Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Glossary
- 1 Is Hebrew an endangered language?
- 2 The emergence of Hebrew
- 3 Hebrew–Aramaic bilingualism and competition
- 4 Three languages in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine
- 5 From statehood to Diaspora
- 6 The Arabian and African connections
- 7 The spread of Islam
- 8 The Jews of France
- 9 The Jews of Spain and their languages
- 10 Loter-Ashkenaz and the creation of Yiddish
- 11 The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy
- 12 Jews in Slavic lands
- 13 Linguistic emancipation and assimilation in Europe
- 14 Britain, its former colonies, and the New World
- 15 Islam and the Orient
- 16 The return to Zion and Hebrew
- Appendix Estimated current status of Jewish languages1
- Notes
- References
- Index
6 - The Arabian and African connections
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Glossary
- 1 Is Hebrew an endangered language?
- 2 The emergence of Hebrew
- 3 Hebrew–Aramaic bilingualism and competition
- 4 Three languages in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine
- 5 From statehood to Diaspora
- 6 The Arabian and African connections
- 7 The spread of Islam
- 8 The Jews of France
- 9 The Jews of Spain and their languages
- 10 Loter-Ashkenaz and the creation of Yiddish
- 11 The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy
- 12 Jews in Slavic lands
- 13 Linguistic emancipation and assimilation in Europe
- 14 Britain, its former colonies, and the New World
- 15 Islam and the Orient
- 16 The return to Zion and Hebrew
- Appendix Estimated current status of Jewish languages1
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Adding another major language
This book has so far traced the adoption and development of the first three major languages of the Jews: Hebrew, from its misty origins until its loss as a spoken language about the second or third century CE; Aramaic, added as a vernacular language and becoming semi-sacred during the years after the Babylonian captivity; and Greek, which was introduced during the period of Hellenization and greatly strengthened under Roman and Byzantine rule. It has also noted the change of balance in population from Palestine to the Diaspora, as, starting with the Babylonian Diaspora, many Jews fled to other places that seemed safer or economically more desirable.
These developing Diaspora communities were in place and waiting, as it were, for the Muslim conquest; in fact, Josephus reported that Jews lived everywhere in the world as he knew it. It was migration and conversion, however, that first added Arabic to the Jewish sociolinguistic ecology, as some Jews moved as traders and settlers through the Nabatean lands in the south and on into the Arabian Peninsula. The number of migrants is not clear, and may not have been large; indeed, with the evidence of the conversion of local pagans, it seems at times that it was Judaism rather than Jews that moved to the Arabian Peninsula and crossed into Ethiopia, the two forming – according to some – the Land of Cush. There, Arabic was adopted as a language of the Jews by migration and linguistic assimilation into Arabic-speaking regions, and by the conversion of indigenous peoples; later it was spread, as a result of the Muslim conquest, by the diffusion of Arabic throughout the rapidly growing Arab Empire, from the Indus in the east to Andalusia in the west. Other languages were added too as a number of African groups adopted Judaism, although the dating is in doubt: while their traditions claim early conversion, the African groups emerge as Jewish only in the nineteenth century and later.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Languages of the JewsA Sociolinguistic History, pp. 80 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014