Mesopotamian Arabic

Mesopotamian Arabic (Arabic: لهجة بلاد ما بين النهرين), also known as Iraqi Arabic (Arabic: اللهجة العراقية), or just as Iraqi (Arabic: عراقي), is a group of varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq, as well as in Syria, southeastern Turkey, Iran, Kuwait and Iraqi diaspora communities.^[2]

Mesopotamian Arabic
Iraqi Arabic
اللهجة العراقية
Native to	Iraq (Mesopotamia), Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, parts of northern and eastern Arabia
Region	Mesopotamia, Cilicia
Ethnicity	Mainly Iraqi Arabs also used as a L2 language by non Arab communities in the region
Speakers	Gelet/South (acm): 17 million (2020)[1] Qeltu/North (ayp): 10 million (2020)[1]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Mesopotamian Arabic
Dialects	Gelet Qeltu
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Variously: acm – Gelet ayp – Qeltu yhd – Judeo-Iraqi Arabic
Glottolog	meso1252 nort3142
Areas where Mesopotamian Arabic is widely spoken (dark blue: majority tongue).[image reference needed]
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History

Aramaic was the lingua franca in Mesopotamia from the early 1st millennium BCE until the late 1st millennium CE, and as may be expected, Mesopotamian Arabic shows signs of an Aramaic substrate.^[3] The Gelet and the Judeo-Iraqi varieties have retained features of Babylonian Aramaic.^[3]

Varieties

Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties: Gelet Mesopotamian Arabic and Qeltu Mesopotamian Arabic. Their names derive from the form of the word for "I said" in each variety.^[4] Gelet Arabic is a Bedouin variety spoken by Muslims (both sedentary and non-sedentary) in central and southern Iraq and by nomads in the rest of Iraq. Qeltu Arabic is an urban dialect spoken by Non-Muslims of central and southern Iraq (including Baghdad) and by the sedentary population (both Muslims and Non-Muslims) of the rest of the country.^[5] Non-Muslims include Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, until most Iraqi Jews left Iraq in the 1940s–1950s.^[6][7] Geographically, the gelet–qeltu classification roughly corresponds to respectively Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Mesopotamia.^[8] The isogloss is between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, around Fallujah and Samarra.^[8]

During the Siege of Baghdad (1258), the Mongols killed all Muslims.^[9] However, sedentary Christians and Jews were spared and northern Iraq was untouched.^[9] In southern Iraq, sedentary Muslims were gradually replaced by Bedouins from the countryside.^[9] This explains the current dialect distribution: in the south, everyone speaks Bedouin varieties close to Gulf Arabic (continuation of the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian Peninsula),^[9][10] except urban Non-Muslims who continue to speak pre-1258 qeltu dialects while in the north the original qeltu dialect is still spoken by all, Muslims and Non-Muslims alike.^[9]

Gelet/qeltu verb contrasts^[11]

s-stem	Bedouin/gelet	Sedentary/qeltu
1st sg.	ḏạrab-t	fataḥ-tu
2nd m. sg.	ḏạrab-t	fataḥ-t
2nd f. sg.	tišṛab-īn	tǝšrab-īn
2nd pl.	tišṛab-ūn	tǝšrab-ūn
3rd pl.	yišṛab-ūn	yǝšrab-ūn

Dialects

Gelet dialects include:^[8]

• Gilit
  • Northwestern Mesopotamian group
    • Shāwi dialects (including Urfa and al-Raqqah)
    • Rural dialects of northern and central Iraq.
  • Central Iraqi Group
    • Baghdad Arabic
    • The surrounding area around Baghdad
  • Southern Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic group
    • Urban dialects
    • Rural dialects
    • Marshland dialects of the Marsh Arabs of the Mesopotamian Marshes

Qeltu dialects include:^[8]

• Qeltu
  • Anatolian Qeltu
    • Mardin dialects: Mardin and surrounding villages, Mhallami, Qamishli, Nusaybin (Christians), Cizre (Jews)
    • Siirt dialects
    • Diyarbakır dialects: Diyarbakır (Christians and Jews), Diyarbakır villages (Christians), Siverek, Çermik and Urfa (Jews)
    • Kozluk–Sason–Muş dialects
  • Tigris Qeltu
    • Moslawi: Mosul and surrounding villages (Bahzani, Bashiqa, Ain Sifni)
    • Moslawi group (Jews only)
      • Northern Moslawi: Sandur, Akre, Erbil, Šoš
      • Southern Moslawi: Kirkuk, Tuz Khurmatu, Khanaqin
    • Tikrit and surroundings
    • Baghdad and southern Iraq (Jews and Christians only)
  • Euphrates Qeltu
    • Khawetna (Syria, Iraq, Turkey)
    • Deir ez-Zor
    • Anah and Abu Kamal
    • Hit, Iraq

Baghdadi Arabic is Iraq's de facto national vernacular, as about half of the population speaks it as a mother tongue, and most other Iraqis understand it. It is spreading to northern cities as well.^[12] Other Arabic speakers cannot easily understand Moslawi and Baghdadi.^[12]

Substrate

Mesopotamian Arabic, especially Qeltu, has a significant Eastern Aramaic substrate,^[13] and through it also has significant influences from ancient Mesopotamian languages of Sumerian and Akkadian. Eastern Aramaic dialects flourished and became the lingua franca throughout Mesopotamia during the Achaemenid and Hellenistic period, where different dialects such as Syriac, Mandaic and Hatran Aramaic came to being.^[14][15] Mesopotamian Arabic also retains influences from Persian, Turkish, and Greek.^[16]

See also

• Varieties of Arabic
• Modern Standard Arabic

References

1. Gelet at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
   Qeltu at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
   Judeo-Iraqi Arabic at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
2. Enam al-Wer, Rudolf Erik de Jong, ed. (2009). Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. Vol. 53. Brill. pp. 99–100. ISBN 9789047425595.
3. Muller-Kessler, Christa (2003). "Aramaic 'K', Lyk' and Iraqi Arabic 'Aku, Maku: The Mesopotamian Particles of Existence". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 123 (3): 641–646. doi:10.2307/3217756. JSTOR 3217756.
4. Mitchell, T. F. (1990). Pronouncing Arabic, Volume 2. Clarendon Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-19-823989-0.
5. Jasim, Maha Ibrahim (2022-12-15). "The Linguistic Heritage of the Maṣlāwī Dialect in Iraq". CREID Working Paper 18. doi:10.19088/creid.2022.015.
6. Holes, Clive, ed. (2018). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Oxford University Press. p. 337. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
7. Procházka, Stephan (2018). "3.2. The Arabic dialects of northern Iraq". In Haig, Geoffrey; Khan, Geoffrey (eds.). The Languages and Linguistics of Western Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 243–266. doi:10.1515/9783110421682-008. ISBN 978-3-11-042168-2. S2CID 134361362.
8. Ahmed, Abdulkareem Yaseen (2018). Phonological variation and change in Mesopotamia: a study of accent levelling in the Arabic dialect of Mosul (PhD thesis). Newcastle University.
9. Holes, Clive (2006). Ammon, Ulrich; Dittmar, Norbert; Mattheier, Klaus J.; Trudgill, Peter (eds.). "The Arabian Peninsula and Iraq/Die arabische Halbinsel und der Irak". Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik, Part 3. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter: 1937. doi:10.1515/9783110184181.3.9.1930. ISBN 978-3-11-019987-1.
10. Al‐Wer, Enam; Jong, Rudolf (2017). "Dialects of Arabic". In Boberg, Charles; Nerbonne, John; Watt, Dominic (eds.). The Handbook of Dialectology. Wiley. p. 529. doi:10.1002/9781118827628.ch32. ISBN 978-1-118-82755-0. OCLC 989950951.
11. Prochazka, Stephan (2018). "The Northern Fertile Crescent". In Holes, Clive (ed.). Arabic Historical Dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. Oxford University Press. p. 266. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0009. ISBN 978-0-19-870137-8. OCLC 1059441655.
12. Collin, Richard Oliver (2009). "Words of War: The Iraqi Tower of Babel". International Studies Perspectives. 10 (3): 245–264. doi:10.1111/j.1528-3585.2009.00375.x.
13. del Rio Sanchez, Francisco (2013). "Influences of Aramaic on dialectal Arabic". In Sala, Juan Pedro Monferrer; Watson, Wilfred G. E. (eds.). Archaism and Innovation in the Semitic Languages: Selected Papers. Oriens Academic. ISBN 978-84-695-7829-2.
14. Smart, J. R. (2013). Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language And Literature. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315026503. ISBN 978-1-136-78805-5. ^{[verification needed]}
15. R. J. al-Mawsely, al-Athar, al-Aramiyyah fi lughat al-Mawsil al-amiyyah (Lexicon: Aramaic in the popular language of Mosul): Baghdad 1963
16. Afsaruddin, Asma; Zahniser, A. H. Mathias, eds. (1997). Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff. Penn State University Press. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1w36pkt. ISBN 978-1-57506-020-0. JSTOR 10.5325/j.ctv1w36pkt. ^{[verification needed]}

Further reading

• Palva, Heikki (2009-01-01). From Qəltu To Gələt: Diachronic Notes On Linguistic Adaptation In Muslim Baghdad Arabic. Brill. ISBN 978-90-474-2559-5.