Modern Andalusi Arabic: An Introduction
Modern Andalusi Arabic
Linguistic family: Semitic Spoken in: Spain Total number of speakers: 4500
Modern Andalusi Arabic (MAA) is a language spoken in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in the autonomous communities of Andalusia and Valencia, where the two dialects currently are: Western Modern Andalusi Arabic (WMAA) and Eastern Modern Andalusi Arabic (EMAA), respectively. They were separated relatively recently, only around 300 years ago. Still, they present differing features, mainly due to their isolation from each other and the always-present influence from Spanish and Mozarabic, and Valencian-Catalan in each case.
WMAA is the main dialect in terms of speakers, with around 3000 total. Today, it is only spoken in the province of Jaén, almost exclusively in the Comarcas of Sierra de Cazorla and Sierra de Segura.
EMAA has around 1500 speakers, and is mostly spoken in and around the Sierra de Salinas mountain range.
The language has survived thanks to the mountainous terrain which has provided it with isolation from the rest of the world. However, being in very rural areas and with no institutional recognition by the local authorities, the numbers of speakers has been on a steady decrease for centuries. The average age of MAA speakers is around 55 years old, as many young people can understand it but can’t or don’t speak it themselves.
The number of speakers probably had the largest drop during the Franco dictatorship, as all local languages that were not Spanish came under heavy censorhip. Prior to that, it had been decreasing as stigmatization of MAA relating it to the previously Muslim populations of the Iberian Peninsula, the Moriscos, made them and its speakers subject to discrimination, especially in urban centers.
As a Semitic, it uses mostly triliteral roots that can be changed to make distinctions in meaning, as well as using affixes. However, due to a centuries long process of erosion of these roots, they present sometimes radically different forms compared to their Classical Arabic counterparts.
This erosion has also resulted in a rather reduced phonemic inventory, losing the pharyngeal distinction, but this has also caused the development of two/four new vowels, together with the raising of short /a/ known as imala. Long vowels also became stressed already in the Middle Ages, resulting in interesting inflectional patterns.
MAA also uses a lot of partially empty in meaning verbs with masda (verbal noun) to express notions that in other Arabic varieties might employ only one verb.
Although more research is needed on this language and its varieties, I will attempt to represent a holistic view of it, indicating when features are common to both dialects and when they are unique to them.
MAA, WMAA, EMAA, Arabic, conlang, constructed language