sedentary population began to regard the freeroaming Bedouin, whose language preserved the purity of pre-Islamic times, as the ideal type of Arab, and the term kalam al-’Arab ‘language of the Arabs’ came to denote the pure, unaffected language of the Bedouin.

It would seem, therefore, that in pre-Islamic nomenclature there was a special term for the nomadic tribes, ‘A’rab, whereas the term ‘Arab indicated all inhabitants of the peninsula, nomads and sedentary population alike. The matter is complicated by another distinction made in the indigenous historiographical tradition. It was thought that the peninsula had been inhabited from time immemorial by the ‘lost Arabs’ ( al-’Arab al-ba’ida ), i.e. those tribes that are mentioned in the Qur’an as having been punished for their disbelief, for instance the tribes of ‘Ad, Tamud and Gurhum . The later Arabs all descended from two ancestors, Qahtan and ‘Adnan. Qahtan was related to the ‘lost Arabs’; his descendants were identified as the Southern Arabs and they were regarded as the ‘real Arabs’ ( al-’Arab al-’ariba ). The descendants of ‘Adnan were the Northern Arabs, who were said to have been arabised at a later period ( al-’Arab al-muta’arriba or al-musta ‘riba ). In the post-Islamic tradition, the descent of the Northern Arabs was traced back through their ancestor ‘Adnan to ‘Isma’il, the son of Abraham. Among the tribes descending from ‘Adnan were Hudayl, Tamim, Qays, Rabi’a, and the Quraysh of Mecca. Among the offspring of Qahtan were the inhabitants of the South Arabian states, who were said to have descended from Himyar, one of Qahtan’s descendants. Some of the tribes in the northern part of the peninsula were of southern provenance, for instance the ‘Aws and Hazrag of Medina and the tribe Tayyi’.

It is difficult to say to what degree this distinction between Southern and Northern Arabs goes back to any real memory of a difference between two groups, but it is clear that in the perception of the Prophet’s contemporaries they were distinct groups, a distinction that continued to be felt strongly in Islamic times: even as far as Islamic Spain, enmity between representatives of the two groups under the names of Qays for the Northern and Kalb for the Southern group persisted. Linguistically speaking, however, the language of poets from both groups was accepted by the grammarians, and the poems of both groups were used indiscriminately as linguistic primary sources.

A special case is that of the so-called Himyaritic language, about which we have some information from al-Hamdani’s (d. 334/946) description of the Arabian peninsula ( Gazira 134-6) . Since for the Arabs Himyar represented all things South Arabian, one might assume that the language called Himyaritic was the continuation of the Old South Arabian language, but in actual fact it is not. From the features mentioned by al-Hamdani and others e.g. the verbal ending k- for the first and the second person, as in South Arabian, e.g. waladku ‘I bore’, ra’ayku ‘I saw’, and the article am- Rabin (1951:42-53) speculates that Himyaritic was the name that the Arabs gave to the language of those ‘rb who are mentioned in the Old South Arabian sources and who had settled in this region. They were probably immigrants from the north, who spoke a North Arabic dialect, but whose speech was heavily influenced by the South Arabian language (cf. Chapter 3, p. 23). As their speech was comprehensible to a speaker of Arabic, Himyaritic cannot be identical with any of the South Arabian languages, which are characterised by al-Hamdani as being ghutm ‘incomprehensible’. It is possible that this language is also reflected in the inscriptions that are sometimes called ‘pseudo-Sabaean’ (cf. Chapter 3, p. 31). Some of the features mentioned as characteristic of the Himyaritic language still survive in the modern Yemenite dialects (cf. below, p. 150).

Apart from the reports about the Himyarites, the dialects of all tribes were subsumed under the label kalam al-’Arab, but the distinctions mentioned above created a difficulty for the later tradition. On the one hand, the idea of one language of the Arabs implies a basic linguistic unity in the peninsula. Moreover, the consensus of the Muslims has always been that the language of the Qur’an was the language of the Prophet and his compatriots, in other words that their everyday speech was identical with the language of the Holy Book, which was the same as the language of the pre-Islamic poems. On the other hand, the grammarians set up a hierarchy of the speech of the various tribes. They held on to the tradition of the sons of Qahtan being the pure Arabs but at the same time believed that the language of the Higaz, the region of Mecca, was superior to all other varieties. One way of reconciling both views was to assert that the Quraysh tribe of Mecca had taken over from all other dialects what was best in them. Thus, the hierarchy of Arabic dialects culminated in the language of the Higaz, the region where the Prophet was born, and the language of the Quraysh, the tribe in which he was born.

This view implies that there were linguistic differences between the tribes, otherwise no hierarchy would be possible. Indeed, although the general opinion was that in the Gahiliyya Arabic ( al-’Arabiyya ) was the language of all Arabs alike, the grammatical literature records regional differences between the tribes, the so- called lughat . Our information about the linguistic situation in the Gahiliyya is largely derived from the Arabic literature on the dialectal differences in pre-Islamic Arabia. Some of these materials were collected in monographs, for instance on the lughat in the Qur’an, while other data are found in the lexica. For the grammarians, the dialectal variants, as long as they were attested in the Qur’an or in poetry, or elicited from a trustworthy Bedouin informant, had to be accepted as correct Arabic. This did not mean, however, that anybody else was entitled to speak in this way, or that such dialectal variants could be used as productive items in the language.

It is difficult to evaluate the testimonies about the geographical distribution of the dialectal differences. Their validity is hard to assess because the grammarians tried to make them fit their scheme. The language of the Southern Arabs - apart from the reports about Himyaritic (see above, p. 38) - was usually indicated as lugha ‘ahl al-Yaman ; one of its best-known features was the use of the definite article ‘am-, still extant in modern Yemenite dialects. The data of the Northern Arabs tended to be systematised into two larger regions, roughly covering the western and the eastern parts of the peninsula: the language of the Higaz, often synonymous with that of the Banu Quraysh, or with the language of Mecca and Medina, on the one hand, and the language of the Tamim, on the other. To a certain extent, this division coincides with that between sedentary Arabs in the pre-Islamic cities and Bedouin tribes in the desert regions.

It seems that the differences between Classical Arabic as we know it and Eastern Arabic were smaller than those existing between Classical Arabic and the language of the Higaz. This may partly explain the relative scarcity of data on Eastern Arabic, since the grammarians tended to concentrate on what deviated from the later norm of Classical Arabic, and in this respect the Eastern Arabic variety had much less to offer than the Higazi variety. Since the norm of Classical Arabic was to a large degree derived from the language of the Qur’an and the pre-Islamic poems, the conclusion would seem to be that this language was more related to Eastern than to Western Arabic. In some respects, the language of the Higaz differed from the language that we find in the Qur’an and in poetry, and this has led some scholars to assume that the origin of the Classical language, the language of pre-Islamic poetry, lay in the Central or Eastern part of the peninsula, possibly in the Nagd, where Western and Eastern dialects met. In this area, the kingdom of Kinda and the confederation of the Qays had created larger cultural and political entities, in which there was a fertile environment for the emergence and development of poetry. From here, the poetic language is assumed to have spread to other centres, in the first place to the court of al-Hira, the buffer state in the north between the Bedouin tribes and the Persian empire. This poetic language must then also have spread to the commercial centres in the peninsula, such as Mecca and Medina. Because of its prestigious and supra-tribal character, it is not surprising that this was the language in which the Qur’an was revealed in Mecca. The text of the Qur’an, in particular its orthography, bears traces of an adaptation to the local pronunciation of the poetic language in the Higaz. The most obvious adaptation is that of the spelling of the hamza, the glottal stop. All sources agree that the Eastern dialects knew a glottal stop, which was absent in the Western dialects, including the dialect of Mecca. In the text of the Qur’an as we have it, the hamza is always spelled with a small sign resembling an ‘ayn, which is usually carried by one of the semiconsonants w, y or ‘alif . The semiconsonants probably represent the pronunciation of the word in the dialect of Mecca (cf. below).

This example shows that the realisation of Arabic across the peninsula varied, and that the local realisation in Mecca differed from the language of the Qur’an as we have it. This led the German scholar Karl Vollers to go one step further in his theory about the relationship between the text of the Qur’an and the colloquial speech of Mecca. In his book Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (’Vernacular and written language in Ancient Arabia’, 1906), Vollers claimed that under the surface of the official text of the Qur’an there were traces of a different language, which were preserved in the literature on the variant readings of the text. He called this underlying language Volkssprache and identified it with the colloquial language of the Prophet and the Meccans. In his view, this colloquial language was the precursor of the modern Arabic dialects. The official text of the Qur’an, however, was revealed in a language that was identical with the poetic language of the Nagd, called by Vollers Schriftsprache . The differences between the two ‘languages’ included the absence of the glottal stop in Meccan Arabic, as well as the elision of the indefinite ending n (nunation) and the vocalic endings. Vollers concluded that there had been an original text of the revelation in the colloquial language of the Prophet; during the period of the conquests, this text was transformed into the language of poetry. The motive behind this transformation was, he asserted, the wish to raise the language of the Qur’an to the level of that of the poems. Those who were responsible for the alleged translation were particularly strict in the matter of the hamza and the case endings, whereas they allowed some of the other features, sometimes in the official text, and more often in the variants of the text.

It is certainly true, as Vollers says, that the correct declension of the Qur’an was a topos in early Islamic literature. But in itself the attention that was given to this phenomenon in post-Islamic times does not tell us anything about the linguistic situation in the pre-Islamic period. It can easily be explained by later linguistic developments in the period of the conquests: many people in the conquered territories did not know Arabic very well and made mistakes when reciting the Qur’an . Therefore, those who cared about the correct transmission of the text were on their guard against mistakes in the use of declensional endings, and instructed people in the correct grammatical rules.

In its extreme form, Vollers’ theory has been abandoned nowadays and the concomitant presupposition of a large-scale conspiracy in early Islam concerning the linguistic transformation of the text is no longer held by anyone. The delivery of a revelational document in a ‘vulgar’ variety of the language is hardly likely in itself. The existence of a poetic register of the language is undisputed, and it is not very likely that for the revelation anything but this prestigious variety of the language would have been chosen. The traces of a transition from Eastern to Western Arabic can also be explained by the activities of the early copyists who were familiar with the Meccan way of speaking and had to devise a way to record the Eastern features such as the glottal stop in an orthographic system that had been invented for the Western way of speaking.

In spite of this rejection of the ‘translation theory’, the main point of Vollers’ theory, the distinction between a Volkssprache and a Schriftsprache, has remained the leading principle for almost all subsequent attempts by Western Arabists to explain the development of the Arabic language. In modern terms, we could say that the central thought of these theories is that in [the] pre-Islamic [period] there was already diglossia, i.e. a linguistic situation in which the domains of speech are distributed between two varieties of the language (cf. below, Chapter 12). In that case, the division would be approximately the same as it is nowadays in the Arabic-speaking world: a high variety as literary language and a low variety as colloquial language. In theories that take this view, the literary language is usually called ‘poetic koine’ (cf. below, p. 46).

In itself, it is not unreasonable to assume that there was an essential difference between poetic or literary language and colloquial language. After all, such a situation is found in other oral cultures as well. The question, however, is whether or not such a situation obtained in pre-Islamic Mecca. Contrary to the Arab sources, the theory of a ‘literary’ language assumes that the case endings ( ‘i’rab ) were absent in Bedouin everyday speech. In order to acquire a better idea of the Bedouin language, we shall first look at the data from the literature on the dialectal variants ( lugat ) of the Arab tribes. Then we shall discuss reports about the language of the Bedouin after the conquests.

From The Arabic Language
© 1997 Kees Versteegh
Used by permission of the Edinburgh University Press.