1. The history of Arabic in South Asia Pakistan is a multilingual country with six major languages (see Table 1) and 69 languages in all (Grimes 2000:588-598). Urdu is the national language, but it is English, the ex-colonial language, which is used in the higher domains of power - government, military, higher education, judiciary, commerce, research and media.  Table 1: Languages spoken in Pakistan language percentage of speakers number of speakers Punjābī 44.15 66,225,000 Pashtō 15.42 23,130,000 Sindhī 14.10 21,150,000 Siraikī 10.53 15,795,000 Urdū 7.57 11,355,000 Balōchī 3.57 5,…

1. Swahili and Arabic Swahili is a Bantu language, more specifically a member of the Sabaki subgroup of North East Coast Bantu. It has been suggested that the ancestor of the modern dialects was spoken in an area along the East African coast, somewhere between the Webi Shebelle River in what is now Somalia and the Tana River in Kenya (Nurse and Spear 1985:46; Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993:490–496). Between 1100 and 1500 C.E., the Swahili dominated trade between the African interior and the Indian Ocean, a hegemony that was interrupted in the 16th century by…

invective Insults invention of language Grammatical Tradition: Approach, Waḍʿ al-Luġa invention of language → imposition of speech; creation of language inversion Ḥāl, Locatives, Xabar inversion strategy Locatives inversion, free subject Presentatives invocation, divine Insults Inzidenzschema Conjunctions iotacism Greek Loanwords IP → phrase, Inflection IPA → International Phonetic Alphabet ʾīqāʿ ʾInšāʾ ʾīqāʿī ʾInšāʾ ʾiqḥām ʾIḍāfa ʾiqlāb Nasalization, Tajwīd iqtiṣār Elision ʾiqwāʾ Rhyme, Šiʿr ʾiʿrāb ʿAmal, Bināʾ, Connectives, Declension, Declension, Dialec…

Ibn Jinnī (d. 392/1002) defines grammar ( naḥw) as follows: “It is to follow the way the Arabs speak… so that the non-Arabs might have access to the Arabs' faṣāḥa” ( Xaṣāʾiṣ I, 34). More than a thousand years later, written Arabic is still called al-luġa al-fuṣḥā. This shows how the notion of faṣāḥa is an essential component of Arab language thinking. The root f-ṣ-ḥ is very ancient and is found in other Semitic languages. From f-ṣ-ḥ is derived fiṣḥ ‘Jewish Passover’, also ‘Christian Easter’ (Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān, s.v.). In some Semitic languages, f-ṣ-ḥ is explicitly associated with somethi…

  The Appearance of the Muwaššaḥ in al-ʾAndalus: Description and Definition In Muslim Spain, the muwaššaḥ – or ‘girdle poem’ (strophic poetry in classical Arabic) – was developed from the end of the tenth century onwards together with the strophic genre of the zajal in colloquial Arabic. This colloquial was a Western Arabic dialect, which we call ʾandalusī. Although the muwaššaḥ is normally conceived in classical Arabic, we find in it quotations in colloquial Arabic and, in the last part of the poem (the xarja or ‘exit refrain’), in Romance language. Both strophic genres norma…

wa- ʿAmal, Conjunctions, Connectives, Connectives, Coptic, Ḍamīr, Discourse Analysis, Energicus, Exclamation, Fronting, Ḥāl, Kalima, Mafʿūl, Maʿnā, Media Arabic, Media Arabic, Poetic Koine, Punctuation, Senegal, Sentence Coordination, Sentence Coordination, Turkish, Waḍʿ al-Luġa, Word Order waḍʿ ʾAṣl, Exclamation, ʾInšāʾ, Jumla, Kalām, Kināya, Majāz, Mawḍūʿ, Sound Symbolism, Waḍʿ al-Luġa waḍʿ al-ʿāmm, al- Waḍʿ al-Luġa waḍʿ al-luġa Grammatical Tradition: Approach, Lexicography: Classical Arabic, Luġa waḍʿ al-xāṣṣ, al- Waḍʿ al-Luġa waḍʿ ḥaqīqī Kināya waḍʿ majāzī K…

Historically, Hebrew was extensively influenced by Arabic, especially during the Middle Ages, with the result that many lexical items entered Hebrew from Arabic. Since the establishment of Israel, though, the Arabic spoken by Palestinians who became Israeli citizens has absorbed many items from Modern Hebrew (Ivrit). 1. Knowledge and use of Ivrit Although Palestinian Arabs in Palestine had some contact with the Jews even before the establishment of Israel in 1948, extensive contacts developed in subsequent years. Between 1948 and 1966 the encounter w…

The Arabic alphabet, or more precisely ʾabjad ‘consonantary’ takes its origin from the Nabataean variant of late Aramaic script, which suits Semitic morphology based on the tri-consonantal root, but records neither short vowels nor most inflectional endings (Daniels 1990:730). In the process of adoption, the letters were graphically homogenized, and subsequently a variety of mostly supralinear signs were devised to optimize the phonetic precision of the script. The Arabic alphabet most often denotes the formal variant within the Arabic languages (Classical Arab…

Eagly, Alice H. Language Attitudes, Language Attitudes East Africa Creole Arabic, Dialects: Genesis, East Africa, Gulf States East African coast Malagasy East Bank Jordan, Jordan East India Company India East Morocco Affrication East Semitic Semitic Languages East Sudan Adverbs Eastern Desert Educated Arabic Eblaic Etymology Ebrahim, Mogamat Hoosain South Africa echo question Bedouin Arabic, Interrogative Sentences, Tunis Arabic echo word Bahraini Arabic, Reduplication Echols, John M. Indonesian/Malay Echu, George Cameroon Arabic, English Loanwords, English Loanwords E…

1. Introduction of Braille in the Arab world Physically, Braille is a “universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind persons and consisting of a code of 63 characters, each made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a six-position matrix or cell” ( Encyclopedia Britannica II, 465). Content-wise, Arabic is a six-dot tactile copy of its schwarzschrift (normal ink print). The system is divided into the alphabet and its subsystems, the non-alphabetical code systems of contractions, and the mathematical signs and musical notation. One interes…

  Music and language have things in common. It is even thought by some that they have a common origin and were once indistinguishable. Whatever the truth of this, they share several characteristics: although they can be written down, they are primarily oral/aural; they are organized sound; they progress linearly in time; their constituents use differences in length and pitch as distinctive elements; there is a hierarchy of structured constituents from the smallest ones (notes or phonemes) to larg…

1. Introduction The place of Arabs in the modern world has been determined to a large extent by the fact that, beginning around the end of World War I and well into the post-World War II period, the majority of the countries of the Arab world were under British or French mandate, in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The development plans of these countries and their emergent political, economic, administrative, and educational systems were established during the colonial period and modeled largely after the French and British s…

  1. Definition The term ‘convergence’ is not an established term, in either theoretical linguistics in general or Semitic and Arabic linguistics in particular. Neither is the opposite term ‘ divergence’. However, the term does occur in an informal sense in studies concerning koineization phenomena (Ferguson 1959; Palva 1982), as well as pidginization and creolization phenomena of language contact (Gumperz and Wilson 1971; Kossmann 1994; Mous 1994). Lately, with Versteegh's book Pidginization and creolization: The case of Arabic (1984), Arabists have become aware of the …

The term ʾaṣl is primarily used as one of the major tools of analysis in Arabic grammatical theory. It is first encountered in the Kitāb of Sībawayhi (d. 180/796) where it occurs 569 times (Troupeau 1976 sub ʾṢL), all of which, with the exception of four instances, indicate a methodological notion. Although the term itself may be generally translated as ‘origin’, ‘principle’, or ‘base’, it is used in a variety of specialized senses, the most basic of which are (for use by Sībawayhi, see Baalbaki 1988:163–164): i.The form, pattern, case ending, etc. which agrees with the qiyās, that is, wit…

1. Yoruba and Islam The term ‘Yoruba’ identifies a people, as well as the language they speak. The Yoruba, with an estimated population of about 24,000,000 (Fagborun 1994:13), live mainly in Nigeria's southwestern states and in parts of the West African republics of Benin and Togo. They are made up of approximately 24 dialect groups, all of which are bound to one another by common traditions of origin (Johnson 1921:3–25). The use of the term ‘Yoruba’ to refer to both the language and the people gained currency in the early 1840s when Bishop Ajayi Crowther, the fir…

  General Language in various registers, encompassing both prose and poetry, is built on and makes copious use of formulae or formulaic features. It is almost a truism that formulaic phrases in rhetorical speech or textual motives in traditional forms of prose and poetry are indispensable building blocks, comparable, for instance, to motifs in musical composition. In a long soliloquy in Raymond Chandler’s crime novel The little sister, detective Marlowe repeatedly uses the fixed phrase “You’re not human tonight, Marlowe”. Turning to the Middle East, the repetitive stanzas in ġazal p…

1. The Arabic language Tunisia's Constitution, promulgated after independence in 1956, establishes Arabic as the official language of Tunisia. However, what is meant by Arabic is not the spoken language but rather written Arabic. In this entry, the first questions to be dealt with are where this language comes from, and when and under what circumstances it spread in Tunisia to the extent of becoming the official language. Arabic is a Semitic language which has been spoken for at least three millennia by the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula, notably those in the n…

This entry describes the evolution of the Arabic language through all its phases, paying special attention to the causes and implications of the changes which have taken place in the language. In order to place Arabic in its broad context and to offer a diachronic insight into the history of a language which is spoken today by approximately 200 million people worldwide and is the preferred religious language of all Islamic countries, it is necessary to consider its historical setting and present-day situation. From the outset it is necessary to consider the scope and limits of…

1. General 1.1 History: Origin of the Arab minority in Uzbekistan The Central Asian Arabs settled in the area of the Khanat Bukhara and the northern plains of Afghanistan-Turkistan. There are different theories about their origin. Barfield (1981:3–4) considers two possibilities. Either their origin goes back to the Islamization of Uzbekistan at the beginning of the 8th century (see also Karmysheva 1964:272; Akiner 1983:366), or Tamerlane settled the Arabs in Central Asia in 1401 after his conquests in the west, deporting Arabs from Damascus and Aleppo. Regard…

  1. Definition Generally speaking, the term ‘noun’ can be used either as a synonym for ‘substantive’ and ‘ adjective’, or as an umbrella term for all ‘nominal’ parts of the sentence, including adjectives as well as pronouns and numerals. In the context of Semitic and Arabic linguistics, ‘noun’ (ism) is always used in the first, narrower sense. The demarcation between substantive and adjective poses a morphosyntactic problem in some Semitic languages (noun phrase; adjective phrase) because from a typological point…