JOHNSON has touched on Arabic and its variety quite a few times over the years, but we have never really addressed a critical question directly: what is “Arabic” today, and is it really even a single thing?

A short and simplified version of the story follows: the prophet Muhammad wrote (or received from Allah directly) the Koran in the seventh century. He then conquered nearly all of Arabia as a political and military leader. His successors—four “rightly guided” caliphs and then the Umayyad caliphs—spread Islam further still, until the Islamic world stretched from Spain to Pakistan. Arabic-speaking soldiers and administrators settled in all of these places, and their language gradually took root among local populations, who up until that point spoke languages from rustic Latin to Berber to Coptic to Persian. 

That was almost 1400 years ago. The Arabic of the Koran remained a prestigious and nearly unchanging standard throughout the Islamic world. This is what most Arabs consider “Arabic”. But all spoken languages change, all the time, and the Arabic people actually used on the streets and in their homes, predictably enough, changed quite a lot…Continue reading

via Johnson http://www.economist.com/node/21579807?fsrc=rss