Mesopotamian Arabic

Mesopotamian Arabic (Arabic: لهجة بلاد ما بين النهرين) is a group of varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into southeastern Turkey, Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and spoken in Iraqi diaspora communities.[1][2]

Mesopotamian Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
اللهجة العراقية
Native toIraq (Mesopotamia), Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, parts of northern and eastern Arabia[1]
RegionMesopotamia, Armenian highlands, Cilicia
SpeakersGilit/South (acm): 19 million (2020)[1]
Qeltu/North (ayp): 10 million (2020)[1]
Dialects
Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
acm – Mesopotamian Arabic
ayp – North Mesopotamian Arabic
Glottologmeso1252
nort3142

History

Aramaic was the lingua franca in Mesopotamia from the early 1st millennium BCE until the late 1st millennium CE, and as may be expected, Mesopotamian Arabic shows signs of an Aramaic substrate.[3] The Gelet and the Judeo-Iraqi varieties have retained features of Babylonian Aramaic.[3]

Varieties

Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties: Gilit Mesopotamian Arabic and Qeltu Mesopotamian Arabic. Their names derive from the form of the word for "I said" in each variety.[4] Gilit Arabic is a Bedouin variety spoken by Muslims (both sedentary and non-sedentary) in central and southern Iraq and by nomads in the rest of Iraq. Qeltu Arabic is an urban dialect spoken by Non-Muslims of central and southern Iraq (including Baghdad) and by the sedentary population (both Muslims and Non-Muslims) of the rest of the country.[5] Non-Muslims include Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, until most of them left Iraq in the 1940s–1950s.[6][7] Geographically, the gelet–qeltu classification roughly corresponds to respectively Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Mesopotamia.[8] The isogloss is between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, around Fallujah and Samarra.[8]

During the Siege of Baghdad (1258), the Mongols killed all Muslims.[9] However, sedentary Christians and Jews were spared and northern Iraq was untouched.[9] In southern Iraq, sedentary Muslims were gradually replaced by Bedouins from the countryside.[9] This explains the current dialect distribution: in the south, everyone speaks Bedouin varieties close to Gulf Arabic (continuation of the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian Peninsula),[9][10] with the exception of urban Non-Muslims who continue to speak pre-1258 qeltu dialects while in the north the original qeltu dialect is still spoken by all, Muslims and Non-Muslims alike.[9]

Gilit/qǝltu verb contrasts[11]
s-stemBedouin/gilitSedentary/qǝltu
1st SGḏạrab-tfataḥ-tu
2nd m. SGḏạrab-tfataḥ-t
2nd f. SGtišṛab-īntǝšrab-īn
2nd PLtišṛab-ūntǝšrab-ūn
3rd PLyišṛab-ūnyǝšrab-ūn

Dialects

Gelet dialects include:[8]

  1. Northern Mesopotamian group
    1. Syrian šāwi dialects (including Urfa and al-Raqqah)
    2. Rural dialects of northern and central Iraq.
  2. Central Iraqi Group
    1. Muslim Baghdad Arabic
    2. The Sunni area around Baghdad
  3. Southern Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic group
    1. Urban dialects
    2. Rural dialects
    3. Marshland dialects of the Marsh Arabs of the Mesopotamian Marshes

Qeltu dialects include:[8]

  1. Anatolian Qeltu
    1. Mardin dialects: Mardin and surrounding villages. Mhallami. Nusaybin and Cizre (Jews)
    2. Siirt dialects
    3. Diyarbakır dialects: Diyarbakır (Christians and Jews), Diyarbakır villages (Christians), Siverek, Çermik and Urfa (Jews)
    4. Kozluk–Sason–Muş dialects
  2. Tigris Qeltu
    1. Maslawi: Mosul and surrounding villages (Bahzani, Bashiqa, Ain Sifni)
    2. Tikrit and surroundings
    3. Baghdad and southern Iraq (Jews and Christians only)
  3. Euphrates Qeltu
    1. Khawetna (Syria, Iraq, Turkey)
    2. Deir ez-Zor
    3. Anah and Abu Kamal
    4. Hit, Iraq
  4. Kurdistan group (Jews only)
    1. Northern Kurdistan: Sandur, Iraq, Akre, Erbil, Šoš
    2. Southern Kurdistan: Kirkuk, Tuz Khurmatu, Khanaqin

Baghdadi Arabic is Iraq's de facto national vernacular, as about half of population speaks it as a mother tongue, and most other Iraqis understand it. It is spreading to northern cities as well.[12] Moslawi and Baghdadi are as different as Glaswegian and Cockney: barely intelligible to one another.[12] Other Arabic speakers cannot easily understand Moslawi and Baghdadi.[12]

Substrate

Mesopotamian Arabic has a Syriac-Aramaic substrate,[13] and also shares significant influences from ancient Mesopotamian languages of Sumerian and Akkadian, as well as influences from Persian, Turkish, and Greek. Mesopotamian Arabic is said to be the most Syriac-Aramaic influenced dialect of Arabic, due to Syriac-Aramaic having originated in Mesopotamia, and spread throughout the Fertile Crescent during the Neo-Assyrian period, eventually becoming the lingua franca of the entire region before the Islamic invasions.[14][15][16]

References
  1. Mesopotamian Arabic at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
    North Mesopotamian Arabic at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
  2. Enam al-Wer, Rudolf Erik de Jong, ed. (2009). Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. Vol. 53. Brill. pp. 99–100. ISBN 9789047425595.
  3. Muller-Kessler, Christa (2003). "Aramaic 'K', Lyk' and Iraqi Arabic 'Aku, Maku: The Mesopotamian Particles of Existence". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 123 (3): 641–646. doi:10.2307/3217756. JSTOR 3217756.
  4. Mitchell, T. F. (1990). Pronouncing Arabic, Volume 2. Clarendon Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-19-823989-0.
  5. Jasim, Maha Ibrahim (2022-12-15). "The Linguistic Heritage of the Maṣlāwī Dialect in Iraq". CREID Working Paper 18. doi:10.19088/creid.2022.015.
  6. Holes, Clive, ed. (2018). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Oxford University Press. p. 337. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
  7. Procházka, Stephan (2018). "3.2. The Arabic dialects of northern Iraq". In Haig, Geoffrey; Khan, Geoffrey (eds.). The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 243–266. doi:10.1515/9783110421682-008. ISBN 978-3-11-042168-2. S2CID 134361362.
  8. Ahmed, Abdulkareem Yaseen (2018). Phonological variation and change in Mesopotamia: a study of accent levelling in the Arabic dialect of Mosul (PhD thesis). Newcastle University.
  9. Holes, Clive (2006). Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J.; Trudgill, Peter (eds.). "The Arabian Peninsula and Iraq/Die arabische Halbinsel und der Irak". Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik, Part 3. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter: 1937. doi:10.1515/9783110184181.3.9.1930. ISBN 978-3-11-019987-1.
  10. Al‐Wer, Enam; Jong, Rudolf (2017). "Dialects of Arabic". In Boberg, Charles; Nerbonne, John; Watt, Dominic (eds.). The Handbook of Dialectology. Wiley. p. 529. doi:10.1002/9781118827628.ch32. ISBN 978-1-118-82755-0. OCLC 989950951.
  11. Prochazka, Stephan (2018). "The Northern Fertile Crescent". In Holes, Clive (ed.). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Oxford University Press. p. 266. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0009. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
  12. Collin, Richard Oliver (2009). "Words of War: The Iraqi Tower of Babel". International Studies Perspectives. 10 (3): 245–264. doi:10.1111/j.1528-3585.2009.00375.x.
  13. del Rio Sanchez, Francisco (2013). "Influences of Aramaic on dialectal Arabic". In Sala, Juan Pedro Monferrer; Watson, Wilfred G. E. (eds.). Archaism and Innovation in the Semitic Languages: Selected Papers. Oriens Academic. ISBN 978-84-695-7829-2.
  14. Afsaruddin, Asma; Zahniser, A. H. Mathias, eds. (1997). Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff. Penn State University Press. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1w36pkt. ISBN 978-1-57506-020-0. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv1w36pkt.
  15. Smart, J. R. (2013). Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language And Literature. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315026503. ISBN 978-1-136-78805-5.
  16. R. J. al-Mawsely, al-Athar, al-Aramiyyah fi lughat al-Mawsil al-amiyyah (Lexicon: Aramaic in the popular language of Mosul): Baghdad 1963

Further reading
Mesopotamian Arabic test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
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