Académique Documents
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chapter 13
dialectolo g y
13.1 Introduction
Geographically, Arabic is one of the most widespread languages of the world, and
Arabic dialects are spoken in an unbroken expanse from western Iran to Mauritania
and Morocco and from Oman to northeastern Nigeria, albeit with vast uninhabited or
scarcely inhabited areas and deserts in between. It is not easy to give the exact number of
speakers; estimates from 1999 count 206 million L1 speakers, a figure that today seems
too low rather than too high.1 This geographical range is marked by extreme dialectal
differences in all fields of phonology, grammar, and lexicon, at times to the extent that
different varieties are mutually unintelligible.
Arabic dialects2 may have millions of speakers, and in some Arab countries the dia-
lect of a politically or economically prominent city plays the de facto role of a Standard
language, at least with respect to oral communication; Cairo Arabic in Egypt and
Casablanca Arabic in Morocco (Aguadé 2008: 288a; Caubet 2008: 273b) are relevant
cases. Although they have their principal domain in oral communication, dialects are
also used for writing and even in some forms of literature (see Aguadé 2006 for Morocco
and Rosenbaum 2004; Woidich 2010 for Egypt; see also [Holes, “Orality”]).
Arabic dialectology is closely connected with a number of other disciplines of Arabic
linguistics such as historical linguistics [Owens, “History”] and sociolinguistics includ-
ing urban linguistics [Al-Wer, “Sociolinguistics”]. In fact, it constitutes an indispensable
prerequisite as it provides these with the necessary data.
than 84 million inhabitants now, nearly all of them speakers of a variety of Arabic.
2 If we consider any variety of a language a dialect, Modern Written Arabic and Classical Arabic are
dialects of Arabic as well and should be treated as such. Nevertheless, Arabic dialectology is concerned
only with dialects of Arabic that have native speakers.
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dialectology 301
This article limits itself to what may be called traditional Arabic dialectology (TAD).
The subject matter of traditional dialectology is the collection of linguistic features in a
given geographic area and the study of these features with regard to their distribution in
this area to establish dialectal borders lines, transitional areas, core areas, and dialectal
continua. All this can be best made visible as a linguistic landscape by reproducing these
features on maps. For more detail, see Behnstedt and Woidich (2005).
The interest in the regional varieties of spoken Arabic has a relatively long history. In
the course of the 19th century, a considerable number of word lists, smaller or larger
dictionaries, and practical guides and textbooks appeared as the result of increased
possibilities of tourism and scientific research in the Arabic-speaking world. A few
more comprehensive treatises on the colloquial had appeared before this time (Alcalá
1505; Dombay 1800; Caussin de Perceval 1833; Tantāvy 1848). Wallin (1851, 1852)
and Wetzstein (1868) provide samples of folk poetry and stories furnished with pho-
nological and factual annotations, which give valuable insights into the Bedouin
Arabic of Syria.
A real linguistic interest in Arabic dialects, however, and the creation of a discipline
“Arabic dialectology” as part of academic Oriental and Semitic studies did not develop
until the final quarter of the 19th century, when the first systematic grammars and elab-
orate dictionaries appeared, which went far beyond previously published works. These
were often accompanied by text collections provided with glossaries (e.g., Spitta 1880),
which at the same time were of great value for ethnographic and folkloristic studies.
The early days of Arabic dialectological studies thus ran parallel to the time when the
great enterprises in dialectology, that is, the national projects of the French and German
dialect atlases, started. Beside the professional scholars in Arabic and Semitic studies,
a considerable number of valuable data of linguistic and ethnographic interest were
collected also by archeologists working in Egypt or Iraq, such as Maspéro (1914) and
Weissbach (1908–1930). The first attempts at dialect atlases for the Arab world—today
historical documents because of the political developments, creation of new states,
and movement of populations—were made as early as in 1915 by Gotthelf Bergsträßer
(Palestine) and 1940 by Jean Cantineau (Ħawrān).
The first half of the 20th century saw many more publications in the field, and, as
early as in 1961, Anton Spitaler could observe that a huge amount of material on
Arabic dialects was available: “Insgesamt verfügen wir heute absolut genommen über
ein gewaltiges, nur mehr schwer übersehbares Tatsachenmaterial, das sich über weite
Gebiete des arabischen Sprachraums von Marokko bis Buchara erstreckt” “Altogether
we have at our disposal a huge amount of primary material extending over a large area
of the Arabic-speaking region from Morocco to Bukara, so that an overview of it is
difficult” (Spitaler 1961: 133), so that it was difficult to maintain an overview over the
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material [135/226]. This amount of data was sufficient and detailed enough to enable
the first comparative overviews by Hans R. Singer (1958) on interrogatives and by
Wolfdietrich Fischer on demonstratives (1959), both students of Hans Wehr.
Nevertheless, Arabic dialectology was at this point not really an academic profession.
Despite the fact that its importance for Arabic linguistic history can hardly be overesti-
mated, it had remained a field to which serious scholars would devote only their Sunday
afternoons, as Spitaler used to tell his students. David Cohen, in his “Préface” to Actes
des premières journées de dialectologie arabe de Paris (Caubet and Vanhove 1994), states
something similar: “Les arabophones méprisaient leurs dialectes, les arabisants la dia-
lectologie.”, “Arabic speakers despised their dialects, the Arabicists dialectology.” Arabic
studies at that time, following their historical origin, more or less resembled the study of
the classical languages Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Making an academic career in dialec-
tology only was next to impossible for Arabists, as chairs for Arabic and Semitic studies
were designed with a far wider profile including Arabic literature, history of the Near
East, and Islamic studies. Several developments in the 1960s and 1970s changed this
state of affairs to some extent.
First of all, the growing political and economic importance of the Arab countries
together with the expanded possibilities for traveling, visiting, and researching these
countries led to an increased interest in “real Arabic,” that is, the spoken language of
daily life or the modern Arabic dialects. Many students would no longer limit them-
selves to Classical or Modern Standard Arabic for second-language learning but chose
to acquaint themselves with the colloquial as a language of daily life as well. Certainly, as
a consequence of this, more academic interest for the field was stimulated.
Second, the unimagined advances in the technology of speech recording that had
begun in the 1950s was not without impact on Arabic dialectology: recording living
speech allowed a far more systematic and scientific approach to fieldwork and was less
prone to the predilections and deficiencies of the individual researcher. While in earlier
times texts could be recorded only by means of dictation—a rather unnatural form of
speech—it was now possible to record speech without too much technical effort and
cost. Haim Blanc and Wehr were the first dialectologists of Arabic to use a tape recorder
in the field (Jastrow 2002: 350). These recordings, as well as the recordings of entire elici-
tation sessions, when necessary, could be repeated and checked by the researcher or by
others for verification in nearly the same way as they had been recorded. This made it
possible to embark on projects covering larger areas more systematically and with better
scientific methods than ever before. It is beyond any doubt that these technical improve-
ments led to a far higher reliability of the recorded data.
Third, descriptive structural linguistics, in particular taxonomic phonology and
morphology, which had already been developed in other philologies in the 1930s and
1940s, were gradually adapted by Arabic dialectologists and applied in their works.
In particular, Cantineau’s (1960) adaptation of the Prague phonology in several
articles from the early 1950s proved to be seminal. His remark that “la dialectologie
arabe n’est guère progressiste; les nouvelles techniques de recherche ont du mal à s’y
acclimater,” “Arabic dialectology is not at all progressive; new research methods have
difficulty becoming established in it” (ibid., 277) proved incorrect for the years to
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dialectology 303
too. On one hand, recording these dwindling specimens of speech has become more
urgent than anybody could imagine at Fleisch’s time, while, on the other hand, the new
media offered by the Internet (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) facilitate the use of the collo-
quial, albeit further developed in written and supraregional forms.
These developments, together with the ever increasing migrations of the population
from rural areas to the cities, and from country to country, offer other possibilities for
scientific study that go far beyond traditional dialectology and have in the meantime
supplanted the latter to some extent: urban dialectology, all types of contact linguistics
including diglossia studies, youth language, Pidgin and Creole studies, and other socio-
linguistically oriented matters.
No wonder that, starting in the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of sociolinguis-
tics and variational linguistics, many Arabic language researchers such as Jonathan
Owens, Gunvor Mejdell, Nilofaar Haeri, Catherine Miller, and Enam Al-Wer directed
their interests to these branches of studies of linguistic varieties and developed them
into more or less separate fields of activity ([Davies et al., “Code Switching”; Al-Wer,
“Sociolinguistics”]). Despite that, the traditional descriptive approach has not been aban-
doned but has been falling behind somewhat over the last few years (Jastrow 2002, 2008).
For all these reasons, the last 50 years saw an unprecedented expansion and increase
in fieldwork and in the amount of data accessible to the researchers. Data collections
such as monographs, atlases, grammatical sketches, text collections, textbooks, dic-
tionaries, and other linguistic descriptions keep flowing continuously. The mass of data
increased again far beyond what had been imagined only some years earlier.
This expansion called for a more formal organization. Since both older and younger
researchers such as Wolfgang Fischer, Hans. Singer, Otto Jastrow, Hartmut Bobzin,
Peter Behnstedt, and Manfred Woidich felt an urgent need for a regular forum for pub-
lication and discussion dedicated to Arabic dialectology and linguistics, Jastrow and
Bobzin founded the journal Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik (ZAL). Its purpose was
to make new findings and recent studies accessible to the public as swiftly as possible.
The ZAL, the first issue of which appeared in 1978, developed into an important special-
ized forum for presentation of research and discussion; more than 50 volumes have been
published to date. In 1983, the French journal Matériaux Arabiques et Sudarabiques-
GELLAS followed. Jastrow started the series Semitica viva in 1987, which in the years
to follow hosted many of the most important publications in the field. In 1993, French
dialectologists from the renowned INALCO (above all Caubet and Vanhove) took the
initiative and convened all colleagues in the field to Paris at a Colloque International,
the first conference dedicated to Arabic dialectology. The conference was concluded
with the foundation of the Association Internationale de la dialectologie Arabe (AIDA)
and thus marked the beginning of a series of nine highly successful conferences to
date. The proceedings of these conferences very aptly mirror the most recent develop-
ments in the field, both with respect to traditional approaches as well as to other types of
Arabic dialectology.3 To conclude, the particular situation in Spain with its Andalusian
3
See http://www.aida.or.at.
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dialectology 305
background and its focus on the Maghreb led to the foundation of another journal with
the programmatic title Estudios de dialectologia norteafricana y andalusí (EDNA) in
1996, which since then has also developed into an important forum for documentation
and discussion.
Maltese, with its rich indigenous linguistic academic landscape, split off from general
TAD and formed its own association, L-Għaqda Internazzjonali tal-Lingwistika Maltija
(GĦILM) in 2007, which convenes regular conferences.4
As Owens (2006: 8) rightly puts it, “The modern dialects have an indispensable role in
an account of Arabic language history.”5 We would even say that the modern Arabic dia-
lects, their development, and their relation to Classical Arabic (or Old Arabic, whatever
one may call it) are the central object of research for Arabic historical linguistics. This
gives TAD fundamental importance for any research in Arabic historical linguistics.
TAD, therefore, is heavily and primarily fieldwork oriented and not as theory driven. In
more detail, it aims at the following:
TAD overlaps here with the study of Middle Arabic; see, for instance, Davies (1981),
Lentin (2008), and Zack (2009).
4
See http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/ghilm/about.aspx.
5
It goes without saying that in this short article not all important publications can be quoted.
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6
For more details, see the chapter “Die arabischen Sprachatlanten” in Behnstedt-Woidich (2005: 4–7).
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dialectology 307
Projects on dialect surveys have been announced for Northern Israel (Talmon 2002)
and Tunisia (Mejri 2002; Sandly 2002)7 but have not materialized so far.
Behnstedt and Woidich (2005) give a general introduction to Arabic dialect geogra-
phy and incorporates a chapter on dialectometry.
7
See further a number of articles in the procedings of AIDA 6 (Mejri 2006).
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(2006) and, on Afghanistan, Kieffer (1981, 1985, 2000) as well as Ingham (1994a, 2002).
On the newly discovered Arabic dialects in Iran, see Seeger (2002). For the situation
in border areas where Arabic is a minority language such as Anatolia, Afghanistan,
Eritrea/Djibouti, and Central Asia, one may consult the publications by Owens (2000),
Simeone-Senelle (2002), and Csató et al. (2005). Heine’s (1982) book on Ki-Nubi intro-
duced Creole studies to the field of Arabic dialectology, followed by Wellens (2005) and
Luffin (2005) [Tosco and Manfredi, “Creoles”]. Corriente, in numerous publications,
provided for the systematic analysis and description of the extinct dialect of Andalusia;
see Corriente (1977, 1997), and for a short account on its evolution see Vicente (2011).
8
For a sharp refutation see Sima (2006: 98) and Owens (2006: 9).
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dialectology 309
9
For further titles, we refer here to the relevant articles in EALL.
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Palva (1976) on al-Balqā’/Jordan; Cowell (1964), Grotzfeld (1964), and Ambros (1977)
on Damascus; Abu-Haidar (1979) on Baskinta/Lebanon; Reichmuth (1983) on the
Shukriyya tribe in Sudan; Owens (1984) on Benghazi; Singer (1984) on Tunis; Owens
(1993) on Nigeria; Seeger (2009) on Ramallah,; Julien de Pommerol (1999) on Chad;
Talay (1999) on the Khawētna/Syria; Werbeck (2001) on Manāxa/Yemen; Wittrich
(2003) on Āzǝx/Anatolia; Borg and Azzopardi (2005) for Maltese; Woidich (2006) on
Cairo; Gralla (2006) on Nabk/Syria; Pereira (2010) on Tripoli; Manfredi (2010) on the
Baggāra in Kordofan. The century-old interest of the Maltese in their spoken language
produced very early grammatical descriptions and dictionaries, making it to one of the
best described and researched varieties of Arabic; see Borg and Azzopardi (2005). In
addition to that, there are quite a few PhD and MA theses on Arabic dialects written by
native speakers at European and American universities, but many of these are difficult
to come by.
The degree of comprehensiveness of these grammars differs, as their interest gener-
ally is limited to the basic facts of phonology and morphology, while syntax is treated
rather marginally. Some exceptions to this point deal with many important syntactic
issues: Spitta (1880) on Cairo; Harrell (1962) on Rabat; Cowell (1964) on Syrian; Jullien
de Pommerol (1992) on Chad; Caubet (1993) on Fes; Woidich (2006) on Cairo; Naïm
(2009) on Sanʕā’.
A classical structuralistic study of the phonology of Egyptian Arabic is Harrell (1957);
a thorough study with a high level of abstractness is Dickins (2007) on the phonology of
Sudanese (Khartoum) Arabic.
Studies on the syntax of individual dialects include Feghali (1928) on Lebanese,
Abboud (1964) on Ħiǧāzi, Bloch (1965) on Damascene, Piamenta (1966) on Palestinian,
Denz (1971) on Kwayriš/Iraq, Sieny (1978) on Urban Ħiǧāzi, Watson (1993) on Sanʕāni,
Vanhove on Maltese (1994), and Eisele (1999) on Cairene. Most important in this
respect is Brustad (2000), as it is the only monograph to treat syntactic issues from a
comparative perspective and in the light of a fresh modern syntactic approach while not
relying on traditional Arabic grammar or a particular modern linguistic school. The lat-
ter is an important issue, since in recent years, quite a few articles and monographs on
Arabic syntax appeared, but, unfortunately enough, many of these use a particular lin-
guistic framework and are aimed more at serving the further development of syntactic
theories than at adding to the knowledge of Arabic.10
Owens and Elgibali (2009) provide a series of articles on structural and pragmatic
sources and offer an introduction to information structure as used in spoken Arabic.
Of particular linguistic interest are “Sprachinseln” in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkey,
and Iran, which on one hand preserve many old features due to an early split from main-
stream Arabic, thus shedding light on earlier linguistic situations in Mesopotamia
(Jastrow 2011), and on the other hand show peculiar developments due to their isola-
tion from the core area of Arabic and their contact with other languages.
10
Cf. the introduction to Brustad (2000: 2–4).
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dialectology 311
The Creolized versions spoken in Africa (Ki-Nubi/, Juba Arabic/Sudan) are a par-
ticularly interesting case for general Creole studies, as they are not based on one of
the European languages; see Miller (1983), Prokosch (1986), and Owens (2006) in
the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics and also Tosco and Manfredi
[“Creoles”].
13.4.5 Dictionaries
Arabic dialectologists have a number of dictionaries at their disposal, although many
of them are rudimentary and are better classified under the categories “vocabulary” or
“glossary” than dictionary. Some are outdated today but have nevertheless been repub-
lished without any adaptations (Belkassem 2001), the Georgetown series (see follow-
ing), and Spiro (1980). The 12 volumes of de Premare (1993–1999) provide a rather
comprehensive dictionary for Moroccan. For Maltese, the dictionary by Aquilina in six
volumes (2000) (a shorter version is Aquilina 1987–1990) forms an indispensable source
for Maltese studies, providing even etymological and comparative information. Others
are Landberg (1909) for South Arabia, Spiro (1925) and Hinds and Badawi (1986) for
Egypt, Barthélémy (1936) for Syria and the Levant, Taine-Cheikh (1988–1998, 1990)
for Ħassāniyya/Mauretania, Piamenta (1990) and Behnstedt (1992–2007) for Yemen,
Qafīšeh (1997) for the Gulf area, Jullien de Pommerol (1999) for Chad, Holes (2001) for
Baħrayn, Qāsim (2002) for Sudan, Elihay (2004) for Palestinian, Kurpershoek (2005)
for Saudi Arabia/Dawāsir, Beaussier et al. (2006) for Algeria, and Chaker and Milelli
(2010) for Lebanese. The older dictionaries should be seen as valuable historical docu-
ments rather than as reflections of modern language. Still useful, though somewhat out-
dated today, are the dictionaries of the Georgetown series: Stowasser and Ani (1964) for
Syria; Woodhead and Beene (1967) for Iraq; and Harrell (1966) for Morocco. Lentin and
Salamé carried out a major project, a comprehensive documentation of Syrian Arabic
vocabulary, the [B] having recently appeared as a first letter.11 More to the category
“word list,” see Vocke and Waldner (1982) on Anatolia and Jastrow (2005) on Kinderib/
Anatolia.
Many text editions, in particular those on Maghrebi dialects, were followed by
glossaries with very useful comparative and etymological annotations. Particularly
noteworthy examples are, for instance, the monumental Takroûna/Tunisia glos-
sary by Marçais and Guîga (1958–1961) with nearly 4000 pages, Marçais (1911) on
Tanger, Brunot (1952) on Rabat/Morocco, and Boris (1958) on Marāzīg/Tunis,
which all contain a host of comparative lexical notes as well. For the southern part
of the Arabian Peninsula, Landberg’s monumental documentations on Ħadramawt
(1901) and Daṯīna (1905–1913) are still indispensable, more than 100 years after their
publication.
11
See http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00504180/fr/.
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There are only few dictionaries or glossaries with Arabic as target language. Among
these are the bidirectional ones: Sobelman and Harrell (1963) for Moroccan; Clarity
et al. (1964/2003) for Iraqi; and Stowasser and Ani (1964) for Syrian. As part of the
Georgetown series, these have the advantage of providing rather systematically exam-
ple sentences illustrating the use of the item listed. Others, mainly intended for practi-
cal usage, are Stevens and Salib (2004) and Jomier (1976) for Cairo, Bauer (1957) and
Elihai (1985) for Palestinian Arabic, Hillelson (1925) for Sudan, Cohen (1963) and
Taine-Cheikh (1990) for Ħassāniyya, and Aguadé and Benyahya (2005) for Morocco.
For Maltese see Moser (2005), a rather comprehensive Maltese–German and German–
Maltese dictionary.
dialectology 313
extent that Cantineau (1960: 277) wrote in the conclusion to his article: “on est frappé
par la disproportion des résultats: trop de textes, pas assez de grammaires et de diction-
naires.” “One is struck by the disproportionality of results: too many texts, not enough
grammars and dictionaries.” His remark is quite to the point, and even more so after
speech recording became possible from the 1960s onward. Most grammars, regional
overviews, and atlases are furnished with texts or accompanied by text volumes; see, for
instance, Peter Behnstedt’s (1997–2000) works on Syria and Otto Jastrow’s (1978–1981)
on qǝltu-dialects. They not only serve a documentary purpose but also are meant to
serve studying the dialect and practicing it. Initially, the interest focused on folklore
and popular culture (fairy tales, folk poetry) and paremiology (proverbs), maybe due to
the fact that recording speech was not possible yet. The texts had to be noted down by
dictation, which means that they had to be present in the memory of the informants so
that they could be repeated if necessary. And as story telling played an important role in
rural life of that time, this was a relatively simple way to get people to speak. To avoid the
highly formulaic language associated with fairy tales and folk poetry, this focus turned
to ethnographical issues and oral history in the course of time. Today, these collections
offer a wealth of information on urban and rural life in earlier times and are therefore
of prime importance not only for the dialectologist but also for the ethnographer and
folklorist. For the dialectologist, the problem with these records is that speakers tend to
use here an acrolectal type of speech that remains rather descriptive and often features
stereotype phrases and does not reflect everyday unmonitored speech, or as Cantineau
(1960: 277) puts it: “dans le texte, rarement spontané, il y a autant de celui qui le recueille
que de celui qui le dicte.” Therefore, despite the fact that they offer much useful lexi-
cal information, texts of this sort are of less value with respect to syntax, phraseology,
and pragmatics. Well aware of these deficiencies, dialectologists today prefer to record
more personal accounts, life stories, jokes, and similar texts or in any case a good mix of
various types of text to provide more space to the speaker for elaborate syntactic con-
structions, everyday phraseology, rhetorical devices, as is described exemplarily in the
introduction to Holes (2005: xviii–xxi). Of course, the observer’s paradox “to monitor
unmonitored speech” can never be avoided totally. For linguistic purposes, recorded
texts should never be “edited” or “improved” by the transcriber but should be pre-
sented with all the deficiencies of natural speech, for example, the Algerian texts given
in Bergman (2006), which consciously display the characteristic interferences from
French.
Large collections of texts are available, both from earlier and modern times: see, for
example, Marçais (1911) in Tanger; Rhodokanakis (1911) in Ḏofār; Schmidt and Kahle
(1918–1930) for Bīr Zēt in Palestine; Marçais and Guîga (1925) Takroûna in Tunisia;
Hillelson (1935) in Sudan; Destaing (1937) Šluħ’s of the Sous (Morocco); Jastrow (1978–
1981) in Anatolia and north Iraq; Behnstedt and Woidich (1985–1999) in Egypt; Stewart
(1988–1990) in Sinai; Mansour (1991) in Jewish Baghdadi; Palva (1991) in al-Balqā’/
Jordan; Behnstedt (1997–2000) in Syria; Jastrow (2003) Kinderib in Anatolia; Luffin
(2004) Kinubi in Mombasa; and Bettini (2006) in Syrian Ǧazīra. Text publications as
articles in journals and Festschriften run into the hundreds, and for many localities our
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data come from publications of this kind. Arab scholars, too, are interested in folkloris-
tic issues and published quite a number of collections of folk songs and suchlike.
Paremiology is represented in copious collections of proverbs such as the classi-
cal ones by Frayha (1938) on Lebanon, Westermarck (1930) on Morocco, Burckhardt
(1830) and Taymūr (1970) on Egypt, Goitein (1970) on Yemen, Mahgoub (1968) on
Egypt with a linguistic analysis, Nataf and Graille (2002) on Libya, and El Attar (1992)
and Lemghūrī (2008) on Morocco. Again, following classical tradition, collecting col-
loquial proverbs was an activity that attracted Arab scholars as well. In addition, numer-
ous amateur collections are available on the market. Unfortunately, in many of these
collections the proverbs are not given in transliteration but in Arabic script, a fact that
together with their syntactical and lexical peculiarities makes them unsuitable for many
linguistic purposes.
As for audio texts, the “Semitisches Tonarchiv” [SemArch] at the University of
Heidelberg12 offers a number of recordings together with their transcriptions, which
unfortunately cover only a small part of the Arab world. Despite its great success and
undisputed benefits, the SemArch seems to have stopped its activities a number of years
ago for financial reasons. It is hoped that the new Project “EALL on-line” (Leiden: Brill)
will be able to undertake similar activities in nearby future.
13.4.8 Textbooks
Arabic dialectologists have always displayed a pedagogical interest, which is evident
from quite a number of text books and language handbooks designed for tourists, busi-
ness people, administrative or military staff, and the like. In fact, writing colloquial
grammars started this way with Dombay (1800), Savary (1813), and Caussin de Perceval
(1833). Both well-known scholars such as Vollers, Nallino, Ferguson, Mitchell, and
interested laymen published to serve this purpose. This tradition has continued, and
in recent years Otto Jastrow’s series “Semitica Viva” opened a specialized branch titled
“Series Didactica” with Watson (1996) as a first textbook for Sanʕāni Arabic. Despite
the fact that didactical publications are not recognized by the academic administrations
as real “scientific” work, quite a few contemporary scholars developed activities in this
field (cf. Holes 1984; Woidich 2000; Bergman 2002). The reason for this pedagogical
interest lies in the particular linguistic situation of the Arab world, which creates a spe-
cific need for this kind of resources. It was, and still is, quite useful for a non-Arab trav-
eler or resident to learn the local dialect or “real Arabic” of a country he wants to visit
or stay in, a language that would be useful in daily life, more so than Standard Arabic,
which Arabs themselves have to learn at school and which can be handled properly only
by a limited number of well-educated, highly motivated, and trained persons. By speak-
ing a dialect of one of the major cities of the Levant (Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus), for
instance, one can make oneself understood in the whole region: Iraqi (Baghdad) will be
helpful in Gulf area and Saudi Arabia; due to the omnipresence of Egyptians, Egyptian
12
[http://www.semarch.uni-hd.de/index.php43?lang=en]
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dialectology 315
Arabic (Cairo) is well understood all over the Arab world, certainly in the East but also
to some extent in the West. Since serious dialectological studies begin at the university,
textbooks on an appropriate level should be written; examples are Ambros (1998) for
Maltese, Woidich and Heinen-Nasr (2006) for Cairene, and Watson (1996) for Sanʕāni.
Collecting, describing, and editing the data of individual dialects for the use of the his-
torical linguist is one side of the coin; the other one is to bring order into the apparent
diversity and to cluster the dialects into groups and determine their interrelations. This
has to be done by forming either a linguistic hierarchy based on linguistic variables or
other ones based on extralinguistic facts.
13 This is common for dialects of European languages, like in German, where the variables maken–
machen, ik–ich, dat–dass, appel–Apfel, that is, the stops developing to affricates, separate Northern and
Southern varieties rather neatly. Within the German context these variables correspond to continuous
isoglosses on the map and form the famous “Rhenish fan” (Niebaum and Macha 2006: 107, Map 30).
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been done for Arabic dialects yet. One possible implication would be, for instance, *q > g ⊃ *g > ǧ/ž,
that is, dialects with a voiced reflex of *q will have an affricated/sibilant reflex of *g. To the best of our
knowledge, no dialect has yet been found that falsifies this implication. The Alexandria example found
in the texts published in Behnstedt (1980) seems more a case of dialect mixing and a fact of “parole,” not
of “langue.” The reverse of this implication *g > ǧ/ž ⊃ *q > g can easily be falsified, since there are several
dialects with /ǧ/ž/ and /q/, for instance, the oasis Farafra in Egypt. Taine-Cheikh (1998: 15) points out
another implication: dialects with /ʔ/ (glottal stop) for *q will have replaced the interdentals with dentals,
that is, *q > ʔ/ ⊃ ṯ > t in, for instance, /*ṯalāṯa/ “three.” There has been no systematic research done so far
on implications of this type. Holes (1987) uses, in fact, implicational scales for sociolinguistic variables in
his study on Baħrayn.
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dialectology 317
of dialects spoken on the northern Sinai littoral, that is, from a Northwestern Bedouin
Arabic dialect type to a largely sedentary (rural) dialect type spoken in the eastern
Šarqiyya province of the Nile Delta in Egypt (or vice versa); see de Jong (2000, 2011).
Another recent and promising way to establish and visualize the subgroups and their
interrelations (distance, closeness) is provided by dialectometry, which compares all
the data recorded for an area, not only an arbitrary choice according to the predilec-
tions of the researcher, by means of more refined statistical methods. As a purely quan-
titative approach, dialectometry gives all variables the same weight and importance,
which makes it more independent on the intuitions of the researcher. It has not yet been
applied to Arabic dialects on a larger scale except for a small region, the oases in the
Western desert of Egyptian; see Behnstedt and Woidich (2005, Chapter 11).17 This first
attempt corroborates the findings of the isogloss method, showing that the dialects of
the two oases at the extremes (Baħariyya, Kharga) share more variables with standard
Cairene than the two others (Farafra, Dakhla) situated farther away from the Nile valley
in terms of traveling distance.
For a more detailed discussion of these approaches, see Behnstedt and Woidich (2005,
2006: 586).
13.5.2.1 Geography
All surveys and state-of-the-art reports in their classifications of present-day Arabic
dialects rely on geography. This means that the dialects are listed and described mainly
within the framework of larger geographical entities such as the Levant, Mesopotamia,
and Gulf area, Arab Peninsula with Yemen and Oman, Egypt with Sudan and sub-
Sahara, North Africa, and Mauretania (e.g., Fischer and Jastrow 1980; Taine-Cheikh
1998; Corriente and Vicentes 2008; Watson 2011; Versteegh 2011), to which the
“islands” Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Anatolia, and Cyprus are added. Maltese, as a
fully “ausgebaute” written language, is sometimes considered an independent language
(Kaye and Rosenhouse 1997).
More or less uncontroversial is the subdivision in Western/North African and Eastern
dialects with the border running between Egypt and Libya (but see Owens 2003). The
linguistic variable most commonly adduced with respect to this dichotomy concerns
the paradigmatic leveling that occurred in the imperfect: eastern a-ktib/n-iktib versus
western n-iktib/n-iktib-u “I write”—“we write.” But this single feature is far from being
17 Whether dialectrometry can ever be applied to the entire of Arab world is doubtful in view of the
conclusive if we want to assign a given dialect to one of these two groups, since there
are dialects in Egypt at the Western part of the Delta and in Upper Egypt that have this
Western conjugation but that in other respects (stress, syllable structure) clearly belong
to the Egyptian, that is, Eastern phylum.18 The Sudanic area, too, is problematic here
since the Western type is the norm in Chad, but not in Nigeria or in most of the Sudan.
The question as to whether the oases of the Egyptian Western desert should be seen
as Western or Eastern (Egyptian) Arabic was answered differently in Woidich (1993a)
and Behnstedt (1998), the first being in favor of Egypt and the second in favor of the
Maghreb.19
13.5.2.2 History
As a variant of the geographic approach but involving a historical fact as well (i.e., the
Arabic expansion starting in the 7th century), the subdivision of the Arab linguis-
tic world can be seen in three zones, as introduced by Jastrow (2002: 348). The Arab
Peninsula, from where the Arabic expansion started, is considered Zone I, all the terri-
tories (Levant, Irak, Egypt, North Africa, parts of Iran) Arabicized due to this expansion
are Zone II, and the remaining “Sprachinseln” (Anatolia, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan,
Cyprus, Malta, sub-Saharan Africa) surrounded today by other languages as Zone III.
Watson (2011) adopts this view but excludes the southern regions of the peninsula from
Zone I, once the stronghold of South Arabic tongues. It is Zone I where we find, accord-
ing to Jastrow (ibid.), the most archaic dialects today. The question remains: what does
“archaic” exactly mean, and how is it defined? See the discussion of allegedly archaic
features in Edzard (1998: 142) and Retsö (2003: 116). Zone II “could be called colonial
Arabic” with dialects characterized by their innovative features. This is against all expe-
rience with other languages forming colonial areas such as English and Spanish. The
dialects spoken in the former colonies North America and, respectively, South America
are quite homogeneous compared with the respective homelands, a generally recog-
nized fact in dialect geography. Why then the apparent diversity in Arabic “colonial”
regions? Can it be attributed only to population movement and contact (Watson 2011),
or did it exist before the expansion (Retsö 2000; Owens 2006; [Retsö, “Arabic?”])? The
criterion “history” no longer works for Zone III, the language islands; the reason for
18
This division does not mean, as Owens (2003) apparently assumes, that dialectologists suggest that
this paradigmatic leveling developed in North Africa. What is said is that this feature was reimported to
Egypt by tribes migrating back to the East. It developed much earlier, maybe not even in Egypt, but on
the Arabian Peninsula in “pre-diaspora” times; see next footnote.
19 A paradigm of the present tense with the same synchronic structure, that is, one single morpheme
for the first person (I, we) and one for the plural, can be found farther to the East in the contemporary
northwest Aramaic language of Maʕlūla in Syria (Arnold 1990: 74). There it is the natural outcome of
the development of a new paradigm from participles, not a case of paradigmatic leveling as in Arabic.
As to the older variety of Galilean Aramaic (Lipiński 2001: 382), only the 1st sg. receives a n-prefix, and
Dalman (1905: 213) considers this as a “Plural der Selbstermunterung.” Similar paradigms, though due to
different provenance, are thus attested for other Semitic languages. For the discussion of this historical
development in Arabic, see Owens (2003), who places its origin in Egypt, and Corriente (2011), who
argues for its origin in Yemen.
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dialectology 319
their being lumped together in a group is the fact that they are surrounded by other lan-
guages and separated from zones II and III.
In a similar vein, Owens (2006) discusses what he calls pre-diaspora Arabic, that
is, Arabic before the conquests “at a time and a place when the ancestral populations
were still together” (Owens 2006: 3; [Owens, “History”]), which in one interpretation
would correspond to Zone I of Jastrow’s approach. As a “convenient fiction,” he takes
Sībawayhi’s approximate date of death (790 CE) as the endpoint of “pre-diaspora”
Arabic, thus taking roughly the first 150 years of “diaspora” as “pre-diaspora.” Relating
linguistic features reconstructed by means of comparative methods from the modern
dialects to this pre-diaspora Arabic, which ended around 790, seems as arbitrary to us as
attributing features to the neo-Arabic language type or not.
Neither of these two approaches is convincing for the linguistic subgrouping, because
they cannot be related to linguistic variables that would justify them.
20 H. Blanc’s (1964: 28, emphasis added) statement (based on Cantineau 1939): “The present-day
distribution of reflexes of OA /q/ throughout the Arabic-speaking world presents a striking dichotomy:
most sedentary populations have a voiceless reflex and all non-sedentary populations a voiced reflex”
can today be considered true only for its second part. There are numerous regions in the present-day
Arab world, for example, the whole of Upper Egypt, large parts of the Nile Delta, Sudan with a sedentary
population speaking voiced /g/, and not a voiceless reflex of *q, due to the settlement of and mixing with
Bedouin over the course of history.
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Khartoum, Mecca). The distinction thus says nothing about the whole Arab world and
is applicable for smaller regions, Syria for instance, only. On a synchronic level, there
is no “urban dialect” delineable by discrete features, each city or town having its own
characteristics. It all depends on the history of settlement and migration; the Muslims
of Baghdad, for instance, speak their “Bedouin” dialect because they originate from the
countryside, which repopulated Baghdad in the Ottoman era (Blanc 1964; Holes 2008;
[Retsö, “Arabic?”]).
Despite a great deal of progress that has been made and a constant flow of new data
over the last 50 years, the coverage of the Arabic-speaking area is still thin compared
with what we are accustomed to in the dialectological studies of European coun-
tries. Talking about “a relative surfeit of information . . . on modern dialects” (Owens
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dialectology 321
2005: 274) is far from reality. Egypt, for instance, a country that has been, compared
with others, researched quite well over the last decades, still needs closer study in such
key areas as Upper Egypt and the Western oases. On the core of the Arab world, the
Arabian Peninsula, in particular its northwestern area Ħiǧāz, its southern parts ʕAsīr,
Ħadramawt, and ʕUmān, we have only very limited knowledge. And the same is true
for the Sudan and the sub-Saharan areas and for Libya, parts of Algeria, let alone the
“Sprachinseln,” such as those in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. All these areas still
need much fieldwork.
Another important point here concerns the validity of data we find in publications
from earlier times, often the only ones we have, before dialectology became a more pro-
fessionalized discipline. A considerable number of these we owe to the efforts of single
individuals only, sometimes not even a trained linguist or Arabisant. We cannot be sure
that these are free from errors. Redoing fieldwork in places from where we have some
older information is not a superfluous task for the future.
Systematic research is best done in the framework of projects aiming at drawing
linguistic atlases. These should not be limited to Arabic-speaking regions but should
also include other languages spoken in the areas under study. To give an example, in
Morocco it is highly advisable to extend the research to Berber-speaking areas because
of the mutual interferences of the two languages [Kossmann, “Borrowing”]. There are
some activities concerning atlases (Israel/Palestine, Tunisia, Morocco), but many more
areas have until this day remained unresearched or underresearched (Algeria, Tunisia,
Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan). The reasons for this may be seen in facts
such as geographical conditions, security problems, and the negative attitude and lack
of understanding toward dialect studies prevailing in most Arab countries, which pre-
vents many native Arab scholars from pursuing academic activities in this field. In this
respect, much more explanatory work could be done to involve these academics in seri-
ous fieldwork in their home countries. Otherwise, it is to be feared that atlases for such
countries as Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, comparable to Behnstedt
and Woidich (1985) and Behnstedt (1999), will never see the light of day. Moreover,
atlases should not be confined to regions or states but should cover the Arabic-speaking
world as a whole and collect all the data gathered so far to provide us with a means to
detect and visualize the migratory processes so important for the understanding of “the
history of the linguistic contacts of speakers of varieties of Arabic” (Versteegh 2011b:
549). The recent “Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte” (Behnstedt and Woidich 2011,
2012) can be seen only as first step in this direction. Regional atlases should, besides the
linguistic data, collect and document as much information as possible about the his-
tories of movement and settlement of the population. To a much larger extent than in
the European situation, linguistic features were transported by the speakers themselves
through physical migration, to mention only the second Arabization of North Africa by
the migration of the Banī Hilāl, in addition to diffusion through contact.21 The distribu-
tions of many features, therefore, show highly irregular geographical patterns.
21
For some conspicuous examples, see Behnstedt and Woidich (2005, Chapter 5.2).
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dialectology 323
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