Classical Arabic

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical Arabic is a language that has carried the words of the Quran for more than thirteen centuries, and yet most people alive today have never spoken a single sentence of it as their native tongue. It exists in a strange in-between state: revered as sacred, studied in schools across dozens of countries, used in formal speeches and broadcasts, and yet no longer anyone's first language. How did a single literary register come to unite a region stretching from North Africa to the Horn of Africa? What does it mean that a language can be ancient and living at the same time? And what happened when the rise of Classical Arabic sparked disputes not just about words, but about race, religion, and who deserved to belong to the highest classes of the Islamic world?

• 2. Before the Standard

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  Old Arabic survives in inscriptions carved in Ancient North Arabian scripts and in fragments of pre-Islamic poetry that later scribes preserved. By the late 6th century AD, linguists hypothesize, a relatively uniform intertribal variety had developed across the Arabian Peninsula. Scholars call it a poetic koine, a synthetic prestige dialect distinct from the everyday speech of any single tribe.

  The Safaitic inscriptions show that as early as the 3rd or 4th century AD, at least some dialects were already losing short final high vowels. That loss was significant because it collapsed the distinction between the nominative and genitive cases, leaving the accusative as the only marked case in certain dialects. Classical Arabic, by contrast, preserved a far more archaic three-case system essentially identical to Proto-Arabic, with full case endings in the singular, dual, and plural.

  The Arabic script itself carried its own contested history. The mainstream view holds that it evolved from cursive varieties of the Aramaic script. Jean Starcky, however, proposed that it derived directly from the Syriac script, pointing to the fact that, unlike Aramaic, both Arabic and Syriac are cursive. Indigenous traditions sometimes located the origin of the script in the hands of figures like Adam or Ishmael, though others said it arrived in Arabia from elsewhere.

  In the 7th century AD, the dialect features of Old Hijazi, including the loss of final short vowels and the loss of hamza, left their mark on the consonantal text of the Quran. That influence would shape the normalized orthography of Classical Arabic as it solidified into a standard literary register during the 8th century.

• 3. The Language of Power

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  By the 2nd century AH, which corresponds to the 9th century AD, Arabic grammarians had standardized Classical Arabic into a codified written form. Knowledge of it became a prerequisite for anyone seeking to rise into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world. It functioned as a lingua franca across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa, and the region developed into a widespread state of diglossia, meaning that people maintained one variety of language for formal or sacred uses and another for daily life.

  The grammarians had strong views about purity. Many strove to attribute as many words as possible to a pure Arabic origin, particularly words appearing in the Quran. Scholars who entertained the idea that loanwords had entered the Quran, treating those words as naturalized borrowings from other languages, faced severe criticism. Their proposed etymologies were denounced in most cases.

  The prestige attached to the language eventually fused with beliefs about ethnicity. A broad movement known as al-Shu'ibiyya, meaning roughly "those of the nations" as opposed to Arab tribes, rejected the claim that Arabs and their language were superior to all other races and ethnicities. The groups gathered under that label held widely different views, but they shared opposition to what had become, for some, a dogma. Their rivals used the term as a pejorative. The belief in the racial and ethnic supremacy of Arabs and the belief in the linguistic supremacy of Arabic were not, as the source notes, necessary entailments of each other, even though they often traveled together.

• 4. Sound and Structure

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  Classical Arabic shared its 28 consonant phonemes with Modern Standard Arabic, a system that made it exceptionally conservative among Semitic languages. It preserved 28 of the 29 consonantal phonemes reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, making it valuable to linguists working backward toward the ancestral language of the entire family.

  The 8th century grammarian Sibawayh described the consonant transliterated as dad as voiced, though some modern linguists doubt whether the word he used actually meant voiced or rather unaspirated. The 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun weighed in on a different consonant, jeem, describing its older Arabic pronunciation as a voiced velar and noting that the prophet Muhammad may have used that pronunciation.

  Vowels carried their own complexity. A phenomenon called imala caused the raising of certain vowels adjacent to sequences containing i-sounds, as long as the surrounding consonants were not emphatic or uvular. Sibawayh considered imala acceptable Classical Arabic, and it survives today in the urban dialects of the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean coast. The Kisai and Hamzah recitations of the Quran used a raised vowel for certain final sounds that the more widely known Hafs recitation renders as a long a, so that the name Moses was pronounced as Musa in one tradition and as Muse in the other two.

  The definite article al- underwent a process of assimilation to certain following consonants, the so-called sun consonants, which included dentals and denti-alveolars as well as the palatal that derived from an older sound. Old Arabic inscriptions showed much less consistent assimilation. The A1 inscription, written in Greek letters and dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD, provides one of the early examples where the coda of the article does assimilate to the following consonant.

• 5. A Living Inheritance

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  Arabic speakers across the medieval Islamic world typically learned Classical Arabic as a second or even a third language. Those whose first language was a regional colloquial Arabic spoke the classical register as a second tongue. Those whose first language was something else entirely, such as Coptic in Egypt, Berber or Punic in the Maghreb, or Aramaic in the Levant, often learned a colloquial Arabic variety first and Classical Arabic on top of that.

  The regional spoken varieties borrowed freely from Classical Arabic, a pattern that resembles how the Romance languages borrowed directly from Classical Latin. At the same time, those spoken varieties absorbed vocabulary from the languages already present in the territories that came under Arabic-speaking rule. Coptic, Berber, Punic, Himyaritic, Modern South Arabian, Old South Arabian, and Aramaic all left traces in the regional spoken forms.

  Modern Standard Arabic, the direct descendant of Classical Arabic, is used today across the Arab world in writing and in formal spoken contexts such as prepared speeches, radio and television broadcasts, and non-entertainment media. Its morphology and syntax remain basically unchanged from the classical model, though its lexis and stylistic register differ, and it uses only a subset of the syntactic structures that Classical Arabic made available. In the Arab world, the distinction between Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic is rarely drawn sharply; both are typically called al-fusha, meaning the most eloquent. The Barth-Ginsberg alternation, a feature where the prefix vowel of a verb shifted depending on the stem vowel, survived into early Classical Arabic before later speakers leveled it out, choosing the single form ya- rather than alternating between ya- and yi-; that same alternation survives to this day in some Najdi dialects of the Arabian Peninsula.