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119-529: The Arab Belt ( Arabic : الحزام العربي , al-hizām al-ʿarabī ; Kurdish : Kembera Erebî, که‌مبه‌را عه‌ره‌بی ) was the Syrian Ba'athist government 's project of Arabization of the north of the Al-Hasakah Governorate to change its ethnic composition of the population in favor of Arabs to the detriment of other ethnic groups , particularly Kurds . It involved the seizure of land which

238-788: A ceremony in Beirut. Greater Lebanon was created by France to be a "safe haven" for the Maronite population of the mutasarrifia (Ottoman administrative unit) of Mount Lebanon . Mt. Lebanon, an area with a Maronite majority, had enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy during the Ottoman era. However, in addition to the Maronite Mutasarrifia other, mainly Muslim , regions were added, forming "Greater" Lebanon. Those regions correspond today to North Lebanon , South Lebanon , Biqa' valley , and Beirut . The capital of Greater Lebanon

357-575: A collection of related dialects that constitute the precursor of Arabic, first emerged during the Iron Age . Previously, the earliest attestation of Old Arabic was thought to be a single 1st century CE inscription in Sabaic script at Qaryat al-Faw , in southern present-day Saudi Arabia. However, this inscription does not participate in several of the key innovations of the Arabic language group, such as

476-435: A corpus of poetic texts, in addition to Qur'an usage and Bedouin informants whom he considered to be reliable speakers of the ʿarabiyya . Arabic spread with the spread of Islam . Following the early Muslim conquests , Arabic gained vocabulary from Middle Persian and Turkish . In the early Abbasid period , many Classical Greek terms entered Arabic through translations carried out at Baghdad's House of Wisdom . By

595-1081: A dialect of Arabic and written in the Latin alphabet . The Balkan languages, including Albanian, Greek , Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian , have also acquired many words of Arabic origin, mainly through direct contact with Ottoman Turkish . Arabic has influenced languages across the globe throughout its history, especially languages where Islam is the predominant religion and in countries that were conquered by Muslims. The most markedly influenced languages are Persian , Turkish , Hindustani ( Hindi and Urdu ), Kashmiri , Kurdish , Bosnian , Kazakh , Bengali , Malay ( Indonesian and Malaysian ), Maldivian , Pashto , Punjabi , Albanian , Armenian , Azerbaijani , Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog , Sindhi , Odia , Hebrew and African languages such as Hausa , Amharic , Tigrinya , Somali , Tamazight , and Swahili . Conversely, Arabic has borrowed some words (mostly nouns) from other languages, including its sister-language Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin and to

714-665: A feasibility study of the Union Economique de Syrie the North-East Syrian and the Alawite State were deemed profitable for the cotton cultivation. Investments began in 1924, but it took until the 1930s to produce more than the level reached in 1925. By 1933, Palestine was the largest importer of Syrian goods, while the French held a share of 7.5% of the imports. Between the two World Wars, France became

833-532: A formerly semi-nomadic Arab tribe that settled near Raqqa in the 1940s. Each state farm constituted a model village where farm labourers were paid and governed by a "council of production". Villages were built into which were to be settled 4,000 Arab families coming from the land which was to be submerged following the completion of the Tabqa dam and the filling of Lake Assad . The Arabs were provided with weapons and divided between more than 50 so-called model farms in

952-487: A lesser extent and more recently from Turkish, English, French, and Italian. Arabic is spoken by as many as 380 million speakers, both native and non-native, in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world, and the fourth most used language on the internet in terms of users. It also serves as the liturgical language of more than 2 billion Muslims . In 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked Arabic

1071-412: A majority of Sunni Muslims . It covered northern Syria in addition to the entire fertile basin of river Euphrates of eastern Syria. These regions represented much of the agricultural and mineral wealth of Syria. The autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta was added to the state of Aleppo in 1923. The capital was the northern city of Aleppo , which had large Christian and Jewish communities in addition to

1190-518: A mere seven-year period, between 1954 and 1961, the population of al-Hasakah governorate had increased from 240,000 to 305,000, an increase of 27 per cent which could not possibly be explained merely by natural increase. The government claimed that Kurds from Turkey were "illegally infiltrating" the Jezireh in order to "destroy its Arab character". On 23 August 1962, the government decreed (decree no. 93) an extraordinary census of al-Jazira Province . If

1309-690: A millennium before the modern period . Early lexicographers ( لُغَوِيُّون lughawiyyūn ) sought to explain words in the Quran that were unfamiliar or had a particular contextual meaning, and to identify words of non-Arabic origin that appear in the Quran. They gathered shawāhid ( شَوَاهِد 'instances of attested usage') from poetry and the speech of the Arabs—particularly the Bedouin ʾaʿrāb  [ ar ] ( أَعْراب ) who were perceived to speak

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1428-508: A new government headed by Hashim al-Atassi was formed on 7 May 1920. The new government decided to organize general conscription and began forming an army. These decisions provoked adverse reactions by France as well as by the Maronite patriarchate of Mount Lebanon, which denounced the decisions as a " coup d'état ". In Beirut , the Christian press expressed its hostility to the decisions of Faisal's government. Lebanese nationalists used

1547-764: A new, mainly Christian, state of Greater Lebanon . A part of France's claim to these territories in the Levant was that France had been acknowledged as a protector of the minority Christian communities by the Ottoman Empire . In March 1920, the Congress in Damascus adopted a resolution rejecting the Faisal-Clemenceau accords. The congress declared the independence of Syria in her natural borders (including Southern Syria or Palestine), and proclaimed Faisal

1666-468: A person was not able to produce a document that proved they lived in Syrian before 1940, they were deemed illegal immigrants, mainly from Turkey. As part of this census on the 5 October 1962, 120,000 Kurds in the province were deprived of their Syrian citizenship. The Syrian Government later admitted mistakes were made during the census, but didn't reinstate citizenry. The census indicated the real population

1785-594: A result, many European languages have borrowed words from it. Arabic influence, mainly in vocabulary, is seen in European languages (mainly Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese , Catalan , and Sicilian ) owing to the proximity of Europe and the long-lasting Arabic cultural and linguistic presence, mainly in Southern Iberia, during the Al-Andalus era. Maltese is a Semitic language developed from

1904-482: A result, to the Kurdish immigration to this area of Syria, the population of these areas became more heterogeneous. Moreover, irregular Kurds volunteered in the French mandate together with other ethnic or religious minorities, including Armenian and Kurdish irregulars The Syrian government believed that there was a new wave of Kurdish infiltrating into al-Hasakeh governorate in 1945. Syrian government documents indicate

2023-462: A script derived from ASA attest to a language known as Hasaitic . On the northwestern frontier of Arabia, various languages known to scholars as Thamudic B , Thamudic D, Safaitic , and Hismaic are attested. The last two share important isoglosses with later forms of Arabic, leading scholars to theorize that Safaitic and Hismaic are early forms of Arabic and that they should be considered Old Arabic . Linguists generally believe that "Old Arabic",

2142-470: A single language, despite mutual incomprehensibility among differing spoken versions. From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages . This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for

2261-507: A type of Arabic. Cypriot Arabic is recognized as a minority language in Cyprus. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia , which is the normal use of two separate varieties of the same language, usually in different social situations. Tawleed is the process of giving a new shade of meaning to an old classical word. For example, al-hatif lexicographically means

2380-489: A variety of means, with the help of their relatives and members if their tribes. They did so with the intent of settling down and acquiring property, especially after the issue of the Agrarian Reform Law No. 161 during the period of Egyptian-Syrian unification in 1958–1961, a socialist measure aimed at setting a maximum limit on agricultural land ownership. Official figures available in 1961 showed that in

2499-507: A variety of regional vernacular Arabic dialects , which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. Classical Arabic is the language found in the Quran , used from the period of Pre-Islamic Arabia to that of the Abbasid Caliphate . Classical Arabic is prescriptive, according to the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as

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2618-657: A view to the formation of the territories of Greater Lebanon and the Ansarieh Mountains "; where the "Ansarieh Mountains" area was to become the Alawite State. On 31 August 1920, the same day that the decree creating Greater Lebanon was signed, General Gouraud signed Arrêté 319 delimiting the State of Alawites , and Arrêté 317 adding the caza of Massyaf (Omranie) into the new State. The State of Alawites (French: État des Alaouites , Arabic: دولة العلويين )

2737-476: A wider audience." In the wake of the industrial revolution and European hegemony and colonialism , pioneering Arabic presses, such as the Amiri Press established by Muhammad Ali (1819), dramatically changed the diffusion and consumption of Arabic literature and publications. Rifa'a al-Tahtawi proposed the establishment of Madrasat al-Alsun in 1836 and led a translation campaign that highlighted

2856-590: Is a minimum level of comprehension between all Arabic dialects, this level can increase or decrease based on geographic proximity: for example, Levantine and Gulf speakers understand each other much better than they do speakers from the Maghreb. The issue of diglossia between spoken and written language is a complicating factor: A single written form, differing sharply from any of the spoken varieties learned natively, unites several sometimes divergent spoken forms. For political reasons, Arabs mostly assert that they all speak

2975-559: Is a sister language rather than their direct ancestor. Arabia had a wide variety of Semitic languages in antiquity. The term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula , as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece . In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside the Ancient South Arabian family (e.g. Southern Thamudic) were spoken. It

3094-478: Is believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages (non-Central Semitic languages) were spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hejaz , Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages. In Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested. In eastern Arabia, inscriptions in

3213-408: Is credited with establishing the rules of Arabic prosody . Al-Jahiz (776–868) proposed to Al-Akhfash al-Akbar an overhaul of the grammar of Arabic, but it would not come to pass for two centuries. The standardization of Arabic reached completion around the end of the 8th century. The first comprehensive description of the ʿarabiyya "Arabic", Sībawayhi's al - Kitāb , is based first of all upon

3332-472: Is credited with standardizing Arabic grammar , or an-naḥw ( النَّحو "the way" ), and pioneering a system of diacritics to differentiate consonants ( نقط الإعجام nuqaṭu‿l-i'jām "pointing for non-Arabs") and indicate vocalization ( التشكيل at-tashkīl ). Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi (718–786) compiled the first Arabic dictionary, Kitāb al-'Ayn ( كتاب العين "The Book of the Letter ع "), and

3451-659: Is estimated that 25,000 Kurds fled at this time to Syria. The French official reports show the existence of at most 45 Kurdish villages in Jazira prior to 1927. A new wave of refugees arrived in 1929. The mandatory authorities continued to encourage Kurdish immigration into Syria, and by 1939, the villages numbered between 700 and 800. French authorities were not opposed to the streams of Assyrians, Armenians or Kurds who, for various reasons, had left their homes and had found refuge in Syria. The French authorities themselves generally organized

3570-574: Is not present in the spoken varieties, but deletes Classical words that sound obsolete in MSA. In addition, MSA has borrowed or coined many terms for concepts that did not exist in Quranic times, and MSA continues to evolve. Some words have been borrowed from other languages—notice that transliteration mainly indicates spelling and not real pronunciation (e.g., فِلْم film 'film' or ديمقراطية dīmuqrāṭiyyah 'democracy'). The current preference

3689-855: Is official in Mali and recognized as a minority language in Morocco, while the Senegalese government adopted the Latin script to write it. Maltese is official in (predominantly Catholic ) Malta and written with the Latin script . Linguists agree that it is a variety of spoken Arabic, descended from Siculo-Arabic , though it has experienced extensive changes as a result of sustained and intensive contact with Italo-Romance varieties, and more recently also with English. Due to "a mix of social, cultural, historical, political, and indeed linguistic factors", many Maltese people today consider their language Semitic but not

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3808-572: Is the third most widespread official language after English and French, one of six official languages of the United Nations , and the liturgical language of Islam . Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities around the world and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, governments and the media. During the Middle Ages , Arabic was a major vehicle of culture and learning, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As

3927-590: Is the variety used in most current, printed Arabic publications, spoken by some of the Arabic media across North Africa and the Middle East, and understood by most educated Arabic speakers. "Literary Arabic" and "Standard Arabic" ( فُصْحَى fuṣḥá ) are less strictly defined terms that may refer to Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Some of the differences between Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are as follows: MSA uses much Classical vocabulary (e.g., dhahaba 'to go') that

4046-413: Is to avoid direct borrowings, preferring to either use loan translations (e.g., فرع farʻ 'branch', also used for the branch of a company or organization; جناح janāḥ 'wing', is also used for the wing of an airplane, building, air force, etc.), or to coin new words using forms within existing roots ( استماتة istimātah ' apoptosis ', using the root موت m/w/t 'death' put into

4165-524: Is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the industrial and post-industrial era , especially in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, which is construed as a multitude of dialects of this language. These dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are usually acquired in families, while

4284-445: The Lisān al-ʻArab ). Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) largely follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties and has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary

4403-723: The Alawite State , and the Jabal Druze State . Hatay State was annexed by Turkey in 1939. The French mandate lasted until 1946, when French troops eventually left Syria and Lebanon, which had both declared independence during World War II . With the defeat of the Ottomans in Syria, British troops, under General Sir Edmund Allenby , entered Damascus in 1918 accompanied by troops of the Arab Revolt led by Faisal , son of Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz . Faisal established

4522-589: The Arab world . The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic , including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic , which is derived from Classical Arabic . This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā ( اَلعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ "the eloquent Arabic") or simply al-fuṣḥā ( اَلْفُصْحَىٰ ). Arabic

4641-533: The Golan Region , there was a sizeable Circassian community. For the same reasons as their Assyrian, Kurdish and Bedouin counterparts in Al-Jazira province in 1936–1937, several Circassian leaders wanted a special autonomy status for their region in 1938, as they feared the prospect of living in an independent Syrian republic under a nationalist Arab government hostile towards the minorities. They also wanted

4760-641: The Hatay State became a Turkish province. On 24 October 1922, Arrêté 1641 established the " État autonome du Djebel druze " (" Autonomous State of Jabal Druze ") It was created for the Druze population of southern Syria . It had a population of some 50,000 and its capital in As-Suwayda . In 1936, both Jebel Druze and the Alawite State were incorporated into the State of Syria. In 1936–1937, there

4879-554: The Lebanese Republic . Most Muslims in Greater Lebanon rejected the new state upon its creation. Some believe that the continuous Muslim demand for reunification with Syria eventually brought about an armed conflict between Muslims and Christians in 1958 when Lebanese Muslims wanted to join the newly proclaimed United Arab Republic , while Lebanese Christians were strongly opposed. However, most members of

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4998-535: The Milli confederation mentioned in 1518 onward, moved into the area. Danish writer C. Niebuhr who traveled to Arabia and Upper Mesopotanmia in 1764 recorded five nomadic Kurdish tribes (Dukurie, Kikie, Schechchanie, Mullie and Aschetie) and six Arab tribes (Tay, Kaab, Baggara, Geheish, Diabat and Sherabeh). in the area around Mardin. According to Niebuhr, the Kurdish tribes were settled near Mardin in Turkey, and paid

5117-660: The Syria–Turkey border . The planned belt stretched from the Iraqi border in the east to Ras al-Ayn in the west. After another coup within the Baath party, Hafez al-Assad emerged as the head of Ba'athist Syria in 1970. While the proposals in the Hilal report had officially been accepted by the Ba'athist government as early as 1965, it was Hafez al-Assad who ordered the implementation of

5236-568: The Xth form , or جامعة jāmiʻah 'university', based on جمع jamaʻa 'to gather, unite'; جمهورية jumhūriyyah 'republic', based on جمهور jumhūr 'multitude'). An earlier tendency was to redefine an older word although this has fallen into disuse (e.g., هاتف hātif 'telephone' < 'invisible caller (in Sufism)'; جريدة jarīdah 'newspaper' < 'palm-leaf stalk'). Colloquial or dialectal Arabic refers to

5355-494: The northern Hejaz . These features are evidence of common descent from a hypothetical ancestor , Proto-Arabic . The following features of Proto-Arabic can be reconstructed with confidence: On the other hand, several Arabic varieties are closer to other Semitic languages and maintain features not found in Classical Arabic, indicating that these varieties cannot have developed from Classical Arabic. Thus, Arabic vernaculars do not descend from Classical Arabic: Classical Arabic

5474-419: The "learned" tradition (Classical Arabic). This variety and both its classicizing and "lay" iterations have been termed Middle Arabic in the past, but they are thought to continue an Old Higazi register. It is clear that the orthography of the Quran was not developed for the standardized form of Classical Arabic; rather, it shows the attempt on the part of writers to record an archaic form of Old Higazi. In

5593-711: The "purest," most eloquent form of Arabic—initiating a process of jamʿu‿l-luɣah ( جمع اللغة 'compiling the language') which took place over the 8th and early 9th centuries. Kitāb al-'Ayn ( c.  8th century ), attributed to Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi , is considered the first lexicon to include all Arabic roots ; it sought to exhaust all possible root permutations —later called taqālīb ( تقاليب ) — calling those that are actually used mustaʿmal ( مستعمَل ) and those that are not used muhmal ( مُهمَل ). Lisān al-ʿArab (1290) by Ibn Manzur gives 9,273 roots, while Tāj al-ʿArūs (1774) by Murtada az-Zabidi gives 11,978 roots. Mandate for Syria and

5712-454: The 11th and 12th centuries in al-Andalus , the zajal and muwashah poetry forms developed in the dialectical Arabic of Cordoba and the Maghreb. The Nahda was a cultural and especially literary renaissance of the 19th century in which writers sought "to fuse Arabic and European forms of expression." According to James L. Gelvin , " Nahda writers attempted to simplify the Arabic language and script so that it might be accessible to

5831-519: The 4th to the 6th centuries, the Nabataean script evolved into the Arabic script recognizable from the early Islamic era. There are inscriptions in an undotted, 17-letter Arabic script dating to the 6th century CE, found at four locations in Syria ( Zabad , Jebel Usays , Harran , Umm el-Jimal ). The oldest surviving papyrus in Arabic dates to 643 CE, and it uses dots to produce the modern 28-letter Arabic alphabet. The language of that papyrus and of

5950-834: The 8th century, knowledge of Classical Arabic had become an essential prerequisite for rising into the higher classes throughout the Islamic world, both for Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, Maimonides , the Andalusi Jewish philosopher, authored works in Judeo-Arabic —Arabic written in Hebrew script . Ibn Jinni of Mosul , a pioneer in phonology , wrote prolifically in the 10th century on Arabic morphology and phonology in works such as Kitāb Al-Munṣif , Kitāb Al-Muḥtasab , and Kitāb Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ    [ ar ] . Ibn Mada' of Cordoba (1116–1196) realized

6069-772: The Alawite State were incorporated into the State of Syria. On 1 September 1920, the day after the creation of Greater Lebanon and the Alawite State, Arrêté 330 separated out of the previous "Gouvernement de Damas" ("Government of Damascus") an independent government known as the "Gouvernement d'Alep" ("Government of Aleppo"), including the autonomous sandjak of Alexandretta, which retained its administrative autonomy. The terms "Gouvernement d'Alep" "Gouvernement de Damas" were used interchangeably with "l'État d'Alep" and "l'État de Damas" – for example, Arrete 279 1 October 1920 stated in its preamble: "Vu l'arrêté No 330 du 1er Septembre 1920 créant l'État d'Alep". The State of Aleppo (1920–1925, French: État d'Alep , Arabic: دولة حلب ) included

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6188-572: The Arab Belt programme in 1973. The project's name was changed by the Assad government to " Plan to establish model state farms in the Jazira region " . By the end of the programme, around 140,000 Kurds living in 332 villages were displaced from their homes by the Syrian government; and tens of thousands of Arabs - mostly from the Raqqa region - established settlements in the confiscated lands. The area of

6307-524: The French-Turkish treaty settling the status of the Sanjak was signed on 4 July 1938. On 2 September 1938, the assembly proclaimed the Sanjak of Alexandretta as the Hatay State . The republic lasted for one year under joint French and Turkish military supervision. The name Hatay itself was proposed by Atatürk and the government was under Turkish control. In 1939, following a popular referendum,

6426-711: The Golan region to become a national homeland for Circassian refugees from the Caucasus. A Circassian battalion served in the French Army of the Levant and had helped it against the Arab nationalist uprisings. As in Al-Jazira Province, the French authorities refused to grant any autonomy status to the Golan Circassians. Already in 1921, the French wanted to develop the agricultural sector and over

6545-497: The Jazira Region and to the north of Raqqa . Twelve were built each around Qamishli and Al-Malakiyah and sixteen around Ras al Ayn . The Kurdish village names of the area were replaced by Arabic names not necessarily related to the traditions and history of the region. These Arabs are named as Maghmurin (مغمورين Maġmūrīn, which is affected by flooding). The campaign has eventually faded out under Hafez al Assad in 1976, but

6664-561: The Jazira province during the 1920s was estimated at 20,000 people. Starting in 1926, the region witnessed another huge immigration wave of Kurds following the failure of the Sheikh Said rebellion against the Turkish authorities . Tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey and settled in Syria, and as usual, were granted citizenship by the French mandate authorities. This large influx of Kurds moved to Syria's Jazira province. It

6783-509: The Lebanese Muslim communities and their political elites were committed to the idea of being Lebanese citizens by the late 1930s, even though they also tended to nurture Arab nationalist sentiments. On 19 August 1920, General Gouraud signed Arrêté 314 which added to the autonomous sandjak of Alexandretta the cazas of Jisr el-Choughour, the madriyehs of Baher and Bujack (caza of Latakia), the moudiriyeh of Kinsaba (caza of Sahyoun) "with

6902-777: The Lebanon The Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon ( French : Mandat pour la Syrie et le Liban ; Arabic : الانتداب الفرنسي على سوريا ولبنان , romanized :  al-intidāb al-faransī ʻalā sūriyā wa-lubnān , also referred to as the Levant States ; 1923−1946) was a League of Nations mandate founded in the aftermath of the First World War and the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire , concerning Syria and Lebanon . The mandate system

7021-412: The Middle East and North Africa have become a badge of sophistication and modernity and ... feigning, or asserting, weakness or lack of facility in Arabic is sometimes paraded as a sign of status, class, and perversely, even education through a mélange of code-switching practises." Arabic has been taught worldwide in many elementary and secondary schools, especially Muslim schools. Universities around

7140-474: The Qur'an is referred to by linguists as "Quranic Arabic", as distinct from its codification soon thereafter into " Classical Arabic ". In late pre-Islamic times, a transdialectal and transcommunal variety of Arabic emerged in the Hejaz , which continued living its parallel life after literary Arabic had been institutionally standardized in the 2nd and 3rd century of the Hijra , most strongly in Judeo-Christian texts, keeping alive ancient features eliminated from

7259-413: The Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb , a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq , much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers but relatively easily learned by them. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages. With

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7378-409: The State of Damascus and the State of the Alawis. However, two and a half years later on 5 December 1924, Arrêté 2979 and Arrêté 2980 established the Alawite State as an independent state with Latakia as its capital, and separately unified the States of Aleppo and Damascus into a single State called "État de Syrie" ("State of Syria"), formally established on 1 January 1925. In 1936, both Jebel Druze and

7497-440: The Sunni Muslims. The state also incorporated minorities of Shiites and Alawites. Ethnic Kurds and Assyrians inhabited the eastern regions alongside the Arabs. The General Governors of the state were Kamil Pasha al-Qudsi (1920–1922) Mustafa Bey Barmada (1923) and Mar'i Pasha Al Mallah (1924-1925). The State of Damascus was a French mandate from 1920 to 1925. The capital was Damascus. The primarily Sunni population of

7616-478: The Syrian states. The Maronite Christians of Mount Lebanon , on the other hand, were a community with a dream of independence that was being realized under the French. Therefore, Greater Lebanon was the exception among the newly formed states. It took France three years from 1920 to 1923 to gain full control over Syria and to quell all the insurgencies that broke out, notably in the Alawite territories, Mount Druze and Aleppo . Although there were uprisings in

7735-401: The Turkish military went into the Syrian province and expelled most of its Alawite Arab and Armenian inhabitants. Before this, Alawi Arabs and Armenians were the majority of Alexandretta's population. The allocation of seats in the sanjak assembly was based on the 1938 census held by the French authorities under international supervision. The assembly was appointed in the summer of 1938, and

7854-460: The atrocities committed against them. Many Assyrians fled to Syria during the genocide and settled mainly in the Jazira area. During WWI and subsequent years, thousands of Assyrians fled their homes in Anatolia after massacres. After that, massive waves of Kurds fled their homes in Turkey due to conflict with Kemalist authorities and settled in Syria, where they were granted citizenship by the French Mandate authorities . The number of Kurds settled in

7973-441: The authority to independently decide policy. The small amount of power that local leaders had could easily be overruled by French officials. The French did everything in their power to prevent people in the Levant from developing self-sufficient governing bodies. On 3 August 1920, Arrêté 299 of the Haut-commissariat de la République française en Syrie et au Liban linked the cazas of Hasbaya, Rachaya, Maallaka and Baalbeck to what

8092-419: The autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta (1921, modern-day Hatay ), and the State of Greater Lebanon (1920), which became later the modern country of Lebanon. The borders of these states were based in part on the sectarian geography in Syria. Many of the different Syrian sects were hostile to the French mandate and to the division it created, as shown by the numerous revolts that the French encountered in all of

8211-420: The border areas in al-Hasakah Governorate started to have a Kurdish majority, while Arabs remained the majority in river plains and elsewhere. In 1939, French mandate authorities reported the following population numbers for the different ethnic and religious groups in al-Hasakah governorate. The population of the governorate reached 155,643 in 1949, including about 60,000 Kurds. These continuous waves swelled

8330-509: The conversion of Semitic mimation to nunation in the singular. It is best reassessed as a separate language on the Central Semitic dialect continuum. It was also thought that Old Arabic coexisted alongside—and then gradually displaced— epigraphic Ancient North Arabian (ANA), which was theorized to have been the regional tongue for many centuries. ANA, despite its name, was considered a very distinct language, and mutually unintelligible, from "Arabic". Scholars named its variant dialects after

8449-440: The crisis against Faisal's government to convene a council of Christian figures in Baabda that proclaimed the independence of Lebanon on 22 March 1920. On 14 July 1920, General Gouraud issued an ultimatum to Faisal, giving him the choice between submission or abdication. Realizing that the power balance was not in his favor, Faisal chose to cooperate. However, the young minister of war, Youssef al-Azmeh , refused to comply. In

8568-462: The deported Kurds were not allowed to return. Arabic language Arabic (endonym: اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ , romanized :  al-ʿarabiyyah , pronounced [al ʕaraˈbijːa] , or عَرَبِيّ , ʿarabīy , pronounced [ˈʕarabiː] or [ʕaraˈbij] ) is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in

8687-559: The different states, the French deliberately gave different ethnic and religious groups in the Levant their own lands in the hopes of prolonging their rule. The French hoped to fragment the various groups in the region, to mitigate support for the Syrian nationalist movement seeking to end colonial rule. The administration of the state governments was heavily dominated by the French. Local authorities were given very little power and did not have

8806-652: The emergence of Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of

8925-728: The eve of the conquests: Northern and Central (Al-Jallad 2009). The modern dialects emerged from a new contact situation produced following the conquests. Instead of the emergence of a single or multiple koines, the dialects contain several sedimentary layers of borrowed and areal features, which they absorbed at different points in their linguistic histories. According to Veersteegh and Bickerton, colloquial Arabic dialects arose from pidginized Arabic formed from contact between Arabs and conquered peoples. Pidginization and subsequent creolization among Arabs and arabized peoples could explain relative morphological and phonological simplicity of vernacular Arabic compared to Classical and MSA. In around

9044-607: The fact that they participate in the innovations common to all forms of Arabic. The earliest attestation of continuous Arabic text in an ancestor of the modern Arabic script are three lines of poetry by a man named Garm(')allāhe found in En Avdat, Israel , and dated to around 125 CE. This is followed by the Namara inscription , an epitaph of the Lakhmid king Imru' al-Qays bar 'Amro, dating to 328 CE, found at Namaraa, Syria. From

9163-520: The first new postwar Arab government in Damascus in October 1918, and named Ali Rikabi a military governor . The new Arab administration formed local governments in the major Syrian cities, and the pan-Arab flag was raised all over Syria. The Arabs hoped, with faith in earlier British promises, that the new Arab state would include all the Arab lands stretching from Aleppo in northern Syria to Aden in southern Yemen . However, in accordance with

9282-510: The fourth most useful language for business, after English, Mandarin Chinese , and French. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet , an abjad script that is written from right to left . Arabic is usually classified as a Central Semitic language . Linguists still differ as to the best classification of Semitic language sub-groups. The Semitic languages changed between Proto-Semitic and

9401-495: The governor of that city for the right to graze their herds in the Syrian Jazira. The Kurdish tribes gradually settled in villages and cities and are still present in the modern governorate). The demographics of northern Syria saw a huge shift in the early part of the 20th century when the Ottoman Empire ( Turks ) conducted ethnic cleansing of its Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations and some Kurdish tribes joined in

9520-543: The grazing land of nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes Shammar and Tayy Arab tribes (see map drwan for Mark Sykes). During the late days of the Ottoman Empire , large Kurdish-speaking tribal groups both settled in and were deported to areas of northern Syria from Anatolia . The largest of these tribal groups was the powerful Reshwan tribe , which was initially based in Adıyaman Province but eventually also settled throughout Anatolia . Clans from another Anatolian tribe,

9639-465: The immigrants "came singly and in groups from neighboring countries, especially Turkey, crossing illegally along the border from Ras al'Ain to al-Malikiyya. Gradually and illegally, they settled down in the region along the border in major population centers such as Dirbasiyya, Amuda and Malikiyya." As usual, many of these Kurds were able to register themselves illegally in the Syrian civil registers. They were also able to obtain Syrian identity cards through

9758-597: The inclusion of new words into their published standard dictionaries. They also publish old and historical Arabic manuscripts. In 1997, a bureau of Arabization standardization was added to the Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization of the Arab League . These academies and organizations have worked toward the Arabization of the sciences, creating terms in Arabic to describe new concepts, toward

9877-583: The king of all Arabs. Faisal invited Ali Rikabi to form a government. The congress also proclaimed political and economic union with neighboring Iraq and demanded its independence as well. On 25 April, the supreme inter-Allied council, which was formulating the Treaty of Sèvres , granted France the mandate of Syria (including Lebanon), and granted Britain the Mandate of Palestine (with Trans-Jordan later), and Iraq. Syrians reacted with violent demonstrations, and

9996-613: The language. Software and books with tapes are an important part of Arabic learning, as many of Arabic learners may live in places where there are no academic or Arabic language school classes available. Radio series of Arabic language classes are also provided from some radio stations. A number of websites on the Internet provide online classes for all levels as a means of distance education; most teach Modern Standard Arabic, but some teach regional varieties from numerous countries. The tradition of Arabic lexicography extended for about

10115-604: The late 6th century AD, a relatively uniform intertribal "poetic koine" distinct from the spoken vernaculars developed based on the Bedouin dialects of Najd , probably in connection with the court of al-Ḥīra . During the first Islamic century, the majority of Arabic poets and Arabic-writing persons spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Their texts, although mainly preserved in far later manuscripts, contain traces of non-standardized Classical Arabic elements in morphology and syntax. Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali ( c.  603 –689)

10234-420: The latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children. The relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin vernaculars (which became Romance languages ) in medieval and early modern Europe. MSA

10353-544: The local Arab governments in the region. France demanded full implementation of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, with Syria under its control. On 26 November 1919, British forces withdrew from Damascus to avoid confrontation with the French, leaving the Arab government to face France. Faisal had travelled several times to Europe since November 1918, trying to convince France and Britain to change their positions, but without success. France's determination to intervene in Syria

10472-883: The many national or regional varieties which constitute the everyday spoken language. Colloquial Arabic has many regional variants; geographically distant varieties usually differ enough to be mutually unintelligible , and some linguists consider them distinct languages. However, research indicates a high degree of mutual intelligibility between closely related Arabic variants for native speakers listening to words, sentences, and texts; and between more distantly related dialects in interactional situations. The varieties are typically unwritten. They are often used in informal spoken media, such as soap operas and talk shows , as well as occasionally in certain forms of written media such as poetry and printed advertising. Hassaniya Arabic , Maltese , and Cypriot Arabic are only varieties of modern Arabic to have acquired official recognition. Hassaniya

10591-653: The minority included dynamic Arab nationalist figures such as Jamil Mardam Bey , Shukri al-Kuwatli , Ahmad al-Qadri , Ibrahim Hanano , and Riyad as-Solh . The head was moderate nationalist Hashim al-Atassi . In June 1919, the American King–Crane Commission arrived in Syria to inquire into local public opinion about the future of the country. The commission's remit extended from Aleppo to Beersheba . They visited 36 major cities, met with more than 2,000 delegations from more than 300 villages, and received more than 3,000 petitions. Their conclusions confirmed

10710-782: The need for a lexical injection in Arabic, to suit concepts of the industrial and post-industrial age (such as sayyārah سَيَّارَة 'automobile' or bākhirah باخِرة 'steamship'). In response, a number of Arabic academies modeled after the Académie française were established with the aim of developing standardized additions to the Arabic lexicon to suit these transformations, first in Damascus (1919), then in Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1948), Rabat (1960), Amman (1977), Khartum  [ ar ] (1993), and Tunis (1993). They review language development, monitor new words and approve

10829-525: The number of Kurds in the area who represented 37% of the Jazira population in a 1939 French authorities census. In 1953, French geographers Fevret and Gibert estimated that out of the total 146,000 inhabitants of Jazira, agriculturalist Kurds made up 60,000 (41%), semi-sedentary and nomad Arabs 50,000 (34%), and a quarter of the population were Christians. Among the Sunni Muslims, mostly Kurds and Arabs, there were about 1,500 Circassians in 1938. As

10948-424: The one whose sound is heard but whose person remains unseen. Now the term al-hatif is used for a telephone. Therefore, the process of tawleed can express the needs of modern civilization in a manner that would appear to be originally Arabic. In the case of Arabic, educated Arabs of any nationality can be assumed to speak both their school-taught Standard Arabic as well as their native dialects, which depending on

11067-561: The opposition of Syrians to the mandate in their country as well as to the Balfour Declaration , and their demand for a unified Greater Syria encompassing Palestine. The conclusions of the commission were ignored by both Britain and France. Unrest erupted in Syria when Faisal accepted a compromise with French Prime Minister Clemenceau . Anti- Hashemite demonstrations broke out, and Muslim inhabitants in and around Mount Lebanon revolted in fear of being incorporated into

11186-549: The overhaul of Arabic grammar first proposed by Al-Jahiz 200 years prior. The Maghrebi lexicographer Ibn Manzur compiled Lisān al-ʿArab ( لسان العرب , "Tongue of Arabs"), a major reference dictionary of Arabic, in 1290. Charles Ferguson 's koine theory claims that the modern Arabic dialects collectively descend from a single military koine that sprang up during the Islamic conquests; this view has been challenged in recent times. Ahmad al-Jallad proposes that there were at least two considerably distinct types of Arabic on

11305-529: The project was a strip of land - almost 15 km in breadth - that extended over 375 km in length; across the north-eastern boundary-regions of Syria with Turkey and Iraq . Fifteen state farms of the Pilot Project were built on lands expropriated by the in the barriya (which means wild area in Arabic ); a zone of pasture and dry culture. Most of its land belonged to members of the Hleissat,

11424-410: The region may be mutually unintelligible. Some of these dialects can be considered to constitute separate languages which may have "sub-dialects" of their own. When educated Arabs of different dialects engage in conversation (for example, a Moroccan speaking with a Lebanese), many speakers code-switch back and forth between the dialectal and standard varieties of the language, sometimes even within

11543-596: The remaining troops possibly defected. General Goybet captured Damascus with little resistance on 24 July 1920, and the mandate was written in London two years later on 24 July 1922. Arriving in Lebanon , the French were received as liberators by the Christian community, but in the rest of Syria, they faced strong resistance. The mandate region was subdivided into six states. They were the states of Damascus (1920), Aleppo (1920), Alawites (1920), Jabal Druze (1921),

11662-463: The resulting Franco-Syrian War , Syrian troops under al-Azmeh, composed of the little remaining troops of the Arab army along with Bedouin horsemen and civilian volunteers, met the better trained 12,000-strong French forces under General Mariano Goybet at the Battle of Maysaloun . The French won the battle in less than a day and Azmeh died on the battlefield, along with many of the Syrian troops, while

11781-458: The same sentence. The issue of whether Arabic is one language or many languages is politically charged, in the same way it is for the varieties of Chinese , Hindi and Urdu , Serbian and Croatian , Scots and English, etc. In contrast to speakers of Hindi and Urdu who claim they cannot understand each other even when they can, speakers of the varieties of Arabic will claim they can all understand each other even when they cannot. While there

11900-593: The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement between Britain and France, General Allenby assigned to the Arab administration only the interior regions of Syria (the eastern zone). Palestine (the southern zone) was reserved for the British. On 8 October, French troops disembarked in Beirut and occupied the Lebanese coastal region south to Naqoura (the western zone), replacing British troops there. The French immediately dissolved

12019-562: The settlement of the refugees. One of the most important of these plans was carried out in Upper Jazira in northeastern Syria where the French built new towns and villages (such as Qamishli) were built with the intention of housing the refugees considered to be “friendly”. This has encouraged the non-Turkish minorities that were under Turkish pressure to leave their ancestral homes and property, they could find refuge and rebuild their lives in relative safety in neighboring Syria. Consequently,

12138-458: The sole example of Medieval linguist Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati – who, while a scholar of the Arabic language, was not ethnically Arab – Medieval scholars of the Arabic language made no efforts at studying comparative linguistics, considering all other languages inferior. In modern times, the educated upper classes in the Arab world have taken a nearly opposite view. Yasir Suleiman wrote in 2011 that "studying and knowing English or French in most of

12257-563: The standardization of these new terms throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and toward the development of Arabic as a world language . This gave rise to what Western scholars call Modern Standard Arabic. From the 1950s, Arabization became a postcolonial nationalist policy in countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan. Arabic usually refers to Standard Arabic, which Western linguists divide into Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. It could also refer to any of

12376-660: The states of Aleppo and Damascus were strongly opposed to the division of Syria. This resulted in its quick end in 1925, when France united the states of Aleppo and Damascus into the State of Syria. The Sanjak of Alexandretta became an autonomous province of Syria under Article 7 of the French-Turkish treaty of 20 October 1921 : "A special administrative regime shall be established for the district of Alexandretta. The Turkish inhabitants of this district shall enjoy facility for their cultural development. The Turkish language shall have official recognition". In 1923, Alexandretta

12495-501: The towns where the inscriptions were discovered (Dadanitic, Taymanitic, Hismaic, Safaitic). However, most arguments for a single ANA language or language family were based on the shape of the definite article, a prefixed h-. It has been argued that the h- is an archaism and not a shared innovation, and thus unsuitable for language classification, rendering the hypothesis of an ANA language family untenable. Safaitic and Hismaic, previously considered ANA, should be considered Old Arabic due to

12614-480: The war—the British held control of most of Ottoman Iraq (now Iraq ) and the southern part of Ottoman Syria ( Palestine and Transjordan ), while the French controlled the rest of Ottoman Syria (including Lebanon , Alexandretta , and portions of Cilicia ). In the early 1920s, British and French control of these territories became formalized by the League of Nations ' mandate system. And on 29 September 1923 France

12733-451: The world have classes that teach Arabic as part of their foreign languages , Middle Eastern studies , and religious studies courses. Arabic language schools exist to assist students to learn Arabic outside the academic world. There are many Arabic language schools in the Arab world and other Muslim countries. Because the Quran is written in Arabic and all Islamic terms are in Arabic, millions of Muslims (both Arab and non-Arab) study

12852-458: Was Beirut. The new state was granted a flag, merging the French flag with the cedar of Lebanon . Maronites were the majority in Lebanon and managed to preserve its independence; an independence that created a unique precedent in the Arab world, as Lebanon was the first Arab country in which Christians were not a minority. The State of Greater Lebanon existed until 23 May 1926, after which it became

12971-651: Was assigned the League of Nations mandate of Syria, which included the territory of present-day Lebanon and Alexandretta in addition to modern Syria. The administration of the region under the French was carried out through a number of different governments and territories, including the Syrian Federation (1922–1924), the State of Syria (1925–1930) and the Mandatory Syrian Republic (1930–1946) , as well as smaller states: Greater Lebanon ,

13090-551: Was attached to the State of Aleppo , and in 1925 it was directly attached to the French mandate of Syria, still with special administrative status. The sanjak was given autonomy in November 1937 in an arrangement brokered by the League. Under its new statute, the sanjak became 'distinct but not separated' from the French Mandate of Syria on the diplomatic level, linked to both France and Turkey for defence matters. In 1938,

13209-427: Was inevitable. In Turkey the rapid mechanisation of farming had created huge unemployment and massive labour migration from the 1950s onwards. The fertile but not yet cultivated lands of northern Jazira must have been a strong enticement and the affected frontier was too long feasibly to police it. A decision was made by the Ba'athist government in 1965 to build the 350 km long and 10–15 km wide Arab belt along

13328-471: Was located on the Syrian coast and incorporated a majority of Alawites , a branch of Shia Islam . The port city of Latakia was the capital of this state. Initially it was an autonomous territory under French rule known as the "Alawite Territories". It became part of the Syrian Federation in 1922, but left the federation again in 1924 and became the "State of Alawites". On 22 September 1930, it

13447-400: Was probably closer to 340,000. Although these figures may have been exaggerated, they were credible given the actual circumstances. From being lawless and virtually empty prior to 1914, the Jazira had proved to be astonishingly fertile once order was imposed by the French mandate and farming undertaken by the largely Kurdish population.... A strong suspicion that many migrants were entering Syria

13566-542: Was renamed the "Independent Government of Latakia ". The population at this time was 278,000. The government of Latakia finally joined the Syrian Republic on 5 December 1936. This state witnessed several rebellions against the French, including that of Salih al-Ali (1918–1920). On 28 June 1922, Arrêté 1459 created a " Federation of the Autonomous States of Syria " which included the State of Aleppo,

13685-657: Was shown by the naming of General Henri Gouraud as high commissioner in Syria and Cilicia . At the Paris Peace Conference , Faisal found himself in an even weaker position when the European powers decided to renege on the promises made to the Arabs. In May 1919, elections were held for the Syrian National Congress , which convened in Damascus. 80% of seats went to conservatives. However,

13804-447: Was some autonomist agitation among Assyrians and Kurds , supported by some Bedouins , in the province of Al-Jazira. Its partisans wanted the French troops to stay in the province in the event of a Syrian independence, as they feared the nationalist Damascus government would replace minority officials by Muslim Arabs from the capital. The French authorities refused to consider any new status of autonomy inside Syria. In Quneitra and

13923-558: Was supposed to differ from colonialism , with the governing country intended to act as a trustee until the inhabitants were considered eligible for self-government . At that point, the mandate would terminate and a sovereign state would be born. During the two years that followed the end of the war in 1918—and in accordance with the Sykes–Picot Agreement signed by the United Kingdom and French Third Republic during

14042-492: Was then known as the Autonomous Territory of Lebanon. Then on 31 August 1920, General Gouraud signed Arrêté 318 delimiting the State of Greater Lebanon, with explanatory notes stating that Lebanon would be treated separately from the rest of Syria. On 1 September 1920, General Gouraud publicly proclaimed the creation of the State of Greater Lebanon (French: État du Grand Liban , Arabic: دولة لبنان الكبير ) at

14161-414: Was then settled with Arabs displaced by the creation of Lake Assad . The programme was implemented in 1973; forcibly deporting around 140,000 Kurds and confiscating their lands around a 180-mile strip. Thousands of Arab settlers coming from Raqqa were then granted these lands to establish settlements. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the Jazira province was a “no man’s land” primarily reserved for

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