Arabic 3

History
Old Arabic
Main article: Old Arabic
Safaitic inscription
Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. In the southwest,

various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South
Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It is also believed that the ancestors of
the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were also spoken in
southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of
northern Hejaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages.
In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested.
In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in a script derived from ASA attest to a language known
as Hasaitic. Finally, on the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to
scholars as Thamudic B, Thamudic D, Safaitic, and Hismaic are attested. The last two share
important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and
Hismaic are in fact early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic.[19]
Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic" (a collection of related dialects that constitute the
precursor of Arabic) first emerged around the 1st century CE. Previously, the earliest
attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic
script at Qaryat Al-Faw, in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does
not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as the
conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate
language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. [20]
It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced--
epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional
tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language,
and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after the towns
where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic).[3] However,
most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the
definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared
innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA
language family untenable.[21] Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be
considered Old Arabic due to the fact that they participate in the innovations common to all
forms of Arabic.[19]
The Namara inscription, a sample of Nabataean script, considered a direct precursor of Arabic script. [22][23]
The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are
three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel, and dated to
around 125 CE.[24] This is followed by the Namara inscription, an epitaph of the Lakhmid king
Mar 'al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From the 4th to the 6th
centuries, the Nabataean script evolves into the Arabic script recognizable from the early
Islamic era.[25] There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th
century CE, found at four locations in Syria (Zabad, Jabal 'Usays, Harran, Umm al-Jimaal). The
oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-
letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of the Qur'an are referred to by
linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into "Classical
Arabic".[3]
Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic

Main articles: Old Hijazi and Classical Arabic
Arabic from the Quran in the old Hijazi dialect (Hijazi script, 7th century AD)
In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in

the Hejaz which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally
standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra, most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts,
keeping alive ancient features eliminated from the "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). [26] This
variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the
past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of
the Qur'an was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows
the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi.
The Qur'an has served and continues to serve as a fundamental reference for Arabic.
(Maghrebi Kufic script, Blue Qur'an, 9th-10th century)
In the late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken
vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd, probably in connection with the
court of al-Ḥīra. During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing
persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far
later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology
and syntax.
Following the early Muslim conquests, Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle
Persian and Turkish.[22] In the early Abbasid period, many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic
through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom.[22]
The standardization of Classical Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century.
The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al-Kitāb, is based
first of all upon a corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants
whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya.[27] By the 8th century, knowledge
of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes
throughout the Islamic world.
Neo-Arabic
Charles Ferguson's koine theory (Ferguson 1959) claims that the modern Arabic dialects
collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests;
this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at
least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on the eve of the conquests: Northern and
Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced
following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects
contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at
different points in their linguistic histories.[27] According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial
Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and
conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs
and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of
vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA.[28][29]
In around the 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus, the zajal and muwashah poetry forms
developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb.[30]
Nahda
Taha Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser were both staunch defenders of Standard Arabic.[31][32]
In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering

Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically
changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications.[33]
The Nahda cultural renaissance saw the creation of a number of Arabic academies modeled
after the Académie française that aimed to develop the Arabic lexicon to suit these
transformations,[34] first in Damascus (1919), then
in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum [ar] (1993),
and Tunis (1993).[35] In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to
the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League.[35] These academies
and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic
to describe new concepts, toward the standardization of these new terms throughout the
Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language.[35] This
gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic.
From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco,[36] and Sudan.[37]

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History

Arabia boasted a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. In the southwest,

Old Hejazi and Classical Arabic

In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in

Taha Hussein and Gamal Abdel Nasser were both staunch defenders of Standard Arabic.[31][32]

In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism, pioneering

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