Palestinian Arabic - Influence of Other Languages

Influence of Other Languages

The variations between dialects reflect the different historical steps of arabization of the Palestinian, and the variety of localities from Palestinian had come. Until the 7th Century, the area used to speak predominantly Aramaic (as witnessed, for example, in the Jewish Aramaic and Christian Aramaic literature), as well as Greek (probably in upper or trader social classes) and some traces of Hebrew. At that time, Arabic speaking people living in the Jordan desert beyond Zarqa, Amman or Karak had no significant influence - on the contrary they tended to adopt Aramaic as a written language as shown in Nabatean texts of Petra or Palmyrenian documents of Tadmor.

Arabization of the population occurred most probably in several waves. After the Arabs took control of the area, so as to maintain their regular activity, the upper classes had quickly to get fluency in the language of the new masters who most probably were only few. The main phenomenon could have been the slow shift of Aramaic-speaking villages to Arabic under the influence of Arabicized elites.

This scenario is consistent with several facts.

• The rural forms can be correlated with features also observed in the few Syrian villages where use of Aramaic has been retained up to this day. Palatalization of /k/, pronunciation of /q/ for instance. Note that the first also exists in Najdi and Gulf Arabic, but limited to palatal contexts (k followed by i or e). Moreover those eastern dialects have or for /q/.
• The less-evolutive urban forms can be explained by a limitation owed to the contacts urban trader classes had to maintain with Arabic speakers of other towns in Syria or Egypt.
• The Bedouins dialect shares a number of features with Hijazi dialects.

This scenario may also be consistent with the fact that the rural dialects of Palestinian Arabic contain features that appear to resemble their classical Hebrew counterparts.

• The clearest example is the second and third person plural pronouns. hemme (they masc.) and henne (they fem.) resembles Hebrew hēm / hēn as against Classical Arabic hum/hunna, Aramaic hennōn/hennēn and general Levantine Arabic hunne. Similarly the suffixes -kem (you or your, masc.) and -ken observed in Bīr-Zēt resembles Hebrew -khem / -khen as against Classical Arabic -kum and -kunna and Aramaic -kōn / -kēn and northern Levantine Arabic -kon.
• A less clear example is the transformation of glottal stop followed by long alif (alif madda) into an "o" sound, as in the form Ana bokel (أنا بوكل) noted above. This certainly occurs in the future forms of Hebrew verbs with an aleph as the first consonant of their root. However, it is equally characteristic of Aramaic.