All Lines Lead to Proto-Arabic.

A Facebook post by our old pal Slavomír Čéplö/bulbul pointed me to Ahmad Al-Jallad’s All lines lead to Proto-Arabic: a review article on Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies [2025], 1–16), in which Al-Jallad (seen here in 2018 and 2022) does a thorough demolition job on Owens’ book, which sounds like a classic case of an expert in a limited field trying to extend his expertise too widely (cf. John McWhorter). It begins (I omit the footnotes):

The past century or so has witnessed what one might call a “documentary turn” in the study of Arabic’s history. The full range of modern Arabic’s dialectal diversity came into focus as linguists began to produce descriptions of peripheral dialects, spanning from Central Asia to the Yemeni highlands and from Cypress to Chad. Sociolinguistic approaches to the dialects have advanced our understanding of language change and dialect formation in real time. The epigraphic exploration of Arabia revealed a “Jāhiliyyah” with stunning linguistic diversity, even when compared to the rich materials compiled by the Arabic Grammarians. Contrary to the commonly held belief, Arabic was not alone in Arabia, but was rather a part of a rich linguistic landscape, lost to history until recently. The discovery and study of papyri from the early Islamic period afford a unique view into the written register of Arabic before the rise of the grammatical tradition, and both pre-modern Christian and Jewish Arabic materials attest to writing traditions that existed parallel to normative Classical Arabic, and shed valuable light on the pre-modern dialectal landscape. The combination of these new sources of data and approaches have rendered the traditional view of Arabic’s past obsolete, and so the time is ripe to synthesize this material into the writing of new linguistic histories of Arabic.

The work under review is the latest monograph by Professor Jonathan Owens, a renowned authority on the Arabic dialects of Nigeria, Libya, and Chad, who has made significant contributions to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology at large. Owens should be congratulated for the great effort put into this work, which spans over 500 pages. In this book, he builds on the case made in Owens (2006/9) that the field of Arabic historical linguistics has been fundamentally misguided, giving undue weight to older attested stages of the language when it comes to reconstruction. Here, he attempts to build a new, “non-linear” paradigm with a focus on the history of the modern Arabic vernaculars, but draws also on other sources such as epigraphy and papyri. […]

This model, however, is not necessarily wrong. Proto-Semitic, as any other Proto-language, is the hypothetical, reconstructed ancestor of all attested members of the Semitic language family. Every Semitic language must descend, by definition, from Proto-Semitic; Old Arabic is no exception. Yes, there are intervening stages, splits and sub-groupings – no Semiticist, to my knowledge, has ever claimed that Arabic was an independent branch of Proto-Semitic – but as a simplistic model, this illustrates an uncontroversial fact, not only in comparative Semitics but in the field of historical/diachronic linguistics in general. Now, his next issue seems to be with understanding Neo-Arabic, a concise way of saying modern vernacular Arabic, as a descendant of Old Arabic. It is hard to understand what the problem here is either. Old Arabic, at least the definition used by Van Putten and me, is not a single attested variety, but rather a chronological term that refers to all varieties of Arabic spoken/written prior to the rise of the Medinan state – we sometimes have evidence for these varieties in writing but the vast majority of the linguistic diversity of this period has been lost to history. Since Old Arabic encompasses all Arabics prior to, say, the mid-seventh century ᴄᴇ, it is obvious that the modern vernaculars are later, changed forms, in other words, descendants, of these varieties, whether attested or otherwise. To my knowledge, nobody has ever claimed that the modern Arabic dialects descend linearly from any attested Old Arabic epigraphic variety. If Old Arabic here is meant to substitute for Classical Arabic, it is safe to say that such an assumption has been long abandoned, and most recent work in Arabic historical linguistics does not operate within such a model. A final way to interpret this model would be that older attested forms of a language are by default more linguistically archaic than later attested ones. But even this is not a position any professional linguists hold. No Semiticist, for example, has ever argued that Akkadian phonology is more archaic than Modern South Arabian because it is attested over four-thousand years earlier. Indeed, it has been long recognized that Arabic is more conservative than Hebrew and Aramaic in terms of nominal morphology despite its being attested later. Indeed, there is interesting work being done on how modern vernacular Arabic can be in some respects more archaic than normative Classical Arabic. As such, the objections here do not seem to be directed at any real positions held by contemporary Semiticists or Arabists.

There is no overarching narrative guiding the book’s argument. Instead, the subsequent parts consist of a series of correctives and case studies, of varying detail, some of which are new and others previously published, on pre-modern forms of Arabic and the modern dialects. These studies are meant to show how Arabic is a “composite”, “non-linear” language. Owens understands this and is “unapologetic” for not developing a history of Arabic, which he seems to consider to be impossible because, according to him, “Arabic language history is inherently contradictory of classic comparative historical linguistic concepts” (p. 432). I would maintain that Arabic is, in fact, a normal human language and there is nothing inherently exceptional about its development, but rather it is the present methodological approach to its history that is responsible in large part for this apparent conundrum, as we shall see throughout the course of this review article. Since the monograph lacks a unified structure and does not argue the thesis presented in its introduction in a coherent way throughout the work, the only way to engage with it is to scrutinize the case studies, their data and argumentation. While some of these studies offer some interesting insights regarding the development of individual Arabic dialectal features, those that go beyond this are often highly problematic, both in terms of facts and method. The remainder of this review will focus on a number of these critical issues, ultimately demonstrating that Owens’ attempt at re-imagining Arabic linguistic history is based on a faulty foundation and is ultimately unsuccessful.

I don’t know much about the history of Arabic, but it’s a pleasure to read someone who knows what he’s talking about, even if I sometimes get lost in the details. That quote “Arabic language history is inherently contradictory of classic comparative historical linguistic concepts” made me roll my eyes hard. And I like the fact that Al-Jallad gives credit when appropriate:

While many of Owens’ unconventional assumptions are certainly open to debate, the data he presents are of much interest and will be a good starting point for future discussion and elaboration. It is important to emphasize that none of these case studies undermine Arabic’s classification as a Central Semitic language, nor do they challenge a conventional understanding of language development. The final part of this section addresses the issue of speech community and its relevance to historical reconstruction, with a lengthy and interesting case study on the varieties of Arabic spoken in Nigeria and the Lake Chad area.

Those varieties are, of course, Owens’ specialty; ne sutor ultra crepidam!