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    This document discusses the Aramaic substrate in Palestinian Arabic and provides background on the gradual language shift from Aramaic to Arabic in Palestine. It notes that Aramaic was dominant until the 2nd century CE and was gradually replaced by Arabic over a lengthy period of bilingualism and substrate influence, with some Aramaic-speaking communities maintaining the language into later periods. The substrate influence of Aramaic on Palestinian Arabic is widely accepted among scholars.

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    Book Edcoll 9789004300156 B9789004300156 016-Preview

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    This document discusses the Aramaic substrate in Palestinian Arabic and provides background on the gradual language shift from Aramaic to Arabic in Palestine. It notes that Aramaic was dominant until the 2nd century CE and was gradually replaced by Arabic over a lengthy period of bilingualism and substrate influence, with some Aramaic-speaking communities maintaining the language into later periods. The substrate influence of Aramaic on Palestinian Arabic is widely accepted among scholars.

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    This document discusses the Aramaic substrate in Palestinian Arabic and provides background on the gradual language shift from Aramaic to Arabic in Palestine. It notes that Aramaic was dominant until the 2nd century CE and was gradually replaced by Arabic over a lengthy period of bilingualism and substrate influence, with some Aramaic-speaking communities maintaining the language into later periods. The substrate influence of Aramaic on Palestinian Arabic is widely accepted among scholars.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    6 views2 pages

    Book Edcoll 9789004300156 B9789004300156 016-Preview

    Uploaded by

    sergius
    This document discusses the Aramaic substrate in Palestinian Arabic and provides background on the gradual language shift from Aramaic to Arabic in Palestine. It notes that Aramaic was dominant until the 2nd century CE and was gradually replaced by Arabic over a lengthy period of bilingualism and substrate influence, with some Aramaic-speaking communities maintaining the language into later periods. The substrate influence of Aramaic on Palestinian Arabic is widely accepted among scholars.

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    of 2

    The Lexical Component in the Aramaic Substrate

    of Palestinian Arabic

    Mila Neishtadt

    1 A Brief Background to Palestinian Arabic

    The term ‘Palestinian Arabic’ (hereafter PA) designates several socially hetero-
    geneous dialect groups. Scholarly research traditionally divides PA into three
    such groups, spoken by town-dwellers, villagers, and Bedouin.1 Each of these
    dialect groups displays religious and/or geographical variations. PA is spoken
    by a variety of religious groups: Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Samaritans.
    Gender and age are sometimes important factors in language variation as well.
    The political situation also has an impact: the strong influence of Modern
    Hebrew (evident especially in the lexicon) can be immediately noticed in the
    Arabic spoken by Palestinians/Arabs with Israeli citizenship.2 Consequently,
    as with every ‘language’, there is much more than one variety of PA.
    It would be misleading to understand the term PA in an exclusively geo-
    graphical sense: Arabic dialects spoken by the Bedouin population in the
    Negev and in Galilee are both different from each other and different from
    PA as a whole.3 In order to avoid confusion, the term PA is usually applied to
    a single linguistic type: the sedentary Arabic of the Syro-Palestinian dialectal
    group spoken in Palestine.4
    It is widely accepted that Hebrew ceased to be spoken in Palestine around
    the 2nd century CE and was gradually supplanted by Aramaic, several varieties
    of which were spoken by Christians, Jews, Samaritans, and pagans. During the
    Roman and the Byzantine periods, before the Arab conquests, these varieties

    * I would like to thank Simon Hopkins for introducing me to this fascinating subject and guid-
    ing me through my first steps. I am grateful to Yishai Neuman for his most helpful remarks.
    Any mistakes are mine alone.
    1 Heikki Palva, “A General Classification for the Arabic Dialects Spoken in Palestine and
    Transjordan,” StOr 55 (1984): 371–372.
    2 Muhammad Hasan Amara, “Hebrew and English Borrowings in Palestinian Arabic in Israel: A
    Sociolinguistic Study in Lexical Integration and Diffusion,” in Yasir Suleiman (ed.), Language
    and Society in the Middle East and North Africa (Richmond, 1999), 81–103.
    3 Palva, “Classification,” 371–372; Rony Henkin, Negev Arabic: Dialectal, Sociolinguistic, and
    Stylistic Variation (Wiesbaden, 2010), 48–49.
    4 Simon Hopkins, “Notes on the History of the Arabic Language in Palestine,” LiCCOSEC 20
    (2011): 51.

    © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004300156_016


    the aramaic substrate of palestinian arabic 281

    of Aramaic, influenced by Greek, were the dominant spoken language of


    Palestine.5 Like other cases of language shift, the shift from Aramaic to Arabic
    in Palestine must not be understood as a sharp replacement of one spoken
    language by another accomplished within a generation or two, but rather as
    a gradual and lengthy process, probably with a significant phase of Aramaic-
    Arabic bilingualism.6 Moreover, the contact between Aramaic and Arabic in
    this area was not limited to the period following the Arab conquests: Arabic-
    speaking communities existed on the outskirts of Palestine before the time
    of the conquests;7 in fact, most of the few known Arabic inscriptions which
    predate Islam are from Syria and Palestine.8 On the other hand, some Aramaic-
    speaking communities maintained Aramaic as their spoken language well into
    the Muslim period. One example is the Samaritans, who became a monolin-
    gual Arabic-speaking community apparently only from the 11th century CE
    onwards.9 The Aramaic > Arabic shift in the Levant has not yet been entirely
    completed: until very recently, three Western Neo-Aramaic-speaking commu-
    nities populated the Syrian villages of Maʽlūla, Baxʽa, and Jubbʽadīn. During
    the course of the Syrian Civil War, Maʽlūla and Baxʽa were severely hit and
    depopulated.10
    As in other cases of language shift, the supplanting language (Arabic) was
    not left untouched by the supplanted language (Aramaic) and the existence
    of an Aramaic substrate in Syro-Palestinian colloquial Arabic has been widely

    5 Klaus Beyer (trans. J. F. Healey), The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions
    (Göttingen, 1986), 34–43, 46–53.
    6 On the history of Arabic-Aramaic language contact, see Stefan Weninger, “Aramaic-
    Arabic Language Contact,” in idem (ed.), The Semitic Languages (Berlin, 2011), 747–755.
    For an example of the linguistic status in the monastic communities of Palestine in the
    Byzantine and the early Islamic periods, see Sidney Griffith, “From Aramaic to Arabic: The
    Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods,”
    Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 11–31.
    7 Isaac Hasson, “The Penetration of Arab Tribes in Eretz Israel during the First Century of
    the Hegira,” Cathedra 32 (1984): 60–62. (in Hebrew)
    8  A brief summary may be found in Ahmad Al-Jallad, Ancient Levantine Arabic: A
    Reconstruction Based on the Earliest Sources and the Modern Dialects (Ph.D. Diss., Harvard
    University, 2012), 10–24.
    9 Haseeb Shehadeh, “When Did Arabic Replace Samaritan Aramaic?,” in Moshe Bar-Asher
    et al. (eds.), Hebrew Language Studies Presented to Professor Zeev Ben-Ḥayyim (Jerusalem,
    1983), 515–528. (in Hebrew)
    10 I owe this information to a personal correspondence with Werner Arnold. See also:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10768900/Syria-war-
    Maaloulas-monastery-destroyed-after-Assad-forces-drive-rebels-out.html—retrieved on
    26–05–2014.

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