Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Kees Versteegh
University of Nijmegen
Introduction
In contemporary sociolinguistic research, religion as a correlate to
linguistic variation tends to receive less attention than the four main
variables class, age, gender, and ethnicity. The connection between
language and religion is usually studied from the perspective of iden-
tity and language attitude. In Arabic studies, Christian varieties of
the language are treated either within a dialectological framework,
or as part of the study of Middle Arabic. As a result, it is not often
clear to what extent they may indeed be regarded as varieties based
on religion. In this paper, I compare the context and function of
Christian Arabic with that of Christian Greek and Latin, which are
said to have functioned as in-group varieties in the Roman empire.
By comparing these cases I attempt to clarify the nature of Christian
Arabic.
1. Part of this paper was presented at the Summer School on Arabic Christi-
anity: History, Culture, Language, Theology, Liturgy, organized at the
University of Münster by Vasile-Octavian Mihoc (July 20, 2016). Catherine
Miller (Université Aix-Marseille), Ana Souza (Oxford University), and Juan
Pedro Monferrer-Sala (Universidad de Córdoba) kindly provided me with
copies of their publications that would otherwise have been unavailable to
me. The comments of an anonymous referee made me reformulate my orig-
inal views.
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12. The use of the term ‘religiolect’ in the literature is not restricted to Christian
minorities. Paul Allen Jackson, “These are Not Just Words: Religious
Language of Daoist Temples in Taiwan,” (PhD diss., Arizona State Univer-
sity, 2015), for instance, uses the term for the variety of Chinese used in
Daoist temples in Taiwan.
13. See Werner enninger, “Linguistic Markers of Anabaptist Identity Through
Four Centuries,” in Language and Ethnicity: Focusschrift in Honor of
Joshua A. Fishman on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. James R. Dow
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1991); Wendy Baker and
David Bowie, “Religious Affiliation as a Correlate of Linguistic Behavior,”
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 2 (2010);
Nicole Rosen and Crystal Skriver, “Vowel Patterning of Mormons in South-
ern Alberta, Canada,” Language and Communication 42 (2015).
14. Sarah Leiter, “Christianese: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the evangelical
Dialect of American english” (BA thesis, emory University, 2013).
15. In examples mentioned by Leiter, “Christianese” includes the use of the
noun fellowship as a verb (to fellowship someone), the use of mother-in-
love instead of mother-in-law, and the frequent use of the phrase to walk
with the Lord.
16. Rosen and Skriver, “Vowel Patterning.”
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Middle Arabic
Communal dialects like the ones described in the previous section
are likely to have existed in the past as well, but the written record is
the only evidence we have about religion-based varieties. The
mechanism determining linguistic choices in written texts is quite
different, however, from the one in speaking. Written language is
never identical with spoken language, yet, it is often taken for granted
29. See Christophe Pereira, “Urbanization and Dialect Change: The Arabic
Dialect of Tripoli (Libya),” in Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact
and Language Variation, ed. Catherine Miller and others (London/New
York: Routledge, 2007).
30. Geoffrey Khan, “Judeo-Arabic,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed.
Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 44–45. See also Marc
Kiwitt and Stephen Dörr, “Judeo-French,” in Handbook of Jewish
Languages, ed. Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016) on
Judeo-French documents from the period before the expulsion of the Jews
in 1306 C.e., when there was free cohabitation between Jews and Christians
in France; as a result, the language of the Jewish documents is indistin-
guishable from that of Christian writers from the same period.
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that Christian and Jewish texts may serve as a direct source of infor-
mation about the way these communities spoke. Concepts like
‘Christian Latin’ and ‘Christian Arabic’ or ‘Jewish Greek’ and
‘Jewish Arabic’ are often used, as if they represent a homogeneous
variety across all media. From time to time, scholars refer to regional
differences, but the difference between the spoken and the written
register is not always taken into account, let alone the fact that
contact between religious communities was not always feasible, so
that linguistic heterogeneity was unavoidable.
The variety of Arabic spoken by members of minorities may well
have functioned as a communal dialect, but when it came to writing
they were bound by the same rules of the standard language as
Muslim speakers: as soon as they put a pen on paper, their primary
target was normative Standard Arabic. For the majority of Muslims,
this norm was rather strict, not least because of the prestige of the
Qurʾānic text. For Christians and Jews, the absence of this factor
meant that they could afford to be relatively lax in the application of
the rules. Nonetheless, in their writings, too, the standard language
remained the norm.
The target of the standard language was not always reached,
however, and a considerable number of Arabic texts exhibit various
degrees of deviation from the norm.31 The general label for these
texts is ‘Middle Arabic,’ which does not denote a discrete variety of
the language, but a category of texts in which for one reason or
another, deviations from the norm occur, even though the standard
language remains the target.32
Gunvor Mejdell claims that the structure of Middle Arabic texts
may be compared to that of mixed spoken Arabic in contemporary
society.33 The corpus of mixed spoken Arabic she collected consists
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‘trinity,’ for instance, the term ṯālūṯ was used alongside taṯlīṯ, possibly
in order to avoid the negative connotations of the latter term. For the
central notion of ‘hypostasis’ different terms were used, the most
frequent one being qunūm or uqnūm, a loanword from Syriac qnōmā
‘self,’ although the Arabic term waǧh ‘person’ was sometimes used
as an alternative. Many of these Arabic expressions are loan trans-
lations of Greek or Syriac words and phrases, for instance when
Greek basileía toû theoû ‘God’s kingdom’ is translated with malakūt
or mulk Allāh.39 even when neologisms are coined, they usually have
some semantic background in Greek or Syriac, like taǧassud for
‘incarnation,’ or qiddīs ‘saint,’ as the equivalent of Greek hágios.
The effectiveness of the lexicon in marking a text as belonging
to a specific religious community was enhanced when the texts were
written in a different script. Obviously, the use of a different script,
which people from outside the community are unable to read, is a
powerful marker of identity.40 These scripts were used even when
the authors were fully proficient native speakers of Arabic and
familiar with Arabic script. Jewish authors generally used Hebrew
script to record whatever new language they adopted as their new
mother tongue. Lily Kahn and Aaron Rubin go so far as to use this
as their main criterion in classifying languages spoken by Jews; they
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41. Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages
(Leiden: Brill, 2016), 3. Only non-coterritorial languages spoken by Jews,
such as Yiddish and Judezmo, are indicated with a special name, other vari-
eties are indicated by prefixed Jewish or Judeo-. Jewish english, for
instance, refers to english as spoken by Jews, which often does not differ
significantly from english spoken by non-Jews, except for a large number
of loanwords from Yiddish and Hebrew. See Sarah Bunin Benor, “Jewish
english,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed. Lily Kahn and Aaron D.
Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Judeo-French is an example of a Judeo-
language that is both spoken by Jews and written in Hebrew script. See
Kiwitt and Dörr, “Judeo-French.”
42. Joshua Blau, “Some Observations on a Middle Arabic egyptian Text in
Coptic Characters,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 1 (1979).
43. Sarah Bunin Benor, “Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language
in the Twenty-first Century,” Religion Compass 2, 6 (2008), 1065 correctly
points out that choice of script is too narrow a criterion for the determination
of what a Jewish language is.
44. Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the ‘People of
the Book’ in the Language of Islam (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2013), 41–53. The Qurʾān displays detailed knowledge of the content
of Jewish and Christian traditions but refers to the Torah and the Gospels
by paraphrase, rather than through direct quotations. This implies that the
tradition was transmitted orally, rather than through texts, cf. Griffith, Bible
in Arabic, 56.
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45. See Meira Polliack, “Medieval Karaite Views on Translating the Hebrew
Bible into Arabic,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996).
46. Khan, “Judeo-Arabic,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, 25.
47. Benjamin Hary, “Judeo-Arabic as a Mixed Language,” in Middle Arabic
and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony, ed. Liesbeth Zack and Arie
Schippers (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 130.
48. A similar style of literal translation is used in the ‘translationese’ of Qurʾān
commentaries in Malay; see Peter G. Riddell, “Literal Translation, Sacred
Scripture and Kitab Malay,” Studia islamika: Indonesian Journal for
Islamic Studies 9, 1 (2002).
49. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 97–126.
50. Christian translators usually translated from a Greek original. Some trans-
lators, however, based themselves on the Syriac Peshīṭta and hardly ever
used the Greek Septuagint, for instance the one who translated parts of the
Pentateuch contained in Ms. Sinai-Arabic 2. Interestingly, this translator
also used a terminology that was at times highly reminiscent of Qurʾānic
phraseology, see Miriam Lindgren and Ronny Vollandt, “An early Copy
of the Pentateuch and the Book of Daniel in Arabic (MS Sinai-Arabic 2):
Preliminary Observations on Codicology, Text Types, and Translation Tech-
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language in the western part of the empire, since it already had a firm
status as a language of culture and philosophy in Rome. Thus, Chris-
tian users of Latin readily borrowed Greek terms for religious
institutions, like ecclesia (from Greek ekklēsía ‘assembly’), for
ceremonies, like baptizare (from Greek baptízō ‘to baptize’), or for
functions, like episcopus (from Greek epískopos ‘bishop’), presbyter
(from Greek presbúteros ‘elder, priest’), etc.
It was not until much later that some of these terms were replaced
by Latin terms, for instance ethnicus (from Greek ethnikós), which
was first replaced by the calque gentilis and later by the Latin word
paganus,63 The or the verb anathematizare ‘to excommunicate,’
which was later replaced by excommunicare.64 From the beginning,
however, in Christian Latin, too, some religious notions were always
expressed by Latin loan translations, e.g., the soteriological
terminology around salus ‘salvation,’ salvator ‘Savior,’ etc.65
Another example is provided by the crucial opposition between caro
‘flesh’ with its derivation carnalis, and spiritus ‘spirit,’ with its
derivation spiritualis.66
Mohrmann explains that the best way to determine whether
Christian Latin was a Sondersprache is to look at the indirect Chris-
tianisms, i.e. those features of the language that set it apart from non-
Christian Latin, but without any direct relation with religion.67 She
mentions a number of morphological features that are characteristic
of Christian Latin, such as the prevalence of verbal compounds in -
ficare, e.g. beatificare, and the derivation of adjectives in -bilis, e.g.
incorruptibilis, and of nouns in -tor, e.g. fornicator. She also
mentions some syntactic features, for instance the high frequency of
constructions with possessive adjectives instead of constructions with
a genitive, e.g. dominica fides, ecclesiastica disciplina; and the const-
ruction of verba dicendi with the preposition ad.68
After the edict of Milan (313 C.e.), when Christianity obtained
a legal status in the Roman empire, there was an upsurge in Christian
writing, which generated a new vocabulary. Christianity had not yet
63. Christine Mohrmann, Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens (Rome: edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1961), vol. I, 26–27.
64. Ibid., 43.
65. Ibid., 23–24.
66. Ibid., 24–25.
67. Mohrmann, “Altchristliches Latein.”
68. Mohrmann, “Quelques traits charactéristiques.”
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reached the status of state religion, but, by the very fact of its public
acceptance, it had achieved a victory that found its expression in a
new lexicon. Thus, adverbs like infatigabiliter ‘tirelessly’ and nouns
like incommutabilitas ‘invariability’ were freely coined as part of a
triumphant Christian discourse. It is not surprising, then, that in the
fourth century C.e. not only the number of Christian religious terms
increased, but even more so that of indirect Christianisms.69 Chris-
tians still constituted a minority, but since they no longer needed to
hide, they could use their own way of speaking to show the world
who belonged to their group and who did not. Soon, of course, their
way of speaking and writing would become the language of the
majority in the empire.
The discussion about the special status of Christian Latin and
Greek is paralleled by that about Jewish Greek. Just like Christian
writers, Jewish writers varied between linguistic levels according to
their audience.70 As we have seen above in connection with Middle
Arabic texts, such a literary style with different levels could be
regarded as a marker of identity, especially when one of the levels is
expressed in a different script. In Rome, Jewish communities clung
to Greek for a longer time than the Christians did.71 even when,
eventually, they shifted to Latin as their spoken language, they
continued for some time using the Greek alphabet to represent their
new language in writing.72 Rutgers explains the difference between
the Jewish and the Christian community is explained by Rutgers by
the fact that Jewish immigrants came from the eastern Medi-
terranean, where Greek had become the language to express Jewish
identity.73 Greek also functioned as a means of communication
between Roman Jews and their Palestinian coreligionists.74 Their
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78. Nor can Judeo-Arabic texts be regarded as evidence of the language spoken
by Jewish communities. Yosef Tobi, “Written Judeo-Arabic: Colloquial
Versus Middle Arabic,” in Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony
and Synchrony, ed. Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers (Leiden: Brill, 2012)
is certainly right when he insists on distinguishing between Arabic as a
spoken language of Jews and Judeo-Arabic as a written language, even
when it contains colloquial elements.
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