or the Arabs, the dialects of all tribes belonged to what was basically one language. In spite of the various lughat in the literature, they do not accept a major dichotomy between any ‘literary’ language and everyday speech. Western scholarship has always been sceptical of this conception of the development of Arabic. Although Vollers’ theory with its distinction between a Volkssprache and a Schriftsprache in pre-Islamic Arabia has been abandoned, most contemporary Arabists still disagree with the Arabs’ view on the fundamental unity of the three varieties of everyday speech, the language of the Qur’an and the language of the poetry. In line with Vollers’ argumentation, most linguists believe that in the Gahiliyya colloquial and ‘literary’ language already diverged. The colloquial varieties of the tribes are usually called in Western publications ‘pre-Islamic dialects’; the language of the Qur’an and the poetry is often designated ‘poetico-Qur’anic koine’ or ‘poetic koine’ (in German publications Dichter-sprache ).

The theory of the poetic koine emphasises the role of the poets, shu’ara’ . According to Zwettler (1978: 109), their name, which means ‘those who have knowledge, who are aware’, indicates that they were seen as the guardians of an arcane form of the language, and that they were the only ones who were still able to handle the complicated declensional endings. In this view, the case system was beyond the reach of the ordinary speakers and could only be acquired by professional poets and their transmitters ( ruwat ) after a long training.

This view of the linguistic situation before Islam ties in with widely-accepted ideas about the emergence of the new type of Arabic in the period of the Islamic conquests. Most linguists believe that the changes that took place in the transition from Old Arabic to New Arabic, among them the disappearance of the declensional endings, were the continuation of a process that had already begun in the pre-Islamic dialects. Since our information on these dialects is limited, we have to turn to other evidence in order to find out whether the later changes can be traced back to pre-Islamic times; in particular, whether the Bedouin used declensional endings in their colloquial speech.

One source of additional evidence are the pre-Islamic inscriptions. Yet, we have seen above (Chapter 3) that in the pre-Islamic inscriptions no conclusive evidence can be found for or against the existence of declensional endings. In the inscriptions, no declensional endings are used, either because the language which they represent did not have such endings, or because this language distinguished between contextual forms with endings and pausal forms without endings, of which only the latter were used in writing. There is some evidence that the variety of Arabic that is reflected in the Nabataean inscriptions retained fossilised endings in some words. Theophoric compound names very often end in y ( ‘bd’lhy ), and the element ‘abu and ibnu in compound names is almost always spelled with w in all syntactic contexts. The usual conclusion is that in this variety of Arabic the declensional endings had been lost before the first century BCE. On the other hand, we should bear in mind that most of the inscriptions stem from a border area where Arabs had been in contact with other peoples for centuries; it may well be possible that the language reflected in these inscriptions underwent changes that were similar to those that affected the language of all Arabs after the conquests, in particular the loss of the case endings. Since the tribes in the North Arabian desert were in touch with an Aramaic-speaking sedentary population, a type of New Arabic may have become current in the small trade settlements of the North Arabian/Syrian desert long before Islam. This may be the type of Arabic that is called by later Arabic sources nabati .

A second possibility is to turn to the orthography of the Qur’anic text. The language of the Qur’an has an operational declensional system, for example in the use of the masculine sound plural endings una/-ina correlating with the syntactic function of the word, and in the use of the moods of the verb (indicative vs subjunctive/jussive). But the question still remains whether this state of affairs reflects the structure of the language of the Higaz. As we have seen above, the orthography of the Qur’an reflects the adaptation of the Higazi dialect to a different phonological system, for instance in the spelling of the hamza . For the case endings, there is no such evidence. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the Qur’anic orthography continues the orthographic conventions of the Aramaic/Nabataean script, which were also used in the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. This is clear in the entire system of the rendering of consonants, but it also applies to the representation of endings. The most important principle is that in the consonantal skeleton text the word is always recorded in its isolated (pausal) form. This explains why the nunation is never written, except in the case of the accusative an which sounded in pause a and was accordingly spelled with ‘alif . The original pausal forms of the nunated endings un, -in, -an were probably u, -i, -a, as we have seen in the inscriptions and in the representation of Arabic names in the Nabataean inscriptions. The same principle also applies to the orthography of the singular feminine noun, with at or ah, where the variation in spelling in the Qur’an ― sometimes with t and sometimes with h ― reflects a change in the pausal ending of the feminine words that was already operative in the earlier period. In the later period, when vocalisation had been introduced in order to record both contextual and pausal endings, the pausal ah of the feminine noun was combined with the pronunciation t- of the contextual forms in the orthographic device of the ta’ marbuta, a letter h with the two dots of the letter t .

Another aspect of the Qur’anic text mentioned in the discussion about the case endings is that of the rhyming conventions. In pre-Islamic poetry, a system prevails in which short final vowels u, -i, -a are pronounced long and count as part of the rhyme. But in the Qur’an and sometimes in poetry, there is another system of rhyming, in which the final short vowels are dropped and only the rhyming consonant counts. According to Birkeland (1940), this is a new development, reflecting a tendency to drop the declensional endings. The only ending that was spared apocopation is the pausal ending an, pronounced a . In the view of Birkeland and others, this ending for a long time resisted elision, not because it was a case ending, but because it had a special status (e.g. as an adverbial ending). In some modern Central Arabian dialects, vestiges of this tanwin in the accusative still exist (cf. below, p. 149), and it must have existed in the Higazi dialect, too, because the orthography of the Qur’anic text consistently notes the final ending an with an ‘alif while ignoring the other nunated endings un/-in . The problem with the rhyming patterns, however, is that it is not clear to what degree pausal phenomena can be used as evidence for the disappearance of case endings. After all, nobody denies that in context both poetry and the Qur’an use case endings as well as modal endings consistently.

The conclusion from pre-Islamic and Qur’anic orthographical practice is that neither can give a definitive answer to the question about the presence or absence of case endings. This means that the question of whether the Higazi dialect belonged to the Old Arabic or to the New Arabic type cannot be resolved on this basis. Most Western scholars nevertheless continue to believe that the colloquial language of the Gahiliyya contrasted with the so-called ‘poetic koine’ ( Dichtersprache ). In this view, the process of change which the Arabic language underwent in the period of the conquests was so radical that some of the changes must have been latently present in the pre-Islamic period. One typical argument for this view points out that the functional load of the declensional endings in Classical Arabic was already low, so that these endings could disappear without the risk of ambiguity. This is the view advanced by Corriente (1971b) in a discussion with Blau, in which Corriente maintains that Old Arabic did not have the synthetic character often attributed to it. He concedes that the daily speech of the Bedouin, perhaps even that of some city-dwellers, contained declensional endings, but points out that this was of little importance since the functional yield was almost zero. In this view, the functional yield of the declensional endings is determined by their indispensability. In other words, if it can be shown that in many cases the declensional endings can be omitted without the sentence losing its meaning, this demonstrates that declension is just an ‘idle tool’ (Corriente 1971b: 39) and that the morphs expressing the declension are redundant.

In his response to this criticism of the traditionally-accepted synthetic character of Old Arabic, Blau (1972-3) states that redundancy is a normal phenomenon in any language. The shift from synthetic to analytic devices in the language involves the introduction of a whole new set of morphs, for instance, the introduction of a genitive exponent in New Arabic to denote a possessive relationship between words (cf. below, p. 107). There is no indication at all in any Old Arabic text that such a device was used. The use of the synthetic genitive in Old Arabic in the construct state is, of course, highly redundant because of the fact that the head noun of the construction loses its article, thereby marking the construction as a possessive one and rendering the genitive ending of the second member dispensable. Yet in Old Arabic this did not lead to the use of an analytic possessive device as in the modern dialects. Something else must, therefore, have happened in the shift from Old to New Arabic, and this new development had nothing to do with the functional yield of the declensional endings, although their redundance may have facilitated their disappearance. It is sometimes thought that synthetic declensional endings are introduced in order to enable the speakers to utilise a free word order. But usually free word order is only a stylistic phenomenon. It is true that in Old Arabic some things were possible that would lead to ambiguity in New Arabic, for instance the fronting of a direct object, or the right dislocation of a cosubject, as in the Qur’anic verse Q 9/3 ‘inna llaha bari’un min almushrikina wa-rasuluhu (see below, p. 50). But this flexibility in word order is a consequence of the presence of declensional endings rather than its cause.

A similar reasoning ascribes the loss of the declensional endings to a phonetic phenomenon: since there was a tendency to elide word-final short vowels, so the argument goes, the declensional endings were dropped, at least in the singular. In this line of reasoning, the loss of the plural endings is then explained as a case of analogy. But a tendency to drop word-final short vowels, if it really existed, is part of an allegro style of discourse and belongs to the normal range of stylistic registers of a language. In a normal process of language acquisition, children learn the full range of styles and get acquainted with both the short and the long forms. By itself, a tendency to drop final vowels in fluent speech can never lead to their disappearance as case markers. Only when there is a break in the normal transmission process may we expect to find any correlation between the coexistence of various stylistic registers and a change in the structure of the language. Discourse phenomena such as the slurring or dropping of unstressed vowels may at best reinforce the development of innovations that find their origin somewhere else.

From another angle, the phonetic explanation has been rejected because of the relative chronology. According to Diem (1991), in the modern Arabic dialects, forms with the pronominal suffix such as bint-ak, bint-ik ‘your [masculine/feminine] daughter’ may be explained as cases of vowel harmony from older *bint-a-ka, *bint-i-ki . The vowel between noun and suffix is a generalised case ending which was selected on the basis of correspondence with the final vowel of the suffix. Therefore, the case endings must already have become inoperative at a time when the short end vowels were still pronounced, otherwise a form such as bint-ak could not have arisen. Besides, the survival of fossilised case endings in some Bedouin dialects (cf. p. 149) is inexplicable if one assumes that the short vowel endings disappeared before the collapse of the case system.

The debate about the colloquial varieties in the Gahiliyya may be approached from yet another angle if we turn to the speech of the Bedouin in post-Islamic times. The Arab grammarians believe that the Bedouin spoke ‘pure Arabic’ ( fasih ) and continued to do so after the conquests, at least for sometime. In the words of Ibn Haldun (d. 757/1356), the Bedouin spoke according to their linguistic intuition and did not need any grammarians to tell them how to use the declensional endings. He clearly thought that in the first centuries of Islam, before Bedouin speech had become affected and corrupted by sedentary speech, it still contained correct declensional endings. The force of this argument partly depends on the value which we attach to reports about Bedouin purity of speech. According to these reports, it was fashionable among caliphs and noble families to send their sons into the desert, not only to learn how to shoot and hunt, but also to practise speaking pure Arabic. Other reports come from professional grammarians who stayed for some time with a Bedouin tribe and studied their speech because it was more correct ( fasih ) than that of the towns and the cities.

Of course, these reports may also be regarded as symptomatic of the generally nostalgic attitude towards the Bedouin past and the desert. Besides, the Bedouin could have preserved certain forms of poetry with a Classical type of ‘i’rab, just as they do nowadays in Central Arabia, while using a form of New Arabic in their everyday speech. Since the grammarians were looking for traces of ‘Arabiyya and often used transmitters of poetry as informants, they got exactly what they were asking for, which was not necessarily the colloquial speech of the Bedouin tribes involved. If one takes this view, the linguistic purity of the Bedouin became a mere topos, along with stories about their chivalry, manliness and generosity. On the other hand, if we believe the reports by professional grammarians, we also have to believe that in the Gahiliyya Bedouin more or less spoke the same language as that of their poems, which in its turn was the language in which God revealed His last message to the world.

In the literature about the linguistic situation in the Gahiliyya, much importance has been attached to reports about linguistic mistakes in early Islam. There is, indeed, a vast amount of anecdotes concerning the linguistic mistakes made by the mawali, the non-Arabs who had converted to Islam. It is commonly believed that these anecdotes document a state of confusion and corruption of the Classical language. Yet such reports do not necessarily support the view that the system of declension had become redundant. If anything, the point in the anecdotes is precisely that the target language of the newly converted, the language of the Arabs which they wished to imitate, still contained declensional endings. In the most frequently-quoted instances of such mistakes, a connection is suggested between faulty Arabic and the ‘invention’ of grammar by ‘Abu l-’Aswad ad-Du’ali (d. 69/688?; cf. below, p. 56).

In one story, someone makes a mistake in the Qur’anic verse 9/3 ‘inna llaha bari’un min almushrikina wa-rasuluhu ‘God keeps aloof from the polytheists, and so does His Prophet’ and recites ‘inna llaha bari’un min al-mushrikina wa-rasulihi with an incorrect genitive ending, thus uttering a blasphemous ‘God keeps aloof from the polytheists and from His Prophet’. In another example, a recent convert is reported to have said tuwuffiya ‘abana wa-taraka banuna ‘our father [accusative] has died and left sons [nominative]’ (Ibn al-’Anbari, Nuzha 6-7). While the first example may have been fabricated, the second one clearly shows a tendency on the part of the non-Arab client to use hypercorrect endings (otherwise he would have said banina in the accusative as well). In both Ibn al’Anbari’s and Ibn Haldin’s account of the history of the Arabic language, a link is made between the corruption of speech and the beginnings of the grammatical tradition (cf. below, Chapter 7).

The first written examples of wrong case endings stem from the first half of the first century of the Higra. In two Egyptian papyri that have been examined by Diem (1984) dating from year 22 of the Higra, we find the proper name ‘Abu Qir in a genitive position and the hypercorrect expression nisfu dinaran ‘half a dinar’. Many more mistakes may be cited from later papyri (cf. below, p. 118). These papyri were written in a bilingual context, and, as the scribes may have been bilingual, such early mistakes cannot be taken as proof for the disappearance of the case endings before the period of the conquests. On the contrary, the occurrence of hypercorrect forms suggests that the target language still contained a case system.

What, then, may we conclude about the presence or absence of diglossia in the pre-Islamic period? One point is certain: there are no traces of pseudo-corrections in the poems preserved from the pre-Islamic period. Such forms are usually a corollary of a sharp divergence between a literary norm and a colloquial variety (cf. below, p. 115), and their absence would seem to point to a more widespread usage of the case endings than the limited one advocated by the proponents of the ‘poetic koine’. One could, of course, object that any errors would have been weeded out by later collectors of poetry and copyists anyway. The general conclusion is that even when some of the changes which Arabic underwent in the post-Islamic period may have been present in pre-Islamic speech, the fundamental structural differences between the Old Arabic of the pre-Islamic period and the New Arabic represented by the contemporary dialects still need an explanation. The emergence of this new type of Arabic in the period of the conquests is characterised not only by the disappearance of the declensional system but also by a complex of other features (cf. the discussion in Chapter 7).

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