ABSTRACT
Arabic is by far the Semitic (or indeed Afroasiatic) language with the greatest number of speakers, probably now in excess of 200 million, although a completely satisfying and accurate estimate is lacking. It is the major language throughout the Arab world, i.e. Egypt, Sudan, Libya, the North African countries usually referred to as the Maghrib (such as Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria), Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, the Gulf countries, etc., and it is even the major language of non-Arab countries such as the Republic of Chad in central Africa (i.e. more Chadians speak Arabic as their mother tongue than any other language). Arabic is also a minority language in other countries such as Nigeria, Iran (Khuzistan),
and former Soviet Central Asia (though these Central Asian varieties of Arabic are heavily endangered). Furthermore, Arabic is in wide use throughout the Muslim world as a second language (e.g. in Somalia, a member of the Arab League) and as a learned, liturgical language (e.g. in Pakistan, India, Indonesia). Indeed, among orthodox Muslims Arabic is luƔat almala-?ikah ‘the language of the angels’, and the language par excellence in the world since Allah himself speaks Arabic and has revealed his Holy Book, the Koran (qur?a-n), in the Arabic language. One can also easily comprehend that the Arabs are very proud of their (most beautiful) language, since there is even a verb ?a ?raba ‘to speak clearly and eloquently’ from the root ?RB, also occurring in the word al ?arabiyyah ‘the Arabic language’ or lisa-n ?arabı-‘the Arabic language’ in the Koran. There is even a historical dialect of Arabic, Maltese, sometimes, although erroneously,
called Maltese Arabic, which, through its isolation from the rest of the so-called Arab world, developed into a new Semitic language in its own right (a similar, but weaker, argument could be made for Cypriot Maronite Arabic). The two major reasons for my claiming that Maltese is not to be regarded synchronically as a dialect of Arabic are: (1) Maltese, if an Arabic dialect today, would be one without diglossia, i.e. it does not have Classical Arabic as a high level of language (more on this important topic later); and (2) it would be the only Arabic dialect normally written in the Latin Script.
