ARA 101 MIDTERM I
LANGUAGE
Arabic is the language of the Arab people originally from the Arabian Peninsula.
Heritage is anything that is inherited by a group of people from its past ancestors, anything that is
passed on from one generation to another.
Heritage = turath
Literature = adab [original meaning of adab = good behaviour, ethics].
Culture = thaqafa
Language = lugha
Pyramids are not Arab [Arabs came to Egypt after Islam].
Semitic family of languages
Phonecian
Assyrian
Syriac
Aramaic
Hebrew
Arabic
The word “Semitic” is derived from the biblical name Shem or Sam [one of Noah’s sons – who is
considered the father of the Semitics people].
Proto-Semitic: the mother of all the extinct and existing Semitic languages.
Arabia is considered the home of Proto-Semitic.
Arabic is the youngest of the Semitic languages.
Arab is classified by some as a Hamito-Semitic language.
The main characteristics of the Semitic languages includes its triconsonantal root-system .
Arabic is considered the richest in linguistic literature.
Many Arabic languages exist:
Northern Arabic languages [Lihyanite and Thamudic]
South Arabic languages [Mihri, Soqotri].
It is now one of the six official International languages.
Unlike any other language, Arabic has taken
the role of an International language twice.
Arabic is spoken by more than 130 million people in the Arabic speaking countries. Outside the Arab
Homeland, more than 5 million Arabic speakers.
Arab land occupies a very important geographical region and owns a lot of natural resources.
Diglossia is a Greek sociolinguistic term consisting of two elements, di – two, glossia –
language/tongue. It refers to two types of the same language co-existing, although they each serve a
different function.
Bilingualism refers to a situation where two different languages exist in a community. [multilingual =
3+]
Diglossia can be observed in Greek, Swiss German, and Arabic.
In the Arabic context, diglossia refers to the co-existence of the standard form and the colloquial
form of Arabic. Arabic diglossia goes back to the pre-Islamic era.
Standard form [Al Fusha] = Classical Arabic + Modern Standard Arabic. Contains a high
degree of uniformity and is the official standard language in all Arabic speaking countries.
Colloquial Arabic [Al a’miyya] = the actual language of everyday activities, mainly spoken,
varies from one area/country to another.
Some people tried to encourage the replacement of Standard Arabic with Colloquial Arabic.
However, they faced the following problems
1.
Standard Arabic was the language in the traditional heritage [books, Quran, etc]
2.
Standard Arabic had a religious attitude.
