ABSTRACT
This chapter is based entirely on the data presented in the previous one. The linguistic features described in Chapter 5 will be analyzed in this chapter to show potential and tentative signs of development in the dialects of pre-Islamic Arabic. This chapter discusses particular signs of linguistic development in the pre-Islamic Arabic dialects towards the features of modern Arabic dialects after the Arab conquests. The chapter will also take into consideration the geographical and tribal locations of the developments to suggest that some of the innovations had contact-induced nature and incentives, which can be traced. This chapter is both general and very short, because the following two chapters discuss two detailed case studies of particular dialectal features that were in a state of development in pre-Islamic times. This chapter can be, therefore, taken as an introduction to the following two chapters. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I will group together some general remarks on trends in the dialects. Due to data shortage, these remarks are somewhat basic. In the second section, I will use the available data together with relevant historical factors to show that we can talk of movement routes for innovations. It is important to include movement route possibilities when we move forward to our two case studies in the coming two chapters. The third section will identify the isoglosses that identify dialect groups. We will see that the data justify two separate groups: Hijazi/western and Najdi/eastern dialects, and a Yemeni group in the south.
