Urbanization and the Development of Arabic: The Case of Garrison Towns in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries CE

Abstract

This article suggests that the Arabicization of Iraq, Syria and Egypt in the seventh and eighth centuries was made possible by the urbanization of the region. I discuss three relevant points: the manner of conquests, the establishment of Arab urban centers, and the migration of Arabs and non-Arabs to these towns. The article suggests that establishing garrison towns, the concentration of Arabs in these towns, and the subsequent migration of local populations to these towns established the Arabic language as a majority language of prestige. The Arabs’ need to communicate for practical reasons enticed them to use simplified registers known in similar modern contexts of language contact as foreigner talk registers. Imperial migration policies permitted Arabs to migrate to the garrison towns only if they belonged to the same tribes that took part in the initial conquest of the province, which permitted only a limited number of Arabic dialects to mix for a long time in the new urban centers. Eventually, the differences among the dialects were leveled and the structures regularized. A new urban koine emerged in every garrison town that was both different from the original dialects of Arabic in the peninsula and from each other. The article suggests that these linguistic processes of simplification and koineization shaped the input that was learnt by the local populations, and caused the differences between the old dialects of Arabic and the new urban dialects in the Arab world.