ABSTRACT
Who used what language to whom and when in Islamic Spain? Al-Andalus offers us a typical example of a medieval multilingual society, typical, unfortunately, in that it is as difficult to organize and to systematize the facts and the internal differences for Islamic Spain as it is for many other territories. In al-Andalus there is no man on the Clapham omnibus whose practice might enlighten us about the patterns of language use in his society as a whole. The variety is too great. What is said of the northern part of the country is not necessarily correct of other areas; cities may well offer patterns different from those of the countryside; the earlier periods differ very much from later ones; class and education introduce other variables; and sex probably does so too. Categorization, again, is very difficult: in terms of language itself, there is the difference between spoken and written forms of any specific language; for their users we have to organize a mixed bag of ethnic and religious boundary markers between and within groups; and in using terms like bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia, and so on there is the risk of appearing to give more exactness to the situation than the facts themselves often warrant. What I should like to do here is simply to attempt to offer a broad systematization of this variety, as a preliminary to other studies of very varied sorts.
