Pre-classical Arabic

Pre-classical Arabic is the cover term for all varieties of Arabic spoken in the Arabian Peninsula until immediately after the Arab conquests and emergence of Classical Arabic in the 7th century C.E. Scholars disagree about the status of these varieties.
Some scholars assume that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was similar, if not identical, to the varieties spoken in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Islam. If differences existed, they concerned mainly stylistic and minor points of linguistic structure. A second group of mainly Western scholars of Arabic do not regard the variety in which the Quran was revealed as a spoken variety of Arabic in the peninsula. Some of them go so far as to state that the function of the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was limited to artistic expression and oral rendition. Others are not as clear about the functional load of this variety in pre-Islamic times. A third group of scholars assume that the variety of Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was the variety spoken by Bedouin Arab tribes and non sedentary Arabs, at least in the western parts of the peninsula where trade routes existed.
Some modern scholars of Arabic believe that the Classical Arabic grammarians held their view, that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was identical with at least the spoken varieties of some Arab tribes in the peninsula. A first reading of the grammatical texts seems to confirm that grammarians were quite aware of the existence of different language varieties in the Arabic-speaking sphere. They distinguished terminologically between luġa ‘dialect’ and lisān ‘language’. Among several meanings of the word luġa is the technical meaning of a linguistic variety.
As early as the 2nd century A.H., grammarians were aware of differences among the dialects. Among the earliest writers on tribal dialects were Yunus ibn Ḥabīb and ˀAbū ˁAmr aš-Šaybānī, the author of the Kitāb al-Jīm, in which odd and archaic lexical items used in certain tribes are recorded.

Dialects

Hijaz dialect

Old Hijazi features appear in the grammarians’ books more frequently than features of any other dialect. It is, therefore, a much better represented dialect in comparison to others, despite the fact that the region's geographical definition is not as clear. In pre-Islamic times,
the Hijaz was the western part of the peninsula, between the Tihama in the southwest and the Najd in the east. It included the Banū Sulaym and the Banū Hilāl. In the north was the territory of Bālī, and in the south that of Huḏayl. After the advent of Islam, the Tihāma was included in the Hijaz, thus the Bedouin tribes in the interior were sometimes included in the Hijaz. It seems that for the grammarians, Hijaz referred to regions defined according to the post-Islamic demarcation. In this way, the urban centers of Mecca, Medina, and Ṯaqīf were included in that region. The term luġa ˀahl
al-Hijaz covers all differences that may have existed within this region.
Phonological features of this region include:

The pronunciation of /ˁ/ as hamza.
The use of the full forms of vowels, without elision or vowel changes, e.g. ˁunuq ‘neck’ as against ˁunq in Eastern Arabian dialects, where short unstressed vowels were elided.
The absence of vowel harmony, which was realized in Eastern dialects, e.g. Hijazi baˁīr ‘camel’, corresponding to Eastern biˁīr. By the same token, uvular and pharyngeal consonants assimilated following vowels in the Eastern dialects, while in the Hijaz they rested immune, e.g. Hijazi ˁuqr ‘the main part of the house’, corresponding to Eastern ˁaqr. In the neighborhood of uvulars and pharyngeals, the Hijaz had /u/, while the Eastern dialects had /a/.
The tendency to shorten the long final vowels in pause positions.
The elision of the hamza.

Morphological features of this dialect include:

The 3rd person suffix pronouns -hu, -humā,-hum, and -hunna did not change to the -hi form after i or ī.
For the singular relative pronoun, the Hijaz used allaḏī rather than the Western and Yemenite ḏī and ḏū. For the feminine plural, the Hijaz used allāˀī. The same form may have been used for the masculine plural as well.
The dual suffix in the Hijaz may have had a single form, -āni, for the nominative, accusative, and genitive cases alike. Ibn Hišām, in his explanation of the nominative case of the demonstrative pronoun hāḏāni ‘these two’ in the verse ˀinna hāḏāni la-sāḥirāni, claimed that in the dialect of the Hijaz, these demonstrative pronouns were indeclinable.
The absence of taltala.
The imperative of geminated verbs was conjugated as the strong verbs, e.g. urdud ‘respond!’.

Syntactic features of this dialect include:

Some nouns were feminine in the Hijaz and masculine in the Najd and Tamīm. Some examples are tamr ‘dates’, šaˁīr ‘barley’, ṣirāṭ ‘path’. The word ṣirāṭ appears in the first sūra of the Qurān followed by a masculine adjective.
In the Hijaz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb, unlike Standard Arabic, where the head verb is always in the singular.
In the Hijaz, after the shortened forms ˀin and ˀan, the subject took an accusative case, while in Classical Arabic and in the east, shortened particles lost their effect on the following nominal clause.
After the complementizer ˀinna, ˀanna, etc. the Hijazi dialect put the subject and predicate of the sentence in the accusative case. Ibn Hišām explains the agreement in case between the subject and predicate in a nominal sentence after ±inna ‘in one version of a ḥadīṯ by saying that the Hijaz did not distinguish between the subject and predicate in case endings after ˀinna.
The predicate of kāna and other copulas was given a nominative case, while an accusative case is assigned to it in Classical Arabic.
In the Hijaz, mā, lā, and ˀin had the same effect as the Classical Arabic laysa in assigning to the subject the nominative case and to the predicate the accusative case.
Verbs in the indicative were used after ±an. An example comes from Mujāhid, who read the verse li-man ˀarāda ˀan yutimma r-raḍāˁata ‘for those who want the suckling to be completed’ with an indicative ending, yutimmu.

ˀAzd dialect

The ˀAzd dialect is rarely mentioned in the literature. Whereas anecdotes and šawāhid from other Yemeni dialects are given, the dialect of ˀAzd receives little attention. More confusing still is the fact that there were two tribes by the name of ˀAzd, one in Oman and the other in the western part of Yemen. The two features that are mentioned, however, show the difference between this dialect and the rest of Yemen.

The retention of the nominal case endings a, i, and u in the pausal position.
The retention of the vowel a in the prefixes of the imperfect, e.g. yaktub ‘he writes’ as against the taltala in other dialects.

Huḏayl dialect

The tribe of Huḏayl was situated in the southeastern part of the Hijaz, to the north of Yemen and to the northeast of ˀAzd. Its location in the southeast of the Hijaz connected this tribe geographically to the Eastern dialect group, which earned the tribe its fame for speaking wellformed
Arabic. Despite this connection with the east, the dialect of Huḏayl belonged mainly to the Western group and functioned as an intermediate zone between the Hijaz and northern Yemen. The evidence for this claim comes from the grammatical and lexical features it shared with the Western group. They shared, for instance, ˀawwāb ‘obedient’ and jadaṯ ‘tomb’ with Kināna.
Other features mentioned by the grammarians include:

The insertion of short unstressed vowels in the middle of words, e.g. ibin ‘son’ instead of Classical Arabic ibn, and jawazāt ‘nuts’, sg. jawza. In Classical Arabic, words with a singular pattern faˁla receive an anaptyctic vowel a in the feminine plural, to become faˁalāt. This vowel is not added when the second radical in the root is w or y, but Huḏayl added an anaptyctic vowel to roots containing w and y as well.
The absence of vowel harmony.
The absence of the hamza.
It is probable that in Huḏayl the final long vowels were shortened, as was the case in the Hijaz.
The change of the glides wu and wi into the long vowels ū and ī, respectively.
Huḏayl used the relative pronoun allaḏī. The plural of this pronoun was allaḏūna, in all numbers and genders, in opposition to Classical Arabic, which uses allaḏīna.
Concerning the taltala feature, Huḏayl was claimed to have used both forms: -a- imperfect like the Hijaz dialects, and -i imperfect like the eastern tribes. This variation is also common in Ṭayyiˀ. Both tribes had contact with eastern tribes, which may explain the variation.

Ṭayyiˀ dialect

The Ṭayyiˀ tribe was situated in the north of
the Najd. It occupied the southern frontiers
of the Nufūd desert and was also situated
toward the northeast of the Hijaz region. It
shared with the tribes of the eastern part some
linguistic features, such as the taltala. Rabin
claims that such common features
are suggestive of the connecting role this tribe
played between the dialects of the eastern and
western parts of the peninsula. The territory
of Ṭayyiˀ during the early Islamic period was
not the original habitat of the tribe. The tribe
was traditionally known to have migrated
from northern Yemen together with the tribes
with which it shared some linguistic features.
Features of this dialect include:

The weakening of the final syllable and elision of final nasals, laterals, t, and/or y.
The absence of vowel harmony and vowel elision.
The change of /ˁ/ into /ˀ/, e.g. daˀ-nī ‘let me’; no other data about depharyngealization are available.
The fate of hamza in this dialect is not known due to the absence of direct evidence.
The suffix pronoun of the 3rd person feminine in pause was -ah and -hā in context, which is in accordance with the Classical and Eastern Arabic weakening of final syllables.
The form of the article was am-.
The singular feminine demonstrative was tā, not hāḏihi.
The relative pronoun was ḏū, which was used for the two genders and all numbers.
The -t of the feminine plural was dropped in pause; again, this is in harmony with the weakening of final syllables.
az-Zajjaji claims that as in the Hijaz, the predicate of verbal sentences agreed in number with the head verb.

Yemeni Arabic

The dialect of Yemen was very well represented
in the writings of the grammarians because of
the special interest it held for the scholars of
the 3rd and 4th centuries A.H., especially for
lexicographers like Ibn Durayd
and Našwān. Although home
to a host of South Arabian dialects, Yemen
does not reflect much South Arabian influence,
except for some lexical items that may be mere
loanwords from that language. A good example
is the word baˁl ‘lord’, which is still common in
Mehri.
During the time of al-Hamadānī, the main source on Yemen, a dialect
similar to the Central Arabian Bedouin dialects
was spoken in the region east of Sarāt and
in the extreme south. Al-Hamadānī describes
these dialects as ‘correct’ Arabic. In the central
and western regions of the Sarāt, different dialects
were spoken. These dialects are characterized
by al-Hamadānī as mutawassi† ‘middle’.
Rabin claims that this attribute must
mean that they were mixtures of Arabic and
Himyaritic. In the southern part of Sarāt and the
mountains around Sanˁāˀ, the language showed
strong traces of Himyaritic. In the area to the
west, a mixture of Arabic and Himyaritic was
spoken. In the villages, however, Himyaritic
was predominant. Outside the villages, in the
nomadic areas, West Arabian dialects were
spoken. Thus, there were two
linguistic communities in Yemen, apart from
the Bedouin in the east. The first was that
of the settled farmer groups, which spoke a
mixture of Himyaritic and Arabic, while the
other group consisted of the nomadic people
who spoke West Arabian dialects. Although
the Yemeni dialects spoken in this region were
very similar to other Arabic dialects, Arabs
considered them incomprehensible. There are
several anecdotes in the literature showing that
Arabs did not consider the dialects of Himyar
Arabic to be similar to their own. The attribute
ṭumṭumāniyya was given in the literature to the
Himyaritic dialect as a form of mockery.
The northern Yemen region hosted tribes
speaking dialects so similar to each other that
they could be considered a defined group. This
group was different from the rest of Yemen
in the south and Huḏayl and the Hijāz in the
north. Despite being distinct from both groups,
the dialects of northern Yemen exhibited similarities
with both. Rabin claims
that because grammarians often ascribed Hijazī
dialect features to Kināna, this region can be
considered as an extension to the West Arabian
dialect group. Among the tribes that lived in
this region were Kināna, Xaṯˁam, Hamadān,
ˁAnbar, Zubayd, and Murād. The first four of
these tribes are frequently mentioned in literature,
but whenever a feature is mentioned as
belonging to a certain tribe, it may have applied
to the rest of the tribes as well. Rabin
also assumes that whenever the grammarians
mention the tribes of Yemen, they mean these
tribes living in the northern part.
Among the
features mentioned for these dialects are the
following:

The absence of ˀimāla. Al-Hamadānī, however, states that the Bedouin tribe of Banū Harb in the south realized ˀimāla.
The realization of hamza. However, in some cases the original hamza of the word was changed into the glide w. An example is ±ātaytu/wātaytu ‘I obeyed’. This feature is still heard in some modern dialects.
In some Yemenite dialects, the feminine ending -at was generalized to pause positions. Yemenite dialect words may have received tanwīn even in the pause position.
The definite article of the Yemenite dialect was am-. Unlike the Arabic definite article al-, it was not assimilated to dental and sibilant consonants. Words that received this article could also be given tanwīn. An example is found in al-Firuzabadī's Muḥīṭ : mani m-qāˀimun ‘who is standing?’
The dual suffix in northern Yemen, -āni, was suffixed to the noun. Although other tribes in the peninsula used a single dual ending as well, they coupled it with a different treatment of the final short vowel. They either used -āna as a fixed form or inflected the ending. This feature was ascribed to Dabba in the northwest of the Empty Quarter, which shows that this feature cut across dialect boundaries.
There was a sentence-initial particle ±am that was used with the verb in the imperfect. vii. In southern Yemen, especially in ðufār, the demonstrative pronoun for both genders was ḏī, which followed the noun it modified, e.g. iš-šuÿl ḏī ‘this work’.
The relative pronoun was ḏī, without distinction for gender or number. It was used in western Ḥaḍramawt and elsewhere. In other places of Yemen and as far north as Huḏayl, the Classical Arabic pronoun allaḏī was used, but without distinction for number or gender.
The negative particle was dū. Another form, still used in Taˁizz, in the southernmost part of Yemen, is da±. This particle may stem from £imyaritic, since a particle da± was found in some of the South Arabian inscriptions around the middle of the 6th century C.E.
The suffix of the 1st and 2nd persons of the verb in the perfect is -k, not -t. A good example is the saying of a woman: raˀayku bi-ḥulm kawaladku ibnan min ṭīb ‘I saw in a dream that I gave birth to a son of gold’. The verbs raˀayku ‘I saw’ and waladku ‘I gave birth’ end in this suffix. The same use is still current in the Yemeni countryside