Before the Lingua Franca: Pidginized Arabic in the eleventh century A.D.

Abstract

This paper presents and analyzes a ten-sentence text written in a form of pidginized Arabic in the mid-eleventh century A.D. Linguistic features of the text are compared to features of modern Arabic-based pidgins and the Arabic-based creole Ki-Nubi; to Classical Arabic and modern colloquial Arabic dialects; and to Berber languages, which were spoken widely in the part of the Sahara from which the text apparently came. The results of this comparison show that the text shares a significant number of features with the modern pidgins and creole. Although a single brief text hardly provides enough evidence to establish the existence of a fully crystallized pidgin language, we argue that social conditions in towns along the medieval Arab trade routes in northern Africa were likely to have been appropriate for the development of a pidgin. Finally, the main theoretical point we make is that the common view of pidgins and creoles as an exclusive, or almost exclusive, result of European trade and global colonization arises from an accident of history - namely, the fact that most Western scholars are familiar only with European writings from relevant periods - and not from an examination of all the available evidence from multilingual contact situations in which no Europeans were involved.