ABSTRACT
This rather short chapter is dedicated to setting the stage for understanding the ecology of the Arabian Peninsula in pre-Islamic times. Ecology is the external non-linguistic factors that help us contextualize and navigate through the blurred historical and structural boundaries among varieties and mitigate the acuity of data shortage, as the knowledge of the stars and the four main directions help a lost hiker in the wilderness (Steffensen and Fill 2014: 6). This chapter, therefore, is not a historical narrative of events. It is rather an attempt to isolate relevant aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia to the emergence and development of Arabic and the interaction of its speakers with the speakers of other languages.
