The Lexical Component in the Aramaic Substrate

of Palestinian Arabic

Mila Neishtadt

1 A Brief Background to Palestinian Arabic

The term ‘Palestinian Arabic’ (hereafter PA) designates several socially hetero-
geneous dialect groups. Scholarly research traditionally divides PA into three
such groups, spoken by town-dwellers, villagers, and Bedouin.1 Each of these
dialect groups displays religious and/or geographical variations. PA is spoken
by a variety of religious groups: Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Samaritans.
Gender and age are sometimes important factors in language variation as well.
The political situation also has an impact: the strong influence of Modern
Hebrew (evident especially in the lexicon) can be immediately noticed in the
Arabic spoken by Palestinians/Arabs with Israeli citizenship.2 Consequently,
as with every ‘language’, there is much more than one variety of PA.
It would be misleading to understand the term PA in an exclusively geo-
graphical sense: Arabic dialects spoken by the Bedouin population in the
Negev and in Galilee are both different from each other and different from
PA as a whole.3 In order to avoid confusion, the term PA is usually applied to
a single linguistic type: the sedentary Arabic of the Syro-Palestinian dialectal
group spoken in Palestine.4
It is widely accepted that Hebrew ceased to be spoken in Palestine around
the 2nd century CE and was gradually supplanted by Aramaic, several varieties
of which were spoken by Christians, Jews, Samaritans, and pagans. During the
Roman and the Byzantine periods, before the Arab conquests, these varieties

* I would like to thank Simon Hopkins for introducing me to this fascinating subject and guid-
ing me through my first steps. I am grateful to Yishai Neuman for his most helpful remarks.
Any mistakes are mine alone.
1 Heikki Palva, “A General Classification for the Arabic Dialects Spoken in Palestine and
Transjordan,” StOr 55 (1984): 371–372.
2 Muhammad Hasan Amara, “Hebrew and English Borrowings in Palestinian Arabic in Israel: A
Sociolinguistic Study in Lexical Integration and Diffusion,” in Yasir Suleiman (ed.), Language
and Society in the Middle East and North Africa (Richmond, 1999), 81–103.
3 Palva, “Classification,” 371–372; Rony Henkin, Negev Arabic: Dialectal, Sociolinguistic, and
Stylistic Variation (Wiesbaden, 2010), 48–49.
4 Simon Hopkins, “Notes on the History of the Arabic Language in Palestine,” LiCCOSEC 20
(2011): 51.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004300156_016

the aramaic substrate of palestinian arabic 281

of Aramaic, influenced by Greek, were the dominant spoken language of

Palestine.5 Like other cases of language shift, the shift from Aramaic to Arabic
in Palestine must not be understood as a sharp replacement of one spoken
language by another accomplished within a generation or two, but rather as
a gradual and lengthy process, probably with a significant phase of Aramaic-
Arabic bilingualism.6 Moreover, the contact between Aramaic and Arabic in
this area was not limited to the period following the Arab conquests: Arabic-
speaking communities existed on the outskirts of Palestine before the time
of the conquests;7 in fact, most of the few known Arabic inscriptions which
predate Islam are from Syria and Palestine.8 On the other hand, some Aramaic-
speaking communities maintained Aramaic as their spoken language well into
the Muslim period. One example is the Samaritans, who became a monolin-
gual Arabic-speaking community apparently only from the 11th century CE
onwards.9 The Aramaic > Arabic shift in the Levant has not yet been entirely
completed: until very recently, three Western Neo-Aramaic-speaking commu-
nities populated the Syrian villages of Maʽlūla, Baxʽa, and Jubbʽadīn. During
the course of the Syrian Civil War, Maʽlūla and Baxʽa were severely hit and
depopulated.10
As in other cases of language shift, the supplanting language (Arabic) was
not left untouched by the supplanted language (Aramaic) and the existence
of an Aramaic substrate in Syro-Palestinian colloquial Arabic has been widely

5 Klaus Beyer (trans. J. F. Healey), The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions
(Göttingen, 1986), 34–43, 46–53.
6 On the history of Arabic-Aramaic language contact, see Stefan Weninger, “Aramaic-
Arabic Language Contact,” in idem (ed.), The Semitic Languages (Berlin, 2011), 747–755.
For an example of the linguistic status in the monastic communities of Palestine in the
Byzantine and the early Islamic periods, see Sidney Griffith, “From Aramaic to Arabic: The
Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 11–31.
7 Isaac Hasson, “The Penetration of Arab Tribes in Eretz Israel during the First Century of
the Hegira,” Cathedra 32 (1984): 60–62. (in Hebrew)
8  A brief summary may be found in Ahmad Al-Jallad, Ancient Levantine Arabic: A
Reconstruction Based on the Earliest Sources and the Modern Dialects (Ph.D. Diss., Harvard
University, 2012), 10–24.
9 Haseeb Shehadeh, “When Did Arabic Replace Samaritan Aramaic?,” in Moshe Bar-Asher
et al. (eds.), Hebrew Language Studies Presented to Professor Zeev Ben-Ḥayyim (Jerusalem,
1983), 515–528. (in Hebrew)
10 I owe this information to a personal correspondence with Werner Arnold. See also:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10768900/Syria-war-
Maaloulas-monastery-destroyed-after-Assad-forces-drive-rebels-out.html—retrieved on
26–05–2014.