[1] Some scholars[2][3][4][5][6][7] assume that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was similar, if not identical, to the varieties spoken in the Arabian Peninsula before the emergence of Islam.
If differences existed, they concerned mainly stylistic and minor points of linguistic structure.
A second group of mainly Western scholars of Arabic (Vollers 1906; Fleisch 1947; Kahle 1948; Rabin 1951; Blachère 1950; Wehr 1952; Spitaler 1953; Rosenthal 1953; Fleisch 1964; Zwettler 1978; Holes 1995; Owens 1998; Sharkawi 2005) do not regard the variety in which the Quran was revealed as a spoken variety of Arabic in the peninsula.
Some of them (Zwettler 1978; Sharkawi 2005) go so far as to state that the function of the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was limited to artistic expression and oral rendition (poetic koine).
A first reading of the grammatical texts seems to confirm that grammarians were quite aware of the existence of different language varieties in the Arabic-speaking sphere.
Among the earliest writers on tribal dialects were Yunus ibn Ḥabīb (d. 182/798) and ˀAbū ˁAmr aš-Šaybānì (d. 213/828), the author of the Kitāb al-Jīm, in which odd and archaic lexical items used in certain tribes are recorded.
In pre-Islamic times, the Hijaz was the western part of the peninsula, between the Tihama in the southwest and the Najd in the east.
The tribe of Huḏayl was situated in the southeastern part of the Hijaz, to the north of Yemen and to the northeast of ˀAzd.
Despite this connection with the east, the dialect of Huḏayl belonged mainly to the Western group and functioned as an intermediate zone between the Hijaz and northern Yemen (Rabin 1951:79).
Rabin (1951:193) claims that such common features are suggestive of the connecting role this tribe played between the dialects of the eastern and western parts of the peninsula.
In the southern part of Saràt and the mountains around Sanˁàˀ, the language showed strong traces of Himyaritic.
The northern Yemen region hosted tribes speaking dialects so similar to each other that they could be considered a defined group.