Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology

Abstract

Studies of spoken Arabic have been dominated by descriptions of individual dialects, dialect atlases and corpus-based sociolinguistic studies. There have been few attempts to apply principles of historical linguistics systematically to this relatively rich data base. 1 Earlier studies such as Cowan (1960) or Kaye (1972) stand out as the exception.2 Since these two studies appeared a great deal of progress has been made in Arabic dialectology (e.g., Behnstedt 1985, 1997, Behnstedt and Woidich 1985, many studies of individual dialects). However, the descriptive advances remain basically unintegrated into a larger study of Arabic linguistics.3 There are two prominent pitfalls in relating dialects to the history of the Arabic language. First, to return to Kaye's study cited above, reconstructions based on dialectal forms eventually have to be melded into the total object, Arabic, and for this their compatibility with the oldest citations of Arabic need to be checked. With regard to 'jiim', already in the late eighth century various pronunciations are attested in the phonetic description of Arabic (Sibawaih II: 452). Sibawaih gives two acceptable variants of 'jiim' and two variants that are not good (laa tustahsanu) either in koranic recitation or in poetry.4 Any discussion of a single proto-form has to consider this situation. It may be asked, for instance, whether Kaye's proposed change of *3 > d3 in Aleppo Arabic (1972: 54), doesn't in fact reflect the use of a variant already existing before Arabic speakers arrived in Aleppo. In general the problem of Arabic reconstruction must always confront the question of whether dialect forms of the diaspora are due to post-diaspora innovation, or are reflective of pre-existing diversity on the Arabian peninsula. A second problem in many dialect studies revolves around linguistic