Spain adopts arabic writing

Gian

Banned
If you're talking about Spanish adopting the Arabic alphabet, than I'll say that you'll probably need the Moors to conquer the whole of the peninsula and make sure they occupy them long enough for the Castillians to start using the alphabet.
 
Have the Moors control the entirety of Iberia, from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees. Of course, that wouldn't really be Spain, in the same way that the USA isn't really the Iroquois Confederacy.

There would have to be Spanish-Moorish detente somehow. Perhaps Al-Andalus survives until the Enlightenment, and religious conflict becomes less of a thing, so Spanish and Moorish cultures hybridize, and the superiority of Muslim education makes Arabic the dominant language of scholarship. Still, I can't see this happening in a TL where the Reconquista seems viable.
 
Well, Mozarabic Romance WAS written in Arabic script IOTL, though it wasn't really "Spanish", as in, Castilian.
However, it is quite unlikely that widespread use of Arabic letters can survive the Reconquista in good shape.
 

Zirantun

Banned
Well, if you want a Romance language to be written with Arabic in Spain, your best candidate is Mozarabic. You would have to stop the mass immigrations of the High Middle Ages somehow though. One of the problems that faced the Mozarabic languages (which were probably very different from Spanish, considering isoglosses more in line with Italian Romance) was that it was a minority language much of the time with Moorish immigration into Spain. If you could stop this, then the nobles may very well adopt the language, and in the absence of a Reconquista, you have a Spanish Romance language in the Arabic alphabet.
 
Are there other examples of Arabic script being used by non-Muslim non-Arabs (i.e. other than Arab Christians?)

I think it was too linked to survive any kind of Reconquista. But I may be mistaken, I suppose.
 
Well, Mozarabic Romance WAS written in Arabic script IOTL, though it wasn't really "Spanish", as in, Castilian.
However, it is quite unlikely that widespread use of Arabic letters can survive the Reconquista in good shape.
If you look at medieval Castilian and medieval Mozarabic they are relatively similar and IIRC were mutually intelligible. It's as Spanish as anything else in the tenth century.
 
Are there other examples of Arabic script being used by non-Muslim non-Arabs (i.e. other than Arab Christians?)

I think it was too linked to survive any kind of Reconquista. But I may be mistaken, I suppose.

Arabic script was used by Jews to write Hebrew in Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere, so yeah, it could be detached from both Arabism and Islam to some extent (though I suppose that most of those Jews actually spoke Judeo-Arabic in daly life). However, no, I don't any Spanish form written in Arabic has serious chances after anything resembling a Reconquista analog.
 
Arabic script is used in... Maltese I think?

I like the idea of al-Lathini.

And if we can make the Reconquista less aggressive, the Arabic script might survive.
 
Arabic script is used in... Maltese I think?

Maltese did'nt have a uniform written system until the 20th century, though previously it was never written in Arabic, rather it was to a large extent an oral language, and the few times it was written down it was alwats in the Latin Script.
 
Maltese did'nt have a uniform written system until the 20th century, though previously it was never written in Arabic, rather it was to a large extent an oral language, and the few times it was written down it was alwats in the Latin Script.

The first example is the 15th c. Kantilena which, while being pretty much Siculo-Arabic lingustically, is written in Latin (and the transcription is far less specialised than the modern orthographical standard, being far more latinate. Modern Maltese has vast amounts of loanwords from Romance and other European languages, by comparison, but has orthography designed to reflect its Semitic grammar and spoken morphemes)
 
What I just found on Wikipedia:
Europe


مۉلٖىمۉ سه ته*بٖى بۉژه‎ = Molimo se tebi, Bože (We pray to you, o God); see Arebica)
 
What I just found on Wikipedia:
Europe


مۉلٖىمۉ سه ته*بٖى بۉژه‎ = Molimo se tebi, Bože (We pray to you, o God); see Arebica)

Remember that in all of those cases they're either places in South-East Europe that had/have large Muslim populations or are used by Muslim minority populations eslewhere.
 
Remember that in all of those cases they're either places in South-East Europe that had/have large Muslim populations or are used by Muslim minority populations eslewhere.

They were pretty much all Muslim populations with the exception of the Mozarabic, which swapped to Latin after the 1400s.

It appears that it really is linked.
 
They were pretty much all Muslim populations with the exception of the Mozarabic, which swapped to Latin after the 1400s.

It appears that it really is linked.

Pretty much, though their is an interesting thing to think of to; Nearly all Arabic scripts are used by Muslims (excluding Mozarabic and the Levantine Minority Religions), but not all Muslims use the Arabic Script (Indonesia and Malaysia use the Latin Script).
 
Pretty much, though their is an interesting thing to think of to; Nearly all Arabic scripts are used by Muslims (excluding Mozarabic and the Levantine Minority Religions), but not all Muslims use the Arabic Script (Indonesia and Malaysia use the Latin Script).

Turkey post-reform, as well. And naturally all the Russian Muslims and many Central Asian ones post-USSR. And Bosnians. Prestige, I suppose.
 
Turkey post-reform, as well. And naturally all the Russian Muslims and many Central Asian ones post-USSR. And Bosnians. Prestige, I suppose.

Indeed, I was just using Indonesia since it's the most populous Muslim country.
 
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