Arabic

How the Arabic script took shape

The earliest continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern script is three lines of poetry by a man named Garmallāhe, found at En Avdat and dated to around 125 CE. The Namara inscription, the epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays, followed in 328 CE. Between the 4th and 6th centuries the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic one, and 6th-century inscriptions in Syria use an undotted alphabet of 17 letters. The oldest surviving Arabic papyrus, from 643 CE, adds the dots that produce the modern 28 letters.

Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali, who died in 689, is credited with standardising the grammar and with the marks that tell consonants apart and show vowels. Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-ʿAyn, and standardisation was complete by around the end of the 8th century.

Why educated Arabs switch between two Arabics

Arabic is a textbook case of diglossia. Educated Arabs speak the Standard Arabic learned at school and their native dialect, and the dialects may be mutually unintelligible: Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, while Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better. When a Moroccan talks to a Lebanese, both often switch between dialect and standard, sometimes within one sentence. Linguists compare the spread of spoken varieties to the Romance languages, with perhaps 1,500 years of divergence. Whether Arabic is one language or many is a politically charged question.

Who coins new Arabic words

The Nahda, the literary renaissance of the 19th century, set out to make the language accessible to a wider audience, and Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi's translation campaign from 1836 showed how many new words it needed, such as sayyārah, automobile. Academies modelled on the Académie française followed: Damascus in 1919, Cairo in 1932, Baghdad in 1948, Rabat in 1960, Amman in 1977, and Khartoum and Tunis in 1993. They approve new terms for their dictionaries. An old word can also take a new sense, a process called tawleed: al-hatif, the one whose voice is heard unseen, now means telephone.