About Arabic Language

History of Arabic Language

 If you ask to ask what a arabic language, i will answer “Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family. The members of this family have a recorded history going back thousands of years--one of the most extensive continuous archives of documents belonging to any human language group. The Semitic languages eventually took root and flourished in the Mediterranean Basin area, especially in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of the Levant, but where the home area of "proto-Semitic" was located is still the object of dispute among scholars. Once, the Arabian Peninsula was thought to have been the "cradle" of proto-Semitic, but nowadays many scholars advocate the view that it originated somewhere in East Africa, probably in the area of Somalia/Ethiopia. Interestingly, both these areas are now dominated linguistically by the two youngest members of the Semitic language family: Arabic and Amharic, both of which emerged in the mid-fourth century C.E. 

The swift emergence and spread of Arabic and Amharic illustrates what seems to be a particularly notable characteristic of the Semitic language family: as new members of the group emerge, they tend to assimilate their parent languages quite completely. This would account for the fact that so many members of the group have disappeared completely over the centuries or have become fossilized languages often limited to mainly religious contexts, no longer part of the speech of daily life. This assimilative power was certainly a factor in the spread of Arabic, which completely displaced its predecessors after only a few hundred years in the area where Arabic speakers had become politically dominant . Thus all the South Arabian languages and Aramaic, in all its varied dialectical forms, became to all intents and purposes "dead" languages very soon after the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E. ²  Arabic even did the same thing to the Hamitic³  language of Coptic, which was the direct descendent of Pharaonic Egyptian and still an important literary and cultural language at the time of the Islamic conquest. Today it survives only as the religious language of the Coptic Christian community of Egypt, who otherwise use Arabic in all spheres of their everyday lives. 

In contrast, when Arabic has contested ground with Indo-European languages or members of other distant linguistic families, like Turkish (which is a member of the Altaic family of languages that originated in central Mongolia), its record has not been nearly so successful. For example, when Arabic was introduced into the Iranian Plateau after the fall of the Sassanian Empire to the Arab armies in the 630s C.E., it seemed to overwhelmingly dominate the Indo-European Persianate languages of the region for a while. But by the late 900s, a revitalized form of the Old Persian (Pahlavi) language had decisively re-emerged as not only a spoken language, but also a vehicle for government transactions and literary culture as well. This "new" Persian has remained dominant in this geographical region throughout succeeding centuries and the modern Persian spoken today in Iran is virtually identical with it. 

Arabic was not the first Semitic language to exhibit this tendency to completely overwhelm its predecessors. Aramaic, the language of various peoples living in Syria and upper Mesopotamia, had pioneered this pattern long before, having displaced (though not suddenly and not necessarily at the same time) both the Akkadian language of the people who had ruled the Tigris-Euphrates basin after the Sumerians (who spoke a non-Semitic language), and Hebrew and other Canaanite tongues that had been used along the coastal strip of the Levant.⁴  By the time Jesus was born, for example, the Jews used either the Jewish dialectical version of Aramaic or Greek for most of their writings and in daily life. Similarly, the Aramaic dialect of the city of Edessa, known as Syriac, became the language used by the Christian communities east of Constantinople. 

Even as the Aramaic dialects grew to dominate the Levantine areas and became the lingua franca of the Persian empire, in the south--less subject to the unifying pressures of complex imperial systems of government and education--a much more fluid and less textualized language situation prevailed. Old civilizations had arisen on the southern fringe of the Arabian peninsula, built on the profits of trade and commerce in the area, particularly the long-distance incense trade. The succession of sedentary dynasties that controlled this land of "Sheba" (or, more properly, Saba) used different forms of a language usually called now "Old South Arabian" of which the dominant dialect was probably Sabaic. Our main records of these languages comes from inscriptions rather than written documents, so our knowledge of how they first developed and later changed is necessarily sketchy. Farther to the north, a tribal, nomadic lifestyle dominated, and although we have fragmentary epigraphic records of some of the dialects these tribes used, our current knowlege about the actual linguistic situation prevailing in the area is even more incomplete than our knowledge of the South Arabian kingdoms. ⁵ 

Although echoes of the glorious past and great achievements of the Sabeans and other peoples of the south would continue to resonate in the literature of the Arab Muslim world throughout its long history, scholars of Arabic literary history have always focused their attention on the nomadic northern Arabs in their accounts of how this literature arose. The overriding reason for this is a linguistic one: the tongue used throughout the Arab world today, and known as fusha or "Standard Arabic," is the same language used by these northern Arabs, crystallized in its written form in the revelations of the Qur’an as recorded in the early 600s C.E.. 

Though the major southern language, Sabaic, and Arabic are closely related to one another, they are definitely separate languages, as different as modern-day English and German, and probably just as often mutually unintelligible as not. Sabaic is almost certainly the older of the two languages, being used for inscriptions as early as 600 B.C.E., while the first evidence we have of Arabic as a written language occurs 900 years later, in an inscription dating to 328 C.E. When the two languages mixed and met after the rise of Islam, however, Northern (Mudari) Arabic--backed by the religious authority of the Qur’an--supplanted its older cousin completely as a language of high culture. Sabaic survives today only in isolated pockets of territory where various dialectical versions continue on a purely spoken level. Written communication in the south is all in Mudari Arabic.

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