Andalusi Arabic
Andalusi Arabic or Andalusian Arabic was a variety or varieties of Arabic spoken mainly from the 8th to the 15th century in Al-Andalus, the regions of the Iberian Peninsula under the Muslim rule.
Arabic spread gradually over the centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia, primarily through conversion to Islam, although it was also learned and spoken by Christians and Jews. Arabic became the language of administration and was the primary language of literature produced in al-Andalus; the Andalusi vernacular was distinct among medieval Arabic vernaculars in that it was used in poetry, in zajal and the kharjas of muwaššaḥāt.
Arabic in al-Andalus existed largely in a situation of bilingualism with Andalusi Romance until the 13th century. Arabic in Iberia was also characterized by diglossia: in addition to standard written Arabic, spoken varieties could be subdivided into an urban, educated idiolect and a register of the less-privileged masses.
After the fall of Granada in 1492, the Catholic rulers suppressed the use of Arabic, persecuting its speakers, passing policies against its use, and expelling the Moriscos in the early 17th century, after which Arabic became an extinct language in Iberia. An Andalusi variety of Arabic continued to be spoken to some degree in North Africa after the expulsion, and it was notably preserved in Andalusi classical music traditions in North Africa. Andalusi speakers influenced the speech of those Maghrebi communities into which they fled and assimilated.
Spoken Andalusi Arabic had distinct features. It is unique among colloquial dialects in retaining from Standard Arabic the internal passive voice through vocalization. Through contact with Romance, spoken Andalusi Arabic adopted the phonemes and. Like the other Iberian languages, Andalusi lacked vowel length but had stress instead. A feature shared with Maghrebi Arabic was that the first-person imperfect was marked with the prefix n- like the plural in Standard Arabic, necessitating an analogical imperfect first-person plural, constructed with the suffix -ū. A feature characteristic of it was the extensive imala that transformed alif into an /e/ or /i/.
History
Origins
The Muslim conquest of Spain in 711, about a century after the death of Muhammad, involved a few thousand Arab tribesmen and a much larger number of partially Arabicized Amazigh, many of whom spoke little to no Arabic. According to Consuelo López-Morillas, "this population sowed the seeds of what was to grow into an indigenous Andalusi Arabic."Unlike the Visigothic conquest of Hispania, through which Latin remained the dominant language, the Muslim conquest brought a language that was a "vehicle for a higher culture, a literate and literary civilization."
Spread
Over the centuries, Arabic spread gradually in al-Andalus, primarily through conversion to Islam. While Alvarus of Cordoba lamented in the 9th century that Christians were no longer using Latin, Richard Bulliet estimates that only 50% of the population of al-Andalus had converted to Islam by the death of Abd al-Rahman III in 961, and 80% by 1100. By about 1260, Muslim territories in Iberia were reduced to the Emirate of Granada, in which more than 90% of the population had converted to Islam and Arabic-Romance bilingualism seems to have disappeared.File:Letter.jpg|thumb|A letter handwritten in Judeo-Arabic by Judah ha-Levi. While Muslims did not write in vernacular registers of Arabic, Andalusi Jews would write in colloquial Arabic with Hebrew script.The colloquial Arabic of al-Andalus was prominent among the varieties of Arabic of its time in its use for literary purposes, especially in zajal poetry and proverbs and aphorisms.
Demise
After the Fall of Granada in 1492, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros oversaw the forced mass conversion of the population in the Spanish Inquisition and the burning of Andalusi manuscripts in Granada. In 1502, the Muslims of Granada were forced to choose between conversion and exile; those who converted became known as the Moriscos. In 1526, Charles V —issued an edict against "heresy", including the use of Arabic, extending the restriction to Muslims throughout the rest of Spain, the Mudéjars. The Moriscos managed to get this suspended for forty years by the payment of a large sum. King Philip II of Spain's finally banned the use of Arabic throughout Spain—forbidding Moriscos from the use of Arabic on all occasions, formal and informal, speaking and writing—leading directly to the Rebellion of the Alpujarras. Still, Andalusi Arabic remained in use in certain areas of Spain until the final expulsion of the Moriscos at the beginning of the 17th century.Legacy
Andalusi Arabic is still used in Andalusi classical music and has significantly influenced the dialects of such towns as Sfax in Tunisia, Rabat, Salé, Fès, Tétouan and Tangier in Morocco, Nedroma, Tlemcen, Blida, Jijel, and Cherchell in Algeria, and Alexandria in Egypt. Andalusi Arabic also influenced Andalusi Romance, Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish varieties, Catalan, Portuguese, Classical Arabic and Moroccan, Tunisian, Egyptian, Hassani and Algerian Arabics.Sociolinguistic features
Prestige
Under Muslim rule, Arabic became a superstrate, prestige language and the dominant medium of literary and intellectual expression in the southern half of the peninsula from the 8th century to the 13th century. Consuelo Lopez-Morillas notes that poetic genres such as zajal and the popular literature of proverbs and aphorisms demonstrate that, among speakers of Andalusi Arabic, there was a "consciousness of, and even pride in, the distinctiveness of the dialect, its suppleness and expressivity."Multilingualism and language contact
Romance
Arabic in al-Andalus existed largely in a situation of bilingualism with Romance until the 13th century, when the Almohad expansion into Iberia led to the flight of Christians living under Muslim rule in the south of Iberia northward to territories under Christian rule and to the reduction of territory under Muslim rule to the Emirate of Granada following a sequence of Christian conquests of Muslim cities.Of the approximately 600 known secular Arabic muwaššaḥāt, there about 50 with kharjas in Andalusi Romance or containing some Romance words or elements.
The influence of Romance on Andalusi Arabic was especially pronounced in situations of daily Arabic-Romance contact. For example, an Arabic letter written by a Valencian Morisco in 1595 contained constructions such as and .
The influence of Arabic on Spanish resulting from this linguistic contact has been thoroughly studied, but Romance also reciprocally influenced Andalusi Arabic. Dialectical features of Andalusi Arabic owing to Arabic-Romance bilingualism and contact include of the adoption of the phonemes and ; the substitution of the traditional Arabic vowel length for the Iberian syllabic stress ; and the change of gender of some nouns to corresponding the gender in Romance, such as the feminine Arabic nouns ʿayn and shams, which became masculine in al-Andalus, matching ojo and sol.