Introduction

Abstract

This chapter outlines the scholarly background of the study of Arabic historical dialectology, and addresses the following issues: the early history of Arabic: myth and reality; the definition and exemplification of ‘Middle Arabic’ and ‘Mixed Arabic through history’; evidence for the early occurrence of certain Arabic dialectal features; examples of substrates and borrowing in Arabic dialects; the dialect geography of Arabic and its typology, especially the ‘sedentary’ and ‘bedouin’ divide; how and why dialects have undergone change, large-scale and small-scale, and the causative social factors; a classification of the typology of internal linguistic change in Arabic; causes of the social indexicalization of dialectal features of Arabic; examples of the pidginization and creolization of Arabic, and the reasons for the apparent rarity of this phenomenon.