ABSTRACT

This chapter is a continuation of the topic of contact and language shift discussed in Chapter 9. I will introduce here a summary of the attempts by modern historical linguists to understand and explain the linguistic situation and structural changes that emerged after the Arab conquests in the Middle East and North Africa (symbolized by the medium dark color in Map 9.1 ). We will note in this chapter that the attitude towards New Arabic in particular and the post-conquest linguistic situation in general hinges to a large extent on the scholarly perception of the pre-Islamic linguistic situation. We will also note in this chapter that the scholarly views discussed here can be characterized as follows: first contradictory to one another, at least in some parts. Second, they are also partial, but not full theories. We will see theories that claim that the new vernaculars after the conquests are the product of the incomplete learning process of the language. According to these theories, the pre-Islamic dialects were quite similar to the Classical Arabic model. Other theories make the claim that the features of New Arabic dialects are a continuation of innovations in pre-Islamic dialects. Ecological data indicate the partial plausibility of all these assumptions. In addition, some of the theoretical claims can be applied to particular structural features and not to others.