ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘Middle Arabic’ (MA) was introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century by the German Arabist Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer as the name for a post-conquest language-variety attested in medieval written texts. C. H. M. Versteegh recognizes the existence of various types of MA texts. He categorizes these types based on: the ethnicity and religious confession of their producers/writers, and periodization of MA into medieval MA texts and contemporary MA. The term MA has been used primarily by two schools in modern scholarship: historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. Some people regard MA as a discrete variety of the language, a special brand of Arabic, situated between the Classical language and the colloquial language. Regarding the diversity of Medieval MA (MMA) texts, Benjamin H. Hary divides MA into two subvarieties: Literary Written MA and Dialectal Spoken MA. MMA is, on the synchronic level, a multi-level scriptolect/variety.
