The Language Of God
The language of God: on the origins of the Arabic language and the causes of its predominance in the Middle East today
Introduction
Thus reads the first line of Surah 96 in Classical Arabic: “Proclaim! in the name of thy Lord who createth[i].” According to Islamic tradition, it is the first surah (or chapter of the Qur’an) which was revealed to Mohammed by the Archangel Jibril, known to Christians as Gabriel. Arabic’s rise to prominence as an international language today is often attributed to the spread of Islam across the world - since large number of Muslims took their language as well as their religion with them. The Arabic used in the Qur’an is known as Classical Arabic, with several semantic and syntactical differences to the Arabic that is written and spoken today. This form of Arabic has been a profound influence on virtually every form of Arabic dialect spoken in the world today[ii] - and yet is itself rooted in the Arab Peninsula. This essay will undertake to summarise the origins of modern Arabic as a linguistic form, as well as answering the question of how it came to be the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, with approximately 280 million speakers worldwide, and the official language in 26 countries[iii].
Proto-Semitic origins
Arabic is one of a group of languages known as the Semitic languages, which derive their roots from a hypothetical language known as ‘Proto-Semitic’. The earliest of these languages is Akkadian, or Assyrian-Babylonian a (now defunct) language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia[iv] - roughly modern-day Iraq. Akkadian used a form of script called cuneiform, dating from around the 30th Century BCE. This was itself a descendant of early pictographs, which also formed the basis for the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire
The Akkadian empire flourished under Sargon the Great, a belligerent and highly successful king who ruled from 2270' 2215 BCE[v] and who captured the...
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