Andalusi Arabic
Arabic spread gradually over the centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia, primarily through conversion to Islam, although it was also learned and spoken by Christians and Jews.
Arabic in al-Andalus existed largely in a situation of bilingualism with Andalusi Romance (known popularly as Mozarabic) until the 13th century.
After the fall of Granada in 1492, the Catholic rulers suppressed the use of Arabic, persecuting its speakers, passing policies against its use (such as the Pragmática Sanción de 1567 [es], which led directly to the Rebellion of the Alpujarras), and expelling the Moriscos in the early 17th century, after which Arabic became an extinct language in Iberia.
A feature shared with Maghrebi Arabic was that the first-person imperfect was marked with the prefix n- (نلعب nalʿab 'I play') like the plural in Standard Arabic, necessitating an analogical imperfect first-person plural, constructed with the suffix -ū (نلعبوا nalʿabū 'we play').
A feature characteristic of it was the extensive imala that transformed alif into an /e/ or /i/ (e.g. al-kirā ("rent") > al-kirē > Spanish "alquiler").
[5] While Alvarus of Cordoba lamented in the 9th century that Christians were no longer using Latin, Richard Bulliet estimates that only 50% of the population of al-Andalus had converted to Islam by the death of Abd al-Rahman III in 961, and 80% by 1100.
[6] By about 1260, Muslim territories in Iberia were reduced to the Emirate of Granada, in which more than 90% of the population had converted to Islam and Arabic-Romance bilingualism seems to have disappeared.
[11] Still, Andalusi Arabic remained in use in certain areas of Spain (particularly the inner regions of Valencia and Aragon)[12][13] until the final expulsion of the Moriscos at the beginning of the 17th century.
[3] Consuelo Lopez-Morillas notes that poetic genres such as zajal and the popular literature of proverbs and aphorisms demonstrate that, among speakers of Andalusi Arabic, there was a "consciousness of, and even pride in, the distinctiveness of the dialect, its suppleness and expressivity.
[3] It was also characterized by diglossia: in addition to standard written Arabic, spoken varieties could be subdivided into an urban, educated idiolect and a register of the less-privileged masses.
The first complete linguistic description of Andalusi Arabic was given by the Spanish Arabist Federico Corriente, who drew on the Appendix Probi, zajal poetry, proverbs and aphorisms, the work of the 16th century lexicographer Pedro de Alcalá, and Andalusi letters found in the Cairo Geniza.
[5] Romance loanwords were used in Andalusi Arabic through the end of Muslim rule in Iberia, even after Granada had been monolingually arabophone for two centuries.
[5]The -an which, in Classical Arabic, marked a noun as indefinite accusative case (see nunation), became an indeclinable conjunctive particle, as in ibn Quzmān's expression rajul-an 'ashīq.
Andalusi Arabic developed a contingent/subjunctive mood (after a protasis with the conditional particle law) consisting of the imperfect (prefix) form of a verb, preceded by either kān or kīn (depending on the register of the speech in question), of which the final -n was normally assimilated by preformatives y- and t-.
An example drawn from Ibn Quzmān will illustrate this: The oldest evidence of Andalusi Arabic utterances can be dated from the 10th and 11th century, in isolated quotes, both in prose and stanzaic Classical Andalusi poems (muwashshahat), and then, from the 11th century on, in stanzaic dialectal poems (zajal) and dialectal proverb collections.
[14] Substantial material on late Granadan Arabic survives in the work of Pedro de Alcalá—the Vocabulista aravigo en letra castellana[39] and Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua araviga,[40] both published in 1505 to explain the language of the conquered to the conquerors following the Fall of Granada.
