Siculo Arabic : interferences, deletions, and additions

Abstract

The Medieval Arabic of Sicily is the product of a number of dialects and sub-dialects spoken by a number of Arab and Berber tribes settled mainly in western Sicily and Sicilians who married Arabic speakers and accultured to Islam. I call this variety Siculo-labn Arabic. Parallel to this variety there grew another one that was spoken firstly, by converted Muslim Sicilians and secondly, by Christians and Jews alike, who had accultured to the Islamic way of life but not necessarily embraced Islam. They spoke what I call Siculo-Arabic, i.e. a hybridized form of Arabic and Romance (with some Greek intervention) in all its linguistic features, morphologically in particular. It is the SA variety that we are concerned with in this paper. An attempt is made to show: (a) Romance sounds interfering in the triliteral Arabic structure, (b) interference of origin and gender, (c) absence or substitution of sounds and (d) maintenance or addition of sounds. I include Maltese to compare some of its phonological and morphological features with CA and SA.