The spoken Arabic varieties are spoken in a wide arc of territory stretching across the Middle East and North Africa, and is the primary language of the Empire of Nehekhara. Arabic languages are Central Semitic languages, most closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic and Phoenician. The standardized written Arabic is distinct from and more conservative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.
Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political and/or ethnic reasons. Arabic has also borrowed words from many languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Persian and Syriac in early centuries, Turkish in medieval times and contemporary European languages in modern times, mostly from English and French.
Dialects[]
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 and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, Scots and English 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.[citation needed]
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. 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.
Koine[]
According to most scholors, the following are some of the characteristic features of the Arabic language that underlies all of the modern dialects outside the Arabian peninsula. Although many other features are common to most or all of these varieties, Ferguson believes that these features in particular are unlikely to have evolved independently more than once or twice, and together suggest the existence of the koine:
- Loss of the grammatical number except on nouns, with consistent plural agreement (cf. feminine singular agreement in plural inanimates).
- Change of a to i in many affixes (e.g., non-past-tense prefixes ti- yi- ni-; wi- "and"; il- "the"; feminine -it in the construct state.
- Loss of third-weak verbs ending in w (which merge with verbs ending in y).
- Reformation of geminate verbs, e.g., ḥalaltu "I untied" →ḥalēt(u).
- Conversion of separate words lī "to me", laka "to you", etc. into indirect-object clitic suffixes.
- Certain changes in the cardinal number system, e.g., ḫamsat ʾayyām →ḫams tiyyām, where certain words have a special plural with prefixed t. Also, unexpected emphatic ṭ in the numbers 13-19 (e.g.,ḫamṣṭaʿšar "fifteen" < ḫamsat ʿašar).
- Loss of the feminine elative (comparative).
- Adjective plurals of the form kibār "big" →kubār.
- Change of nisba suffix -iyy →i.
- Certain lexical items, e.g., jāb "bring" < jāʾ bi- "come with"; šāf "see"; ʾēš "what" (or similar); illi "(relative pronoun)".
- Merger of /ɮˤ/ and /ðˤ/.