Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb Ibn as-Sikkīt[n 1] (ابو يوسف يعقوب ابن السكيت) was a Persian philologist tutor to the son of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil and a great grammarian and scholar of poetry of the al-Kūfah school.
He was the son of al-Sikkīt, a philologist of the Kūfī school of grammar, a man of science, and an associate of the scholars al-Kisā’ī and al-Farrā’.
[n 2][3] His father originated from the village of Dawraq, Ahwaz Khuzestan (Iran),[n 3][n 4] Ya‘qūb was a scholar of Baghdād, which followed the Kūfī school tradition in grammar, Qur’anic science and poetry.
A group of wārraqūn[n 9] of al-Kūfah gathered for a reading aloud by a warrāq of al-Baṣrah, of Ibn al-Sikkīt’s Book of Logic.
Al-Riyāshī was at the event and attested that Ibn al-Sikkīt had told him, that he had learned the vernacular dialects of Southern ‘Irāq from Ḥarashat al-Ḍibāb[13] and Aklat al-Yarābī,[14] and they had derived theirs from the people of al-Sawād.