AHC: fracture arabic

with a PoD of the abbasid revolt against the ummayyads, have arabic in different regions (egypt, n.africa, the levant and the arabian peninsula) fracture into different languages by today. how could this be accomplished? could byzantine/crusader influence produce some kind of franko/grecco/italo-arabic?
 
Last edited:
Can confirm the above posts; I speak both Egyptian and Levantine dialects but I can’t understand a word of Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian or Nejdi Arabic...

The only POD you need to fully accomplish this is to undermine pan-Arabism in favor of national identities, which isn’t too hard because this trend started OTL in Lebanon and Egypt with Phonecianism and Pharaonism respectively. You would just have to exacerbate that trend by severely undermining the main competing ideologies of pan-Arabism and Islamism.
 
Arabic already has fractured, and Moroccan and Iraqi Arabic are far more different than, say, Spanish and Portuguese or Dutch and Afrikaans.

But how could these dialects be considered wholly separate languages by today? I assume the prestige of Arabic in the middle ages and early modernity will make that sort of cultural distancing unappealing to rulers and citizens, but what could make this lingual divide crystallize and become official? also, what would be the effects of this formalization (if there are any at all)?
 
This is a relatively complex threat. The arab dialects of OTL are as similar to each other as the OTL romance languages. The difficult part is to make them being recognized as separated, which doesn't happen IOTL because of:
-Religious factor: Arabic is the language of Al quran. Maltese probably would be a arabic dialect if the people from Malta weren't christians
-Political factor: Pan-Arabism.
Make this factors weaker and you can get it
 
Doesn't Maltese use the Latin script?

Get a big Arab country, such as Egypt, to adopt the Latin script and Arabic should fracture quickly.
 
Simple. Allow translation of the Quran. If Islam is not completely welded to a specific dialect then the divergences can be recognized.

This would require a very different Islam, one which doesn't consider the Qu'ran to be the literal word of God. Change that, and you've changed a lot of what Muhammad thinks about his own revelation, so a lot about his own relationship with Judaism and Christianity, so a lot about his interactions with surrounding cities and tribes, so a lot about the history of 7th-century Arabia, so a hell of a lot about the history of the entire world.

It's all well and good to say "you just have to change this belief in X religion", but you can't really surgically remove stuff like that and keep it plausible. You've made Muhammad into a vocal Ebionite theologian, which is a very different thing to what he was IOTL. IATL he preaches to a few city-states, maybe he's remembered as a literary genius and contributes to the standing of the Arabic language, maybe at the outset he succeeds with the conversion of Arabia and we get a new recognised sect of Christianity, with all the religious cooperation and conflict that would entail. But here we are - a Christian Arabia! The butterflies are immense.
 
Last edited:
But how could these dialects be considered wholly separate languages by today? I assume the prestige of Arabic in the middle ages and early modernity will make that sort of cultural distancing unappealing to rulers and citizens, but what could make this lingual divide crystallize and become official? also, what would be the effects of this formalization (if there are any at all)?

They are de facto considered separate. In the Maghreb countries for example the official language is standard Arabic rather than Darija, the local form of the language.
 
Last edited:
@LSCatilina

As an Arabic speaker, I haven't actually experienced any of the fracturing or incomprehensibility of Arabic that people in this thread are talking about. While there are differences in dialect and some are more understandable than others, in the end it's pretty easy to understand other dialects with some effort and context clues to make up for strange sounding words. Usually the people who have issues with dialects are often stilling learning the language or aren't native Arabic speakers so dialects may be daunting for them without the context that is given to you by living in the Arab world.
 
As an Arabic speaker, I haven't actually experienced any of the fracturing or incomprehensibility of Arabic that people in this thread are talking about.
A language isn't defined necessarily by mutual incomprehension, at least between neighbours : an Italian-speaker can, as you said with some effort and context clues make up for the differences at least up to a point, with another not-too much divergent Romance language. This is greatly supported with Arabic with the existence of same written rules when they vary more between, say, French and Italian from one hand, and the existence of a "double-standarized" language thanks to mass media (such as globalisation of TV Arabic). I'm not saying the difference between Arabic speeches is necessarily the same to Romance speeches because of these factors, but would some sort of litterary Latin as cultural horizon would still exist, it could play a similar role.

And of course, as people said in this thread, a language really gets to be considered as such when its speakers consider it as a language even when it's pretty much intercomprehensiible (one of the most caricatural exemples between Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrian-Serb)
 
@LSCatilina

As an Arabic speaker, I haven't actually experienced any of the fracturing or incomprehensibility of Arabic that people in this thread are talking about. While there are differences in dialect and some are more understandable than others, in the end it's pretty easy to understand other dialects with some effort and context clues to make up for strange sounding words. Usually the people who have issues with dialects are often stilling learning the language or aren't native Arabic speakers so dialects may be daunting for them without the context that is given to you by living in the Arab world.
Well, most Moroccans I know (Moroccan Darija native speakers) speak to be unable to understand either Fusha or other distant vernaculars properly, though they manage quite well with other Maghribi varieties. Similarly for other Arab speakers I know (and and I know quite a few).
But it is true that, as a speech community, Arabic has not fully fractured (except Maltese as noted), as in the formal language is still unitary and used in the appropriate contexts (by educated speakers at least) even though the linguistic system that most if not all Arabs acquire natively is the vernacular one. The point is that talking about Arabic as either unitary, fractured, or even diglossic, is incomplete: Arabic is unitary as a range of vernacular and increasingly formal varieties boperating along a mostly contextual continuum; they, however, are by themselves different enough to be describable as distinct languages in terms of purely structural divergence in stuff like grammar. The sociolinguistic and educational systems, maintain a collective level of general mutual intelligibility among the educated portion of the population, and also tend to disseminate both the standard formal variety and the educated register of the most prestigious spoken varieties (usually the ones of the capital cities).
A linguist who looks at Qur'anic Arabic and modern spoken Cairene in terms of their grammar, phonology and almost any other structural feature of note would then be correct in saying they are distinct languages (though of course related) under the specific perspective of the discipline. Without specific training, acquiring each does not allow proficiency in the other; conversely, an anthropologist or a historian who look at how they are actually used by the people would quickly realize how in concrete they function as parts of a larger way of defining the "Arabic language" as the whole of the system by which Arabs do indeed perform different kind of linguistic acts approprately to a given context.
 
No. Official stance of Islam is that the Quran, by definition, can't be translated. That any translation is a study guide, day, but not a Quran.

Yup. "Allow the Qur'an to be translated" makes it sound like he thinks it hasn't ever been translated. It has. Anyway true that the Arabic language does have the only theologically valid version, since translation causes the range of meanings present in the original to be lost.

"1. Read: In the Name of your Lord who created.

2. Created man from a clot.

3. Read: And your Lord is the Most Generous.

4. He who taught by the pen.

5. Taught man what he knew not."
 
an Italian-speaker can, as you said with some effort and context clues make up for the differences at least up to a point, with another not-too much divergent Romance language.

There is, admittedly, a larger amount of indigenous Arabic speakers who are capable of understanding other dialects than Italian speakers who are capable of understanding similar languages.

Well, most Moroccans I know (Moroccan Darija native speakers) speak to be unable to understand either Fusha or other distant vernaculars properly, though they manage quite well with other Maghribi varieties. Similarly for other Arab speakers I know (and and I know quite a few).

I haven't really come across them although it is true that Maghrebi speakers particularly have a hard time with other dialects.

A linguist who looks at Qur'anic Arabic and modern spoken Cairene in terms of their grammar, phonology and almost any other structural feature of note would then be correct in saying they are distinct languages (though of course related) under the specific perspective of the discipline.

What about Cariene is different in it's grammer from Arabic? Sorry, I'm not particularly well-versed in the subject.

Without specific training, acquiring each does not allow proficiency in the other; conversely, an anthropologist or a historian who look at how they are actually used by the people would quickly realize how in concrete they function as parts of a larger way of defining the "Arabic language" as the whole of the system by which Arabs do indeed perform different kind of linguistic acts approprately to a given context.

I don't really understand most of this sentence (I'm not a native English speaker) but, regarding what I do understand, I don't see how you need different training to understand other dialect. Indigenous Arabic speakers don't have to need training to understand other dialects, we just have a sort of mutual understanding or way of thinking when talking to people who speak other dialects. The same should be for people teaching themselves to learn Arabic. All you need is exposure to other dialects and some critical thinking to understand any Arabic speaker.
 
There is, admittedly, a larger amount of indigenous Arabic speakers who are capable of understanding other dialects than Italian speakers who are capable of understanding similar languages.
Indeed, but because they're used to hearing and processing various differences : on the other hand, I can tell you that a significant of French speakers are unable to really understand French canadian without subtitles and it's still definitely the same language.
 
Yup. "Allow the Qur'an to be translated" makes it sound like he thinks it hasn't ever been translated. It has. Anyway true that the Arabic language does have the only theologically valid version, since translation causes the range of meanings present in the original to be lost.

"1. Read: In the Name of your Lord who created.

2. Created man from a clot.

3. Read: And your Lord is the Most Generous.

4. He who taught by the pen.

5. Taught man what he knew not."

Technically, this is considered translation of the meaning of the Qur'an, which is not exactly the same than a translation of the Qur'an from a Muslim religious standpoint insofar the translated text is not considered to be "Qur'an" anymore (since it is a purely human work, as opposed to the Qur'an in Arabic, which is literally taken by the vast majority of Muslims ever to be Word of God and has no human author). Translations of the meaning of the Qur'an have been done for a long time (by Muslims and non-Muslims alike), but they usually seen by Muslims as equivalent to commentaries with explanatory value for those who have no sufficient mastery of Classical Arabic. In contrast, Christians usually accept translated Bibles as valid Scriptures (while Jews tend not to) although in Christian contexts too this was historically controversial in some cases.
Theological points aside, the form and structure of the Arabic Qur'an are very difficult to render in different language, as the text, even not considering from the richness and complexity of its apparent meaning, also has rhythmical and rhetorical features, rhymes, assonances, parallelisms based on Arabic root structures, and lexical peculiarities, formal repetitions and so on, that add to both its persuasive force to the believer and its meaning itself, and which have interpretive significance for traditional Muslim scholarship. While this is true to some degree of many other texts, the Qur'an itself stresses its being Arabic and the commentaries underline the unique conjunction of form and meaning in conveying a multilayered overall message that could be grasped in fullness in Arabic (and even then, Muslim tradition holds that a scholarly training in Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and host of other specialized disciplines is needed, and then often to be complemented by a spiritual training as well).
 
Top