북부 아랍어와 남부 아랍어에 대한 역사적 고찰

A Historical Study on Northern Arabic and Southern Arabic

The Arabic language is generally divided into northern Arabic and southern Arabic. The northern Arabic includes western Ḥijāzi and eastern Najdi dialects, while the southern Arabic includes the ancient Yemeni languages and modern dialects. The Ḥijāzi dialects were used as the urban dialects in Mecca and Medina and the Najdi dialects included Bedouin dialects. The urban dialects during the Islamic conquest have rapidly changed compared to the Bedouin dialects, which have lost its own grammatical rules. On the other hand, the Bedouin dialects relatively maintained a linguistic purity because they were geographically isolated. It seems that the language of the Koran and the pre-Islamic poems were more related to Eastern than to Western Arabic considering that the Najdi dialects have the linguistic characteristics of the classical Arabic, such as the adaptation of the spelling of the hamzah, the glottal stop, the preservation of the declension, a voiceless sound of /q/, the presence of interdental sounds, the use of passive form, and the use of the duals and so on. The southern Arabic is divided into the ancient Yemeni languages and the modern Yemeni dialects. The ancient Yemeni languages like the Minaean, Sabean disappeared, while the Himyarian has developed into the modern Yemen dialects. The Himyarian was influenced by the northern Arabic language, and the linguistic features of the Sanaa dialect belonging to the Himyarian language prove this well. The aim of this paper is historically to study northern Arabic and southern Arabic by investigating the language situation and the phonetical & morphological differences or similarities between them.