into India, from India into South-East Asia: Arabic was accepted as a sacred language, but had no tendency to spread as a vernacular, or even as a lingua franca for contacts among the new Muslim populations. Except for the Hausa speakers of West Africa, none of the converted communities spoke Afro-Asiatic languages; so this conforms to the linguistic constraint.*
Before leaving the subject of the spread of Arabic and its limits, it is right to consider one other way in which Arabic might have been expected to spread, but in fact did not. At least from the beginning of the first century ad to the advent of European adventurers in the fifteenth, it is known that Arab sailors, with perhaps some Persian competition, undertook most of the marine trade between the Near East and the coasts of Africa and India.
The first testimony dates from the first century AD, in the Greek guide for sailors Períplous Thalássēs Eruthraías, ‘Voyage Round the Indian Ocean’.
(§16) Two days’ sail beyond there lies the very last market-town of the continent of Azania [East Africa], which is called Rhapta; which has its name from the sewed boats [rháptōn ploiaríōn] already mentioned; in which there is ivory in great quantity, and tortoise-shell. Along this coast live men of piratical habits, very tall, and under separate chiefs for each place. The Mapharitic chief governs it under some ancient right that subjects it to the sovereignty of the state that is become first in Arabia. And the people of Muza now hold it under his authority, and send thither many large ships; using Arab captains and agents, who are familiar with the natives and intermarry with them, and who know the whole coast and understand the language...
(§21) Beyond these places in a bay at the foot of the left side of the gulf, there is a place by the shore called Muza, a market-town established by law, distant altogether from Berenice [Ras Banas] for those sailing southward, about 12,000 stadia. And the whole place is crowded with Arab shipowners and seafaring men, and is busy with affairs of commerce; for they carry on a trade with the far-side coast and with Barygaza [Broach, in western India], sending their own ships there.77
Wherever Rhapta (Dar es Salaam?), Muza (al Mukha?) and Mapharitis (Ma‘afir?) were, it is clear from this that Arab trade involvement with both sides of the Indian Ocean goes back for well over six hundred years before Mu
This means that Arabic would have been heard in all the ports along the shores of the Indian Ocean from Mozambique to Malabar and Coromandel in southern India. Surely this might have had a linguistic effect, at least in the creation of a trade jargon? There is, after all, ample precedent, both, as we have seen, in the way that Phoenician was spread round the Mediterranean, and in more recent centuries as European powers have brought their languages to the parts of the world where they went to trade. Trade is usually accounted the first factor that set English on the road to becoming a world language.
In fact, the only vestige of such influence from Arabic is found in East Africa, where Swahili, the major Bantu language, shows heavy signs of Arabic influence. Its very name is derived from Arabic sawāil, ‘coasts’. Counting up to ten, the numbers 6, 7 and 9 are all borrowed from Arabic: Swahili sita, saba and tisa versus Arabic sitta, sab ‘a and tis ‘a. Unlike almost every other Bantu language, it has no distinctive tones, but it uses certain sounds from Arabic which are unknown in other Bantu languages, notably distinguishing between r and l, and using the consonants th [θ], kh [x] and their voiced analogues dh [ð] and gh [γ].
Nevertheless, it remains in many ways characteristically Bantu, with lots of nasals before stops (-nd-, -ng-, -mb-, -nt-, -nk-, -mp-), a variety of special prefixes that show what type of concept is designated by a noun, and heavy agglutinative prefixing on its verbs, doing most of the work that would be done by pronouns, verb inflexions and auxiliaries in languages like English, or indeed Arabic: for example,
people-oldster not-they-know-not he-past-there-go The old men don’t know where he has gone.
The reckoning is that the spread of Bantu languages from the Great Lakes region would have reached the Zanzibar* area early in this millennium, so that an early version of the language may well have been learnt by the Arab visitors mentioned in the Períplous. When Europeans first arrived on the scene (the Portuguese in 1498), Swahili was spoken in a thin strip all along the coast from Mogadishu in Somalia to Beira in Mozambique. The oldest surviving Arabic inscription in the region is from a mosque built in 1107, and it is clear that Arabic was much used as a trade language here, often in mixtures with other languages that have since died out. There may also have been influence in the opposite direction: it is said that some coastal dialects of Arabic in Arabia and Iraq show signs of Swahili influence.79
Be this as it may, Swahili is now the official language in the states of Tanzania and Kenya, and widely used in the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, the Congos, Madagascar and the Comoros. Since the advent of European colonists, it has played a major role as a lingua franca of empires, as well as a less honourable one as the argot of slavetraders and their victims. Despite the vast numbers who use it (estimated at 40 million), Swahili is learnt as a native language only on the islands and coast close to Zanzibar. Perhaps as always, the vast majority of its speakers (some 90 per cent) pick it up later in life. Without Arab trade there would have been no Swahili as we know it, but Arabic influence on it ceased long ago.
THIRD INTERLUDE: TURKIC AND PERSIAN, OUTRIDERS OF ISLAM
Kalkιp ta yerimden doğrulayιm, derdim, Yelesi-kara Kazιlιk atιma bineyim, derdim, Kalabaιk Oğuz içine gireyim, derdim, Ala-gözlü gelin alayιm, derdim, Kara yere ak otaklar dikeyim, derdim, Yürüyüp oğulu ak gerdeğe göçüreyim, derdim, Muradιna, maksuduna eriştireyim, derdim, Murada erdirmedin beni!
Kara başιm ilenci tutsun, Kazan, seni! *
I said to myself, let me get up from my seat and stand, I said to myself, let me ride my black-maned Kazilik horse, I said to myself, let me go among the throngs of Oghuz, I said to myself, let me find a chestnut-eyed daughter-in-law, I said to myself, let me pitch white tents on the black earth, I said to myself, let me walk the boy to his bridal chamber, I said to myself, let me bring him to his wish, to his desire, You did not let me attain my wish, May the dark head’s curse seize you, Kazan!
Dede Korkut, The Lineage of Uzun the Prisoner, son of Kazan Bey (A mother berates her husband for losing their son on a raid)
Two other major languages, Turkic (spoken in a variety of forms, but all fairly close to modern Turkish) and Persian, are now best known as the auxiliary languages of Islamic civilisation. We have had to give them walk-on roles in the history of Arabic, but unjustly: both have interesting histories which go back for a thousand years before their speakers’ fateful conversions to Islam, and have contributed equally to their characters today and in the past.
The
