ABSTRACT
Arabic is by far the largest Semitic language, not only of today but of all times. No other Semitic language has ever occupied an area of similar dimensions or been spoken by so many millions of people. It is impossible to determine how many Arabic dialects exist. There are hundreds of them if you define dialects as differing significantly in structure; if you define them as varieties just recognizably different from each other, there are tens of thousands. Although there is such a large number of Arabic dialects and although their development started more than 1000 years ago, one would be reluctant to use the term language for any one Arabic dialect. They are thus quite unlike the Romance languages which developed from Latin. There are only a few exceptions to this. One, and perhaps the most striking, example of an independent language deriving from vernacular Arabic is Maltese. Another one, in my view, is Uzbekistan Arabic, a claim which I shall try I to substantiate in this short paper.
