Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T19:21:22.918Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Arabic Language Contact

from Part Three - Language Spread

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Jonathan Owens
Edited by
Salikoko S. Mufwene  and
Anna María Escobar
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna María Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Get access

Summary

It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.

Keywords

Arabiccontactmixed languageidiomaticityeducated spoken Arabicdifferential object marking (DOM)gutturalitysyllable structurecalquing
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 1: Population Movement and Language Change
 , pp. 382 - 424
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abdel-Jawad, Hassan. 1981. Lexical and phonological variation in spoken Arabic in Amman. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Abu Haidar, Farida. 1991. Christian Arabic of Baghdad. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Al-Jallad, Ahmad. 2015. An outline of the grammar of the Safaitic inscriptions. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Al-Wer, Enam. 2013. Sociolinguistics. In Owens (2013a), 241–63.Google Scholar
Al-Wer, Enam. 2014. Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Amman. In Froud, K. & Khamis-Dakwar, R. (eds), Perspectives on Arabic linguistics, 29–46. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Behnstedt, Peter. 1985. Die nordjemenitischen Dialekte. Wiesbaden: Reichert.Google Scholar
Behnstedt, Peter. 1997. Sprachatlas von Syrien. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Behnstedt, Peter & Arnold, Werner. 1993. Arabisch-aramäische Sprachbeziehungen im Qalamūn (Syrien). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Bizri, Fida. 2014. Unity and diversity across Asian migrant Arabic pidgins in the Middle East. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 29.385–409.Google Scholar
Davies, Eirlys, Bentahila, Abdelali, & Owens, Jonathan. 2013. Codeswitching and related issues involving Arabic. In Owens (2013a), 326–48.Google Scholar
Bergsträsser, Gotthelf. 1928. Einführung in die semitischen Sprachen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (Second edition, 1977.)Google Scholar
Blanc, Haim. 1964. Communal dialects in Baghdad. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies.Google Scholar
Blau, Joshua. 1985. On some Arabic dialectal features paralleled by Hebrew and Aramaic. The Jewish Quarterly Review 76.5–12.Google Scholar
Borg, Alexander. 1985. Cypriot Arabic. Wiesbaden: Steiner.Google Scholar
Borg, Alexander. 1994. Some evolutionary parallels and divergences in Cypriot Arabic and Maltese. Mediterranean Language Review 8.41–67.Google Scholar
Borg, Alexander. 2004. A comparative glossary of Cypriot Maronite Arabic. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Borg, Albert & Azzopardi, Marie. 1997. Maltese. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Boyarin, D. 1981. An inquiry into the formation of Middle Aramaic dialects. In Bono homini donum: Essays in historical linguistics in memory of J. Alexander Kerns, ed. by Arbeitman, Yoël L. & Bomhard, Allan R., 613–49. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Clausner, Tim & Croft, William. 1997. Productivity and schematicity in metaphors. Cognitive Science 21.247–82.Google Scholar
Coetsam, Frans van. 2000. A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Contini, Riccardo. 1999. Le substrat arameen en neo-arabe Libanais: preliminaires à une enquete systematique. In Afroasiatica Tergestina, ed. by Lamberti, Marcello and Tonelli, Livia, 101–22. Trieste: Unipress.Google Scholar
Corriente, Federico. 1977. A grammatical sketch of the Spanish Arabic dialect bundle. Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Arabe.Google Scholar
Corriente, Federico. 2013. A descriptive and comparative grammar of Andalusi Arabic. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Daniels, Peter. 1997. Classical Syriac phonology. In Kaye 1997, 127–40.Google Scholar
Diem, Werner. 1979. Zur Frage des Substrats im Arabischen. Der Islam 56.12–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diem, Werner. 1980. Die genealogische Stellung des Arabischen in den semitischen Sprachen: Ein ungelöstes Problem der Semitistik. In Studien aus Arabistik und Semitistik A. Spitaler zum 70 Geburtstag, ed. by Diem, W. & Wild, S., 65–85. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Dixon, Robert. 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erwin, Wallace. 1963. A short reference grammar of Iraqi Arabic. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Faber, Alice. 1997. Genetic subgrouping of the Semitic languages. In Hetzron 1997, 3–15.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15.325–40.Google Scholar
Fischer, Wolfdietrich. 1961. Die Sprache der arabischen Sprachinsel in Uzbekistan. Der Islam 36.232–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Wolfdietrich & Jastrow, Otto (eds.). 1980. Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Fraenkel, Siegmund. 1886. Die aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Garcin, Jean-Claude. 1976. Un centre Musulman de la Haute-Egypte medievale: Quus. Cairo: Institut Francais d’archeologie Orientale du Caire.Google Scholar
Garr, Randall. 1985. Dialect geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000–586 BC Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Greenfield, Jonas. 1978. The dialects of early Aramaic. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37.93–9.Google Scholar
Hachimi, Atiqa. 2007. Becoming Casablancan: Fessis in Casablanca as a case study. In Arabic in the city: Issues in dialect contact and language variation, ed. by Miller, Catherine et al., 97–122. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hallberg, Andreas. 2016. Case endings in spoken Standard Arabic. Lund: Studia Orientalia Lundensia.Google Scholar
Heath, Jeffrey. 2015. D-possessives and the origins of Moroccan Arabic. Diachronica 32.1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2005. Language contact and grammatical change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hetzron, Robert. 1976. Two principles of genetic reconstruction. Lingua 38.89–108.Google Scholar
Hetzron, Robert (ed.). 1997. The Semitic languages. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Holes, Clive. 1987. Variation and change in a modernising Arabic state. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Holes, Clive. 2016. Dialect, culture and society in Eastern Arabic, vol. 3. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Horn, George. 2003. Idioms, metaphors and syntactic mobility. Journal of Linguistics 39.245–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huehnergard, John. 1995. What is Aramaic? Aram 7.261–82.Google Scholar
Ibn al-Nadim, . n.d. Al-Fihrist. Beirut: Dar al-Maʕrifa.Google Scholar
Ibn Faris, Aħmad. n.d. Al-Ṣaaħibi fi Fiqh al-Luɣa, ed. by Ṣaqar, A.. Cairo: Maktabat ʕIṣa al-Babi al-Halabi.Google Scholar
Ingham, Bruce. 2006. Afghanistan Arabic. In The encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistics, vol. 1, ed. by Versteegh, Kees, 28–35. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Jastrow, Otto. 1997. The Neo-Aramaic languages. In Hetzron 1997, 334–77.Google Scholar
Kaye, Alan (ed.). 1991. Semitic studies in honor of Wolf Leslau. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Kaye, Alan (ed.). 1997. Phonologies of Asia and Africa. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar
Kaye, Alan (ed.). 2007. Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar
Khan, Geoffrey. 1988. Studies in Semitic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Khan, Geoffrey. 1997. Jewish Palestinian Aramaic phonology. In Kaye 1997, 103–14.Google Scholar
Khan, Geoffrey. 2007a. The morphology of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic. In Kaye 2007, 107–20.Google Scholar
Khan, Geoffrey. 2007b. The north-eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects. Journal of Semitic Studies 52.1–20.Google Scholar
Kieffer, Charles. 2000. The Arabic speech of Bactria (Afghanistan). In Arabic as a minority language, ed. by Owens, J., 181–98. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kossmann, Maarten. 2013a. The Arabic influence on northern Berber. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kossmann, Maarten. 2013b. Borrowing. In Owens (2013a), 349–68.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83.344–87.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lipiński, Edward. 2000. The Aramaeans, their ancient history, culture, religion. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Lucas, Christopher & Lash, Elliot. 2010. Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation. Journal of Linguistics 46.379–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macuch, Rudolph. 1982. Grammatik des samaritanischen Aramäischen. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Macuch, Rudolph. 1991. Pseudo-Ethiopisms in Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic. In Kaye 1991, 966–76.Google Scholar
McWhorter, John. 2007. Language interrupted: Signs of non-native acquisition in standard language grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Manfredi, Stefano. 2017. Arabi Juba: un pidgin-créole du Soudan du Sud. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Mejdell, Gunvor. 2006. Mixed styles in spoken Arabic in Egypt. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mifsud, Manwel. 1995. Loan verbs in Maltese: A descriptive and comparative study. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Miller, Catherine. 2005. Between accommodation and resistance: Upper Egyptian migrants in Cairo. Linguistics 43.903–56.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Terence. 1986. What is Educated Spoken Arabic? International Journal of the Sociology of Language 61.7–32.Google Scholar
Moscati, Sabatino. 1980. An introduction to the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Muraoka, Takamitsu. 1997. Classical Syriac. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Muraoka, Takamitsu. 2007. Syriac Morphology. In Kaye 2007, 135–48.Google Scholar
Newman, Daniel. 2013. The Arabic literary language: The naħda and beyond. In Owens (2013a), 472–94.Google Scholar
Newton, Brian. 1968. Spontaneous gemination in Cypriot Greek. Lingua 20.15–57.Google Scholar
Newton, Brian. 1972. Cypriot Greek. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nöldeke, Theodor. 1898. Kurzgefasste Syrische Grammatik. Leipzig: Chr. Tauchnitz.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey, Sag, Ivan, & Wasow, Thomas. 1994. Idioms. Language 70.491–538.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 1996. Idiomatic structure and the theory of genetic relationship. Diachronica 13.283–318.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 1998. Neighborhood and ancestry: Variation in the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2006/9. A linguistic history of Arabic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2009. Indeterminacy and the comparative method: Arabic as a model for understanding the history of Aramaic. In Festschrift for Clive Holes, ed. by Al-Wer, Enam, 3–16. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2010. What is a language? Journal of Contact Linguistics 3.104–18.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan (ed.). 2013a. The Oxford handbook of Arabic linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2013b. The historical linguistics of the intrusive *-n in Arabic and West Semitic. Journal of the American Oriental Society 133.217–47.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2014a. Many heads are better than one: The spread of motivated opacity via contact. Linguistics 52.125–65.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2014b. The origins of Nubi morphology. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 29.232–98.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2015a. Idioms, polysemy, context: A model based on Nigerian Arabic. Anthropological Linguistics 57.46–98.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2015b. Arabic language history and the comparative method. Journal of Arabic Linguistics 1.1–27.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2015c. Review of Corriente 2013. Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.421–4.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2016a. The lexical basis of idiomaticity. Language Sciences 57.49–69.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2016b. Dia-planar diffusion: Reconstructing early Aramaic–Arabic language contact. In Approaches to the history and dialectology of Arabic in honor of Pierre Larcher, ed. by Sartori, Manuel, Giolfo, Manuela, & Cassuto, Philippe, 77–101. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan. 2019. Style. In The handbook of Arabic sociolinguistics, ed. by Al-Wer, Enam & Horesh, Uri, 81–92. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan & Dodsworth, Robin. 2009. Stability in subject–verb word order: From contemporary Arabian peninsular Arabic to Biblical Aramaic. Anthropological Linguistics 51.151–75.Google Scholar
Owens, Jonathan & Dodsworth, Robin. 2017. Semantic mapping: What idioms do in discourse. Linguistics 55.641–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, Jonathan & Yavrumyan, Marat. 2008. The participle. In The encyclopedia of Arabic language and linguistcs, vol. 3, ed. by Versteegh, Kees, 541–6. Leiden, Brill.Google Scholar
Parker, S. 1987. Peasants, pastoralists and “Pax Romana”: A different view. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 265.35–51.Google Scholar
Peters, F. 1978. Romans and Bedouin in southern Syria. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37.315–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ratcliffe, Robert. 1998. Defining morphological isoglosses: The “broken” plural and Semitic subclassification. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 57.81–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Retsö, Jan. 2000. Kaskasa, t-passives and the dialect geography of ancient Arabia. Oriente Moderno ns 19.111–18.Google Scholar
Retsö, Jan. 2003. The Arabs in Antiquity. London: RoutledgeCurzon.Google Scholar
Retsö, Jan. 2013. What is Arabic? In Owens (2013a), 433–50.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Franz. 1961. A grammar of Biblical Aramaic. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Seeger, Ulrich. 2002. Zwei Texte im Dialekt der Araber von Chorasan. In Sprich doch mit deinen Knechten Aramäisch, wir verstehen es!, ed. by Bobzin, Hartmut & Arnold, Werner, 629–46. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Sjoberg, Andrée. 1963. Uzbek structural grammar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Spitta-Bey, Wilhelm. 1880. Grammatik des arabischen Vulgärdialekts von Aegypten. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrischs’sche Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
Stolz, Cristel. 2009. A different kind of gender problem. In Introducing Maltese linguistics, ed. by Comrie, Bernard et al., 321–54. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Svanlund, Jan. 2007. Metaphor and convention. Cognitive Linguistics 18.47–89.Google Scholar
Thomason, Sarah & Kaufman, Terence. 1988. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Versteegh, Kees. 1984. Pidginization and creolization: The case of Arabic. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Watson, Janet. 2012. The structure of Mehri. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Watson, Janet. 2018. South Arabian and Arabic dialects. In Arabic historical dialectology, ed. by Holes, Clive, 316–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wellens, Ineke. 2005. The Nubi language of Uganda. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wexler, Paul. 2000. Arabic as a tool for expressing Jewish and Romani ethnic identity. In Arabic as a minority language, ed. by Owens, J., 65–88. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Wilmsen, David. 2014. Arabic indefinites, interrogatives and negators. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Windfuhr, Gernot. 2005. Central Asian Arabic: The Irano-Arabic dynamics of a new perfect. In Linguistic convergence and areal diffusion, ed. by Csató, Evá, Isaksson, Bo, & Jahani, Carina, 111–26. London: RoutledgeCurzon.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×