The historical context and the status of the Arabic language in Ibn Makki's Sicily

Abstract

This article investigates the topic of Siculo-Arabic, from the Arabic conquest up to the arrival of the Normans in Sicily. It is undeniable that in between the IX-XII century Arabic has been a sort of “lingua franca” of the Mediterranean sea, and as such it was used for different purposes and spoken by various speakers, mostly non-natives. Due to common use, Arabic went far from the standard variety because of a great number of changes in phonology, morphology and syntax. Ibn Makkī tagged as laḥn, error, these changes, and he collected in his Taṯqīf al-lisān wa-talqīḥ al-ǧanān a list of errors that he had heard. He considered two profiles of speakers and two levels of the language: ˁāmma, the dialect spoken by the people, and ḫāṣṣa, the élite language spoken by the educated. Since Ibn Makkī refers to the spoken language, we cannot prove with documents his observations. We can only try to compare his study with some written documents, called ǧarāˀid, but belonging to a later era. In any case, it is highly probable that Arabic entered Sicily via different paths, some of them not related with the North African conquerors.