However, the spoken forms of Arabic vary widely, and each Arab country has its own dialect. Dialects are spoken in most informal settings, such as at home, with friends, or while shopping.
Being one of the quirkiest in the world, the actual script reads from right to left with an alphabet containing 28 consonants. There are various types of Arabic script, some more intricate than others. Arabic script has been used for decorative purposes all over the Muslim world in mosques, houses and other buildings. This is possible as the writing flows in a beautifully stylised fashion. Today, words of Arabic origin can be found in some European languages such as Portuguese and Spanish, due to periods of Arab reign in those countries.
Overall, Arabic translation services play an important role in todays world. Arabic is descended from a language known in the literature as Proto-Semitic. This relationship places Arabic firmly in the Afro-Asiatic group of world languages. Going further into the relationship between Arabic and the other Semitic languages, Modern Arabic is considered to be part of the Arabo-Canaanite sub-branch of the central group of the Western Semitic languages.
If we go further back, the Ancestors of the Hijazi people, the Nabataeans wrote their texts in a form of Amamaic , but proper names and other features in the scriptures have made linguists theorize that the Nabataean people spoke a form of Nabataean Arabic. This language might go as far back as years. It is said to have sprung out from other Central Semitic languages which in turn developed into such languages as Aramaic, Hebrew and Phoenician , which were spoken in the Syrian dessert almost years ago.
Formal Arabic, or Modern Standard Arabic is the language used today in all official matters in Arabic speaking countries. But the language that people speak in the Arab world can sometimes be quite different.
Each Arabic speaking region does in fact have its own spoken dialects, and these can be considerably different from formal Arabic. The Bedouin dialects, both sides feel, likely remained untouched by language change for several centuries after the advent of Islam in the mid seventh century Koine 52; Blau They also agree that there was no one language center in the Arab World which exercised enough influence by itself to cause the changes seen Koine ; Blau 24, Finally, both sides agree that the most important factor in precipitating the rise of the colloquial Arabic dialects was the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries Blau 21; Koine This is where the agreement stops.
This explanation, he felt, was more in line with conventional linguistic theory such as the wave theory of language change diffusion where language changes spread wave-like from speech population to speech population Blau Kees Versteegh is one researcher who has advocated this theory. Versteegh argued that both the existing theories of diglossia development focused exclusively on either an explanation of the differences or an explanation of the similarities of the dialects without treating the other side In his estimation, an effective theory needed to treat both the similarities and the differences between the dialects.
For example, he described how mixed marriages between Muslim Arab men and non-Arab women of the conquered peoples would likely have led to communication using a pidginized form of Arabic.
At the same time, any children resulting from such a marriage would have probably spoken a creolized Arabic This creolized Arabic could then have served as the starting point for the colloquial Arabic dialects.
Of course, Versteegh acknowledged the influence of other factors, but on the whole, felt his hypothesis succeeded in explaining both the differences and the similarities between modern Arabic dialects. Diglossia Concluded Though scholars differ in opinions over the exact cause for the rise of the Arabic dialects, there is some ground for general agreement.
This agreement is perhaps best summed up in a statement by Fischer and Jastrow: One will hardly go wrong if one imagines that the development of New [colloquial] Arabic was connected with dialect mixing in the camps of the conquerors, the influence of the languages and dialects of the conquered, and the formation of regional vernaculars. Later population displacements and constant leveling tendencies through cross-regional contacts between the cities, likewise tendencies toward peculiar developments among the most isolated rural populations, may have been equally important developmental factors Belnap Results of Arabic Diglossia While linguists disagree sharply regarding how diglossia developed, there is consensus regarding the changes that have taken place in the switch from Standard Arabic to colloquial Arabic.
Phonologically, for example, a number of phonemes have shifted systematically in the change from Standard Arabic to colloquial Arabic. For example, Egyptian colloquial Arabic has shifted all interdental fricatives to their corresponding alveolar articulation. Other colloquial dialects have made similar changes. Other morphological changes include the collapsing of multiple particles into a single form, while feminine plural forms have been lost in pronouns, adjectives, and verbs Blau 3.
Syntactic changes are also abundant. Versteegh emphasizes the fact that most dialects have become analytical whereas Standard Arabic is more synthetic. One place where this is easily seen is in showing possession; Standard Arabic uses a synthetic method to show possession, but almost all dialects have now developed an analytical method of showing possession using a word which shows the possession relationship Versteegh The colloquials have undergone and will likely continue to undergo great change.
Unfortunately, until recently they have not been closely studied, and therefore it is difficult to document any changes they may have undergone. It is easier, however, to document changes in Modern Standard Arabic. One on-going trend in Modern Standard Arabic is modernization. Like many other speakers around the world, Arabic speakers are sensitive to the wholesale borrowing of words. In fact, they are perhaps more sensitive to language change because most Arabs recognize Arabic as the language of God.
As a result, normative language academies have been established in several areas throughout the Arab world including Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Amman Bakalla The language academies try to control borrowing by creating terms for new technological entities.
Their typical means for doing this include extension, calques, and a process known as Arabization. This word originally meant caravan of camels but has been redefined to mean car.
Calques are more obvious in such phrases as kurat al-qadam , which is literally ball of the foot or football soccer Bakalla Arabization, on the other hand, involves the adoption of a foreign word, but with changes which make it acceptable to Arabic morphological and phonological patterns Bakalla Another trend I have noticed in both personal experience and in researching is how Arabs have the expectation that the Arab world is slowly turning toward Modern Standard Arabic as its mother tongue.
This trend takes two parts. In my experience, Arabs uniformly disparage the colloquial dialects they speak natively. For example, a teaching assistant in my current Arabic language class emphasizes every time she tells us a colloquial Arabic word that it is, "slang. The history of Arabic continues to be debated.
Over millennia, these languages spread, as different groups left their homelands, carrying their languages with them into various parts of the Middle East and neighbouring areas. Guth says that the most recent study, by Leonid Kogan in , dealing with the question of internal grouping within the Semitic language family places Arabic according to two principles:. All the long political and cultural history that Arab people have gone through is reflected in the language.
So as the world celebrates Arabic on Sunday, it heralds a complicated language, its story difficult to reconstruct because historic truth is still much shrouded and obscured by legends and myths.
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