The Arabic Language

Ṣifa
jazīrat al-ʿArab
, I, ed. Müller, Leiden, 1884–91, 134–6). Since for the 
Arabs Ḥimyar represented all things South Arabian, one might assume that the 
language called Ḥimyaritic was the continuation of the Epigraphic South Arabian 
language, but in actual fact it is not. From the features mentioned by al-Hamdānī 
and others – for example, the verbal ending 
-k-
for the first and the second person, 
as in South Arabian, for example, 
waladku
‘I bore’, 
raʾayku
‘I saw’, and the article 
ʾam-
– Rabin (1951: 42–53) speculates that Ḥimyaritic was the name that the Arabs gave 
to the language of those 
ʿrb
who are mentioned in the Epigraphic South Arabian 
sources and who had settled in this region. They were probably immigrants from 
the north, who spoke a North Arabian dialect, but whose speech was heavily influ-
enced by the South Arabian language (cf. Chapter 3, p. 26). Since Ḥimyaritic was 
comprehensible to a speaker of Arabic, it cannot have been identical with any of 
the South Arabian languages, which are characterised by al-Hamdānī as being 
ġutm
‘incomprehensible’. It is possible that this language is also reflected in the 
inscriptions that are sometimes called Qaḥṭānic or ‘pseudo-Sabaean’ (cf. Chapter 3, 
p. 34). Some of the features mentioned as characteristic of the Ḥimyaritic language 
survive in the modern Yemenite dialects (cf. below, pp. 195f.).
Apart from the reports about the Ḥimyarites, the dialects of all tribes were 
subsumed under the label 
kalām al-ʿArab
, but the distinctions mentioned above 
created a difficulty for the later tradition. On the one hand, the idea of one 
language of the Arabs implied a basic linguistic unity in the peninsula. Moreover, 
the consensus of Muslims has always been that the language of the 
Qurʾān
was the 
language of the Prophet and his compatriots, in other words that their everyday 

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Arabic in the Pre-Islamic Period 
45
speech was identical with the language of the Holy Book, which was the same as 
the language of the pre-Islamic poems. On the other hand, the grammarians set 
up a hierarchy of the speech of the various tribes. They held on to the tradition 
of the sons of Qaḥṭān being the pure Arabs, but at the same time believed that the 
language of the Ḥijāz, the region of Mecca, was superior to all other varieties. One 
way of reconciling both views was to assert that the Qurayš tribe of Mecca had 
taken from other dialects what was best in them. Thus, the hierarchy of Arabic 
dialects culminated in the language of the Ḥijāz, the region where the Prophet 
was born, and the language of the Qurayš, the tribe in which he was born.
This view implies that there were linguistic differences between the tribes, 
otherwise no hierarchy would be possible. Indeed, although the general opinion 
was that in the 
Jāhiliyya
Arabic (
al-ʿArabiyya
) was the language of all Arabs alike, 
the grammatical literature records regional differences between the tribes, the 
so-called 
luġāt
. Our information about the linguistic situation in the 
Jāhiliyya
is 
largely derived from the Arabic literature on the dialectal differences in pre-Islamic 
Arabia. Some of these materials were collected in monographs, for instance, on 
the 
luġāt
in the 
Qurʾān
, while other data are found in the lexica. For the grammar
-
ians, the dialectal variants, as long as they were attested in the 
Qurʾān
or in poetry, 
or elicited from a trustworthy Bedouin informant, had to be accepted as correct 
Arabic. This did not mean, however, that anybody else was entitled to speak in 
this way, or that such dialectal variants could be used as productive items in the 
language.
The validity of the testimonies about the geographical distribution of the 
dialectal differences is hard to assess. The grammarians tended to systematise 
the data of the northern Arabs into two larger regions, roughly covering the 
western and the eastern parts of the peninsula, with the language of the Ḥijāz as 
representative of West Arabic, often synonymous with that of the Banū Qurayš, 
or with the language of Mecca and Medina, on the one hand, and the language of 
the Tamīm as representative of East Arabic, on the other. To a certain extent, this 
division coincides with that between sedentary Arabs in the pre-Islamic cities and 
nomadic Bedouin tribes in the desert regions.
It seems that the differences between Classical Arabic as we know it and East 
Arabic were smaller than those existing between Classical Arabic and the language 
of the Ḥijāz. This may partly explain the relative scarcity of data on East Arabic. 
The grammarians tended to concentrate on what deviated from the later norm 
of Classical Arabic, which was based largely on the language of the 
Qurʾān 
and 
pre-Islamic poetry. They were therefore more interested in Ḥijāzī Arabic than in 
East Arabic, because it contained more features that differed from the Classical 
Arabic norm.
The text of the 
Qurʾān
, in particular its orthography, bears traces of an adapta
-
tion to the local pronunciation of the poetic language in the Ḥijāz. The most 
obvious adaptation is that of the spelling of the 
hamza
, the glottal stop. All 

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46
The Arabic Language
sources agree that the Eastern dialects knew a glottal stop, which was absent 
in the Western dialects, including the dialect of Mecca. In the text of the