Dialect koiné in Arabic [article]

[Harrachi78]

I. Introduction

The term koiné comes from the Greek word koinè ‘common’, referring to the variety of Greek that became the lingua franca, or common language, of the eastern Mediterranean area during the Hellenistic period. It has since been applied to many other languages that share certain features with the original Greek koine.

Inspired by the Hellenistic tradition, a number of Arabists used the term to refer to two historical types of Arabic varieties: the pre-Islamic poetic koine and the military or urban dialect koine of the early periods of the Arab conquest.

The poetic koine, which refers to a literary use, will not be dealt with here, although many authors have suggested a dialectal base to this literary koine. The concept of a military or urban koine has been used to explain the emergence and development of what are called the modern Arabic dialects or "Middle Arabic". Not all Arabists agree with this hypothesis and other models have been proposed. The debate around the concepts of koine turns around the role of contact phenomena in the emergence of modern Arabic dialects.

The term ‘koineization’ refers to a process of interdialect contact leading to an amount of linguistic restructuring. A dialect koine is the stabilized mixed variety that results from this process. Koineization usually, but not always, implies that the most peculiar features of each contact dialect are dropped and that the regular/most common features are selected instead. This implies a certain degree of leveling, but without radical restructuring, unlike pidginization. To speak in terms ot koineization rather than language mixing or pidginization means that the varieties in contact are considered to be sub-varieties of the same linguistic system.

The concept of koineization has also been used to describe the changes that are occurring in many contemporary dialects following movements of population and urbanization. This implies that these changes are due to interdialectal contact as much as to Classical–dialectal contact (diglossia). The historical situation was dealt with in a number of theoretical articles, which became classic references in the field. The contemporary situation has been approached in numerous works describing specific local situations (urban, rural, or Bedouin), but few papers offer a wider perspective of the contemporary dynamics.

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[Harrachi78]

II. Dialect koine in the first centuries of the Arab conquest

Most authors agree that the grammatical restructuring that characterized the modern Arabic dialects, compared to Classical Arabic, must have taken place during the first centuries of the Arab conquest, when Arabic spread out from its traditional homeland to expand to vast territories of previously non Arabic-speaking areas. But they disagree on the relationship between Classical Arabic and the modern dialects and on the nature of the restructuring process. The first issue concerns the nature of pre-Islamic Arabic and whether there were pre-Muslim Arabic dialectal varieties or not. The second issue is whether the restructuring processes were :

(a) induced by external influence (the influence of the local non Arabic languages in a process of second language learning) or

(b) the result of an internal drift leading to leveling or

(c) a result of interdialectal contact.

A number of theories have been put forward but three main streams can be isolated: Ferguson’s military/urban koine; Cohen’s urban koines; and Versteegh’s pidginization/creolization processes.

A number of earlier Arabists assumed that, generally speaking, modern Arabic dialects derive lineally from Classical Arabic or a variety very similar to it. Ferguson refines this hypothesis and postulates that the modern Arabic dialects descend from the earlier language through an Arabic koine. The koine was not identical with any of the earlier dialects and differed in many significant respects from Classical Arabic but was used side by side with the Classical language during the early centuries of the Muslim era. The koine came into existence through a complex process of mutual borrowing and leveling among various dialects and not as a result of a diffusion from a single source. Ferguson postulates one koine and assumes that present dialect differences are innovations that took place following the spread of the koine. He believes that the koineizing process must have begun before the great expansion of Arabic with the spread of Islam, but that the full development of the koine coincided with this expansion, which brought about a mingling of the original dialects and caused large numbers of speakers of other languages to adopt Arabic. The koine developed chiefly in the cities and in the armies and its spread coincided with the spread of an urban Arabo-Islamic culture. He distinguishes this urban koine from Bedouin dialects and assumes that most sedentary dialects came from this urban military koine. Ferguson based his argumentation on a selected list of 14 linguistic features (1 phonological feature, 10 morphological features, 3 lexical features) which, according to him, cannot be analyzed as natural development or drift continuing early trends (which is why the loss of the glottal stop or the reduction of inflectional categories are not included in these 14 features). Among the 14 features are the loss of the dual, the loss of verbs IIIw verbs, the loss of the feminine comparative, the relative ±illi... etc. It may be noted that Ferguson was not the first to use the concept of koine, which can be found also in the writings of Fleischer to designate the common language or Middle Arabic of the period following the conquest. Moreover, the notion, if not the term, of a dialect koine appears also in the Arab grammarians’ definition of the Quraych dialect, the supposed base of the Quranic language and the poetic koine.

Ferguson’s hypothesis was discussed by Cohen, who questions the existence of a unique dialect koine. He mainly bases his argumentation on the nature of the features selected by Ferguson. In order to sustain the argumentation, those features must be common to most sedentary dialects, should not be found in either Bedouin or Quranic Arabic, and should not be attributable to a general natural drift. Cohen concludes that a number of Ferguson’s selected features do not fit these criteria. Many innovations in the sedentary dialects appear to be the result of parallel evolution rather than inheritance from a single koine. Cohen proposes a wave-like diffusion model. A number of different urban koines emerged independently and progressively spread out in various directions.

The koine(s) hypothesis leaves little room for the linguistic influence of local vernacular languages in the early period of the Muslim conquest and stresses the continuity between Old Arabic and the modern dialects. On the contrary, the pidginization/creolization hypothesis defended by Versteegh considers that non-Arabic speakers played a crucial role in the early restructuring of urban dialects. Versteegh draws a parallel between a number of pidgin/creole contexts and the language situation in the newly conquered cities of the new Arab Empire. He emphasizes that acquisition of Arabic by the majority of the non-Arab urban population was a process of untutored second language acquisition. He concludes that the modern Arabic dialects are the result of an initial process of pidginization/ creolization followed by a decreolization trend and a realignment toward the rules of Classical Arabic. Versteegh’s hypothesis was much discussed, both at the linguistic and extralinguistic levels. The contemporary dialectal varieties show no definite evidence of an earlier pidginization process. Most features can be analyzed as the result of internal drift (e.g. the case of the dual) or interdialectal contact or universal language trends. Today many authors agree that a less radical process of second language learning can explain the development of a number of modern dialectal features.

Historically, there is little evidence that a creolization-like context prevailed in most urban centers of the Arab Empire. It may be noted that the main arguments raised in favor or against the koineization theory are of a linguistic nature: the presence or absence of such-and-such a feature which could be analyzed as a produce of koineization. Yet, linguistic arguments have to be supported by historical and social data and, for the time being, we still know very little about the social conditions that led to the spread of Arabic in many areas of the Arab Empire.

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[Harrachi78]

III. Contemporary dialect koines

Whatever their origin, the modern Arabic vernaculars present a high range of diversity. Dialectologists tend to classify the various vernaculars according to geographical factors (eastern versus western dialects), social factors (Bedouin dialects versus sedentary dialects, and within the latter urban versus rural dialects), or ethnic and religious factors (Muslim dialects versus Christian or Jewish dialects). But in many instances, dialect contact and dialect mixing led to the emergence of mixed dialects.

Sedentary dialects have often been leveled by Bedouin dialects following waves of Bedouin settlement in the 10th–13th centuries. This process was recorded in North Africa following the settlement of the Hilālī tribes through the 12th–13th centuries, but also in Mesopotamia between the 14th and 18th centuries. A welldescribed case is Muslim Baghdadi Arabic, which emerged in the 18th–19th centuries. Another case of a 17th–18th-century emergence of a mixed dialect is that of the city of Salt in Jordan. Koineization occurred not only in urban areas, but also in the rural areas lying between different dialect groupings. Examples of such mixed rural dialects are provided by Behnstedt and Woidich in their atlas of Egyptian rural Arabic. Many other examples are provided by Johnson for the Gulf Arabic vernaculars.

In the late 19th century and in the 20th century, rural/urban migration and urbanization led to many cases of dialect mixing and koineization. This koineization trend goes in two main directions:

(a) Due to the urbanization of large segments of previously rural speakers, many contemporary urban standards emerge through various degrees of leveling.

(b) The urban dialects of the main cities emerge as national or regional standards and often spread to other cities and to rural areas through the influence of the media; in this respect they are competing with Modern Standard Arabic as prestigious norms.

Degrees of koineization and leveling depend on each city history and on the rate of rural/urban migration. Therefore, there is neither a single model nor a common linear development. A number of urban vernaculars, such as Cairo Arabic, went through a process of dialect contact and leveling during the second part of the 19th century, following a significant population renewal. Since that time, Cairo Arabic has become more or less established, and migration does not initiate new processes of dialect leveling and koineization.

Instead, rural migrants are subjected to a longterm accommodation process to Cairo Arabic. In Morocco, the most typical example of contemporary koine is the dialect of Casablanca, which emerged in the early 20th century, based on a koineized Hilāli dialect. It is spreading as the national standard and leading to the progressive attrition of the prestigious old urban dialects of the cities of Fes, Rabat ... etc. This phenomenon is not restricted to Morocco since in most North African old urban centers (Algiers, Constantine,
Tetouan, Tunis ... etc.), the old urban dialects tend to become restricted to women while the urban koines of the capital cities are expanding, functioning as national dialect koine. In cities, where communal dialects had coexisted for centuries, a koine tends to become the shared language among the various communities. In Bahrain, for instance, where two communal dialects (the Shi'i and Sunni dialects) have existed for more than 200 years, the economical changes of the 20th century have led to the emergence of an intercommunal standard urban dialect, spoken in public context and mainly based on the Sunni dialect, due to the political weight of the ruling Sunni families. In the relatively recent city of Amman, where different dialects coexist (rural/urban Palestinian and rural/Bedouin Jordanian dialects), it seems that a new urban koine is emerging among the youth who have developed a mixed vowel system. In an expanding city such as Sanaa in Yemen, sanaani speakers tend to keep their old vernacular for family interaction and to shift to pan-dialectal items in public settings, although one cannot speak of a sanaani koine.

The development of a koine used in public urban context does not necessarily lead to the loss or total attrition of the different communal dialects. Each urban context needs to be investigated in detail. Likewise, not all urban dialects of the capital cities are imposing themselves as a national standard and there are recorded cases of regional competition within the same country (e.g. Algiers versus Oran). Finally, koineization processes expand sometimes beyond national boundaries. Many non-Egyptian dialects have taken some Cairo Arabic features and there is evidence that some features like the genitive particle btā3 or the verbal prefix b- are becoming pan-dialectal features.

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[Harrachi78]

IV. Conclusion

The past and present states of Arabic dialects/
vernaculars indicate that dialect mixing and processes of koineization have been extremely important trends in the development of modern Arabic vernaculars. Many contemporary cases could not be recorded here due to lack of space.

Koineization implies a certain degree of leveling and simplification, yet we lack a comprehensive survey of the Arabic linguistic features subjected to leveling. The various examples of dialect koine indicate that all levels of the language can be affected and that the selected koine features are not always the less salient, or the demographically dominant features. Some general trends have been recorded, however, such as the loss of gender distinction for 3rd and 2nd pers. pl. verbal imperfective markers.

[Fin]

[Issabrahimi]

. A dialect koine is the stabilized mixed variety that results from this process. Koineization usually, but not always, implies that the most peculiar features of each contact dialect are dropped and that the regular/most common features are selected instead.

@Harrachi78,

On peut dire que notre Darija est une koineisation de plusieurs dialects Arabes qui ont donné un Koiné plus stable qui est notre Darija Arabe.

[Harrachi78]

C'est l'une des trois thèses existantes oui, et ça ne concerne pas spécifiquement nos dārija d'Algérie, mais tous les dialectes arabes existants.

[Issabrahimi]

Harrachi78 ,

On remarque cette stabilisation dans des termes utilisés en Arabe ( Darija) Maghrebin surtout.

On utilise Hdar pour dire parler. Dabbar pour dire se débrouiller. J'imagine pas un Maghrebin ou Algérien qui utilise Takalam au lieu de Hdar ou Itakil au lieu de Dabbar.

Ce qui m'a surpris c'est qu'il y a des termes que les Saudiens, Khalijies partagent aussi avec nous. Par exemple, Baltou pour dire coustume, j'ai cru qu c'était un mot Francais mais les Arabes Khalijis l'utilisent aussi.

J'aime aussi les expressions Arabes de la Darija Maghrebine. Un exemple: Nfadt 3lih karcha : je l'ai insulté ou lui ai parlé d'une façon severe.

[Harrachi78]

Issabrahimi

On utilise Hdar pour dire parler. Dabbar pour dire se débrouiller. J'imagine pas un Maghrebin ou Algérien qui utilise Takalam au lieu de Hdar ou Itakil au lieu de Dabbar.

L'intérêt des articles académiques comme celui posté ici, c'est d'essayer de faire porter l'intérêt au-delà des perceptions primaires des choses (qui peuvent parfois tronquer la réalité historique des choses), en essayant de déceler les mécanismes et les schémas systématiques de l'évolution dialectale ou linguistique.

Par exemple, contrairement à ce que tu perçois au présent là, il n y a pas si longtemps ici à Alger, on ne disais pas hadra mais plutôt klām : rāni netkellem m3āk et non pas rāni nahdar m3āk, ou encore kellmīni et non pas ahadri m3āya ... etc. La réalité est que la forme "hadra" est caractéristique des dialectes arabes dits hilāliens, et le fait que ça ait remplacé la forme "klām" (qui est un trait des parlers arabes de première vague au Maghreb) reflete le changement de population qui s'est opéré à Alger au cours de l'époque coloniale et qui s'est poursuivi après l'indépendance, transformant de manière profonde l'ancien dialecte pré-hilālien de la ville et créant une sorte de koïné dialectal nouveau qui, à son tour, s'est mis influencer les autres dialectes des diverses régions du pays (et vice versa) a cause de la fluidité des déplacements et la démocratisation des moyens de communication de notre époque.

C'est un exemple typique de l'évolution très rapide des parlers dialectaux, mais dont on n'a pas conscience au niveau individuel, pensant que la manière de parler que nous vivons à l'instant vécu serait celle qui a toujours existé.