Religion as a Linguistic Variable in

Christian Greek, Latin, and Arabic1

Kees Versteegh
University of Nijmegen

Introduction
In contemporary sociolinguistic research, religion as a correlate to
linguistic variation tends to receive less attention than the four main
variables class, age, gender, and ethnicity. The connection between
language and religion is usually studied from the perspective of iden-
tity and language attitude. In Arabic studies, Christian varieties of
the language are treated either within a dialectological framework,
or as part of the study of Middle Arabic. As a result, it is not often
clear to what extent they may indeed be regarded as varieties based
on religion. In this paper, I compare the context and function of
Christian Arabic with that of Christian Greek and Latin, which are
said to have functioned as in-group varieties in the Roman empire.
By comparing these cases I attempt to clarify the nature of Christian
Arabic.

1. Part of this paper was presented at the Summer School on Arabic Christi-
anity: History, Culture, Language, Theology, Liturgy, organized at the
University of Münster by Vasile-Octavian Mihoc (July 20, 2016). Catherine
Miller (Université Aix-Marseille), Ana Souza (Oxford University), and Juan
Pedro Monferrer-Sala (Universidad de Córdoba) kindly provided me with
copies of their publications that would otherwise have been unavailable to
me. The comments of an anonymous referee made me reformulate my orig-
inal views.

55
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

Religion as a Variable in Sociolinguistics

Contemporary research in language variation does not seem to be
overly interested in religion as a correlate to linguistic variation.
Compared to the four main variables class, age, gender, and ethnicity,
religion often takes a backseat or is omitted entirely, as in a recent
handbook of language variation, which does not even list the term
in the index.2 Admittedly, it is not always easy to tease apart the
interacting variables, especially in modern secularized societies:
ethnicity is therefore often taken as a blanket term for a number of
labels, including culture, kinship, and also religion. Joshua Fishman
defines ethnicity as “a bond (self-perceived and/or ascribed by others,
with or without objective justification) to a historically continuous
authenticity collectivity.”3 Whether self-perceived or ascribed, any
bond may apparently serve to create a sense of belonging to a group.4
A number of recent studies have claimed that there is ample
reason to include religion as a separate variable in questionnaires for
linguistic fieldwork, even in so-called secularized countries.5 As with
all linguistic variation, religion-based variation depends on the
interaction of two forces.6 On the one hand, propinquity in social
networks leads to accommodating linguistic behavior, so that
members of one group tend to converge in their speech, thus creating
an in-group variety. On the other hand, linguistic variants index
certain socio-religious choices, so that speakers may use linguistic
variants as ‘acts of identity’.7 Not surprisingly, Yaeger-Dror

2. Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-estes, eds., The

Handbook of Language Variation and Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
3. Joshua Fishman, “Language and ethnicity in Bilingual education,” in
Culture, Ethnicity, and Identity: Current Issues in Research, ed. William C.
McCready (New York: Academic Press, 1983), 128.
4. Carmen Fought, “ethnicity,” in The Handbook of Language Variation and
Change, ed. Jack K. Chambers and others (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 45.
5. Malcah Yaeger-Dror, “Religion as a Sociolinguistic Variable,” Language
and Linguistics Compass 8, 11 (2014).
6. Malcah Yaeger-Dror, “Religious Choice, Religious Commitment, and
Linguistic Variation: Religion as a Factor in Language Variation,” Language
and Communication 42 (2015), 72.
7. Robert B. LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-
based Approaches to Ethnicity and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985); on the relation between language and identity see
also Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, “Locating Identity in Language,” in
Language and Identities, ed. Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (edin-

56
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

concludes that the more interaction there is between religious

communities, the less linguistic divergence, and inversely, when they
live isolated from each other, the linguistic differences are bound to
be larger.8
The publication in 2006 of a collection of papers on the link
between religion and language edited by Omoniyi and Fishman has
led to a number of studies about this topic from the perspective of
identity marking for religious groups.9 One example from the Arabic-
speaking world is John Joseph’s study of the differences between
Lebanese Muslims and Christians in their attitude towards French,
Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic.10 Here, the connection between
denomination and language attitude is, indeed, undeniable, and it is
clear that the resulting language choice may serve as an identity
marker. It is less clear whether, all things being equal, religion may
serve as a linguistic variable in a speech community in the form of
systematic variation correlating with the speakers’ denomination.
Benjamin Hary believes it may, indeed; he proposes the term
‘religiolect’ for denominational varieties, in particular for Jewish
varieties, along the entire spectrum from minimal to maximal
divergence from the majority language.11 While the term ‘religiolect’
in principle could include all variation correlating with religious

burgh: edinburgh University Press, 2010); Barbara Johnstone, “Locating

Language in Identity,” in Language and Identities, ed. Carmen Llamas and
Dominic Watt (edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 2010).
8. Yaeger-Dror, “Religious Choice,” 70.
9. Tope Omoniyi and Joshua Fishman, eds., Explorations in the Sociology of
Language and Religion (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2006);
for a summary see Ana Souza, “Language and Religious Identities,” in The
Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, ed. Siân Preece (London:
Routledge, 2016).
10. John e. Joseph, Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 194–212; John e. Joseph, “The
Shifting Roles of Languages in Lebanese Christian and Muslim Identities,”
in Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, ed. Tope
Omoniyi and Joshua Fishman (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins,
2006).
11. Benjamin Hary, “Religiolect,” in Critical Terms in Jewish Language Stud-
ies, ed. Joshua L. Miller and others (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Frankel Institute
Annual, 2011); see also Benjamin Hary and Martin J. Wein, “Religiolin-
guistics: On Jewish-, Christian- and Muslim-defined Languages,” Interna-
tional Journal of the Sociology of Language 220 (2013).

57
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

denomination, it is often used to refer to the linguistic practices of

religious minorities, including Christian denominations.12
Many of these studies deal with heritage linguistics, the study of
the maintenance of linguistic variation in immigrant communities in
the United States and elsewhere.13 In her study of ‘Christianese,’
which is the label evangelical Christians in the southern United
States attach to their way of speaking American english, Sarah Leiter
claims that this particular variety constitutes a religiolect, because
“it is claimed by an overtly religious community.”14 The difference
between mainstream American english and the variety of the
evangelical Christians mainly concerns the use of lexical items, in
the form of neologisms and semantic extensions, and does not seem
to go beyond this level.15
even minor differences may very well serve to identify someone
as member of a religious community. Nicole Rosen and Crystal
Skriver analyze one linguistic variable, the realization of /æ/ before
/g/, in a Mormon community in Alberta, Canada.16 They conclude
that the general raising of /æg/ in Alberta, which is described as a
change in progress, is not shared by young Mormons, in particular
not by young women. The variation is probably the product of the
closely-knit network of young Mormon women, which prevents
them from taking part in the ongoing phonetic change. Rosen and
Skriver do not mention any perceptions associated with this

12. The use of the term ‘religiolect’ in the literature is not restricted to Christian
minorities. Paul Allen Jackson, “These are Not Just Words: Religious
Language of Daoist Temples in Taiwan,” (PhD diss., Arizona State Univer-
sity, 2015), for instance, uses the term for the variety of Chinese used in
Daoist temples in Taiwan.
13. See Werner enninger, “Linguistic Markers of Anabaptist Identity Through
Four Centuries,” in Language and Ethnicity: Focusschrift in Honor of
Joshua A. Fishman on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. James R. Dow
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1991); Wendy Baker and
David Bowie, “Religious Affiliation as a Correlate of Linguistic Behavior,”
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 2 (2010);
Nicole Rosen and Crystal Skriver, “Vowel Patterning of Mormons in South-
ern Alberta, Canada,” Language and Communication 42 (2015).
14. Sarah Leiter, “Christianese: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the evangelical
Dialect of American english” (BA thesis, emory University, 2013).
15. In examples mentioned by Leiter, “Christianese” includes the use of the
noun fellowship as a verb (to fellowship someone), the use of mother-in-
love instead of mother-in-law, and the frequent use of the phrase to walk
with the Lord.
16. Rosen and Skriver, “Vowel Patterning.”

58
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

realization, nor whether non-raised /æg/ serves as a shibboleth of

Mormon speech.

Communal Dialects in the Arabic-speaking World

In the Middle east, dialect geographers have long been familiar with
communal dialects, which are closely connected with a religious
community.17 Marie-Aimée Germanos and Catherine Miller explain
the existence of such varieties as the possible outcome of different
demographic processes.18 One possibility is for a religious minority
to migrate to another city and maintain their own variety, after sett-
ling down in an area where the majority speak a different variety.19
Another possibility is for a religious majority in a city to be affected
by the speech of immigrants from rural areas when these practice the
same religion as they do. In both cases, the different ways of speak-
ing were not there from the beginning, but developed as the result of
a demographic process.
The classic study of communal dialects of Arabic is that by Haim
Blanc, who distinguished three dialect varieties in Baghdad, spoken
by the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in that city. Chris-
tian and Jewish Baghdadi Arabic belong to the oldest stratum of
urban vernaculars, which originated during the first period of Arab
conquest in Iraq in the seventh century and exhibit the typical traits

17. Catherine Miller, “Variation and Change in Arabic Urban Vernaculars,” in

Approaches to Arabic Dialects: A Collection of Articles Presented to
Manfred Woidich on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Martine Haak
and others (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Catherine Miller, “Arabic Urban Vernac-
ulars: Development and Change,” in Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect
Contact and Language Variation, ed. Catherine Miller and others
(London/New York: Routledge, 2007); Keith Walters, “Communal
Dialects,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed.
Mushira eid and others (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
18. Marie-Aimée Germanos and Catherine Miller, “Is Religious Affiliation a
Key Factor in Language Variation in Arabic-speaking Countries?,”
Language and Communication 42 (2015).
19. An example of this is the emigration of North-African Jews and their reset-
tlement in Cairo, where they maintained some North-African traits in their
speech, such as the 1st person sg. verbal prefix n- (see Joshua Blau, The
Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judeo-Arabic: A Study of the
Origins of Middle Arabic, 2nd revised ed. (Jerusalem: Ben Zwi, 1999), 56.

59
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

of Mesopotamian qǝltu dialects.20 The dialect spoken by Muslims

nowadays belongs to the Mesopotamian gilit dialects.21
Heikki Palva points out that a number of features in
contemporary Muslim Baghdadi Arabic are traces of an old urban
qǝltu dialect. This implies that when the city was founded in 762
C.e., the linguistic differences between the denominations were less
pronounced, or perhaps even absent entirely. After the devastation
of the city during the Mongol invasion of 1258 C.e., the urban
population was decimated, but replenished by rural Muslim immi-
grants.22 The new immigrants accommodated to a certain extent to
the urban Muslim dialect, but introduced some Bedouin features,
such as the voiced realization of /q/. It was only in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries that massive Bedouin migrations and sett-
lement led to a more intensive Bedouinization of the Muslim dialect.
According to Palva, it was not the case that the rural dialect of the
immigrating Bedouin was more prestigious than the existing urban
dialect, but since (Sunni) Islam was the common religion of the
Bedouin and part of the urban population, some Bedouin linguistic
traits became Muslim markers, while leaving the Christian (and
Jewish) Baghdadi dialect unaffected.23
A similar distinction between an old urban dialect and a more

20. Haim Blanc, Communal Dialects in Baghdad (Cambridge, Mass.: Center

for Middle eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1964). For Christian Bagh-
dadi Arabic, see also Farida Abu Haidar, Christian Arabic of Baghdad
(Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1991). A similar situation in Mosul, with
three distinct communal varieties, is described by Otto Jastrow, “Jüdisches,
christliches und muslimisches Arabisch in Mosul,” in Approaches to Arabic
Dialects: A Collection of Articles Presented to Manfred Woidich on the
Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Martine Haak and others (Leiden:
Brill, 2004).
21. Muslim Baghdadi is probably further divided along sectarian lines. Farida
Abu Haidar, “Turkish as a Marker of ethnic Identity and Religious Affili-
ation,” in Language and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa, ed.
Yasir Suleiman (Richmond: Curzon, 1996) observes that the Shiʿite and
Sunnite community both spoke a Muslim Baghdadi dialect, but that the
Shiʿites tended to turn to Persian for loanwords, whereas the Sunnites
preferred to borrow Turkish loanwords (see also Germanos and Miller,
“Religious Affiliation,” 10).
22. Heikki Palva, “From qǝltu to gǝlǝt: Diachronic Notes on Linguistic Adap-
tation in Muslim Baghdad Arabic,” in Arabic Dialectology: In honour of
Clive Holes on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. enam Al-Wer and
Rudolf de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
23. Palva, “From qǝltu to gǝlǝt,” 36.

60
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

recent Bedouin one is manifested by the Sunni and Shiʿi dialects in

Bahrain: the Shiʿites speak an urban dialect, belonging to the oldest
stratum, whereas the Sunnites have shifted to a Bedouin dialect.24 In
such a situation, speakers from non-dominant religious groups are
unlikely to use their own variety with members of the dominant
group; instead, they tend to accommodate to the dominant speech,
even when their own variant is identical with the Standard Arabic
one. In Bahrain, for example, /q/ is realized by the Sunnites as voiced
/g/, while the Shiʿi variant is identical with the Standard Arabic
realization as a voiceless uvular. Nonetheless, for both communities
voiced /g/ is the prestige variant.25
In other regions in the Arabic-speaking world, sectarian
differences are not always reflected in linguistic variation. In egypt,
for instance, the official view is that there is no linguistic difference
between Muslims and Copts and this is borne out by the results of
field research.26 Yet, people often assert that it is possible to hear
whether someone is Copt or Muslim. When asked for concrete
examples, however, the best answer most people can come up with,
apart from specifically religious terms, is that Christians tend to greet
with nahāruka saʿīd rather than ṣabāḥ il-ḫēr.27 In North-Africa, there
do not seem to be any Christian Arabic varieties, but there were well-
established Jewish varieties, urban dialects that went back to the
oldest period of Arabicization.28 In Tripoli, for instance, the old urban

24. Clive Holes, “Patterns of Communal Language Variation in Bahrain,”

Language in Society 12 (1983); Clive Holes, Language Variation and
Change in a Modernising Arab State (London: Kegan Paul, 1987).
25. Holes, Language Variation, 42–45; Clive Holes, “Community, Dialect and
Urbanization in the Arabic-speaking Middle east,” Bulletin of the School
of Oriental and African Studies 58 (1995).
26. See Reem Bassiouney, Language and Identity in Modern Egypt (edinburgh:
edinburgh University Press, 2014), 183–214.
27. Greeting formulas signal denominational divisions elsewhere as well, for
instance in Lebanon (see Marie-Aimée Germanos, “Greetings in Beirut:
Social Distribution and Attitudes Towards Different Formulae,” in Arabic
in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact and Language Variation, ed. Catherine
Miller and others (London/New York: Routledge, 2007).
28. Some of the Jewish Arabic varieties are still spoken in North Africa, but
the majority of these varieties is either endangered or extinct, see Matthias
Brenzinger, “Language endangerment in Northern Africa,” in Language
Diversity Endangered, ed. Matthias Brenzinger (London/New York:
Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 131-34.

61
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

dialect was preserved by the relatively large Jewish community,

which was not affected by later Bedouinization.29
The intensity of the diverging tendencies partly depends on the
degree of isolation of the minority communities involved. If their
attitude was open and assimilatory, as in the case of Karaite Jewish
communities, they were more likely to co-develop their dialect with
that of their Muslim neighbors. Geoffrey Khan mentions the Jewish
Arabic dialect of Hīt, which, unlike dialects in a similar situation in
other cities, went along with the process of Bedouinization that
affected the Muslim dialect of Hīt.30 In those societies where a greater
degree of segregation obtained between the various communities,
Christian and Jewish speakers tended not to follow linguistic shifts
in the Muslim community. As a result, their speech came to be
different from that of Muslim speakers, even outside the domain of
religion, and it began to function as in-group language for the
religious communities involved. These varieties became a linguistic
marker by which the speakers from these communities could be iden-
tified by others, and by which they distinguished themselves from
others.

Middle Arabic
Communal dialects like the ones described in the previous section
are likely to have existed in the past as well, but the written record is
the only evidence we have about religion-based varieties. The
mechanism determining linguistic choices in written texts is quite
different, however, from the one in speaking. Written language is
never identical with spoken language, yet, it is often taken for granted

29. See Christophe Pereira, “Urbanization and Dialect Change: The Arabic
Dialect of Tripoli (Libya),” in Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact
and Language Variation, ed. Catherine Miller and others (London/New
York: Routledge, 2007).
30. Geoffrey Khan, “Judeo-Arabic,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed.
Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 44–45. See also Marc
Kiwitt and Stephen Dörr, “Judeo-French,” in Handbook of Jewish
Languages, ed. Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016) on
Judeo-French documents from the period before the expulsion of the Jews
in 1306 C.e., when there was free cohabitation between Jews and Christians
in France; as a result, the language of the Jewish documents is indistin-
guishable from that of Christian writers from the same period.

62
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

that Christian and Jewish texts may serve as a direct source of infor-
mation about the way these communities spoke. Concepts like
‘Christian Latin’ and ‘Christian Arabic’ or ‘Jewish Greek’ and
‘Jewish Arabic’ are often used, as if they represent a homogeneous
variety across all media. From time to time, scholars refer to regional
differences, but the difference between the spoken and the written
register is not always taken into account, let alone the fact that
contact between religious communities was not always feasible, so
that linguistic heterogeneity was unavoidable.
The variety of Arabic spoken by members of minorities may well
have functioned as a communal dialect, but when it came to writing
they were bound by the same rules of the standard language as
Muslim speakers: as soon as they put a pen on paper, their primary
target was normative Standard Arabic. For the majority of Muslims,
this norm was rather strict, not least because of the prestige of the
Qurʾānic text. For Christians and Jews, the absence of this factor
meant that they could afford to be relatively lax in the application of
the rules. Nonetheless, in their writings, too, the standard language
remained the norm.
The target of the standard language was not always reached,
however, and a considerable number of Arabic texts exhibit various
degrees of deviation from the norm.31 The general label for these
texts is ‘Middle Arabic,’ which does not denote a discrete variety of
the language, but a category of texts in which for one reason or
another, deviations from the norm occur, even though the standard
language remains the target.32
Gunvor Mejdell claims that the structure of Middle Arabic texts
may be compared to that of mixed spoken Arabic in contemporary
society.33 The corpus of mixed spoken Arabic she collected consists

31. See Joshua Blau, “Das frühe Neuarabisch in mittelarabischen Texten,” in

Grundriss der arabischen Philologie. Vol. I. Sprachwissenschaft, edited by
Wolfdietrich Fischer (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1982); Joshua Blau, Studies in
Middle Arabic and its Judaeo-Arabic Variety (Jerusalem: Magnes Press,
1988); Joshua Blau, Emergence; Jérôme Lentin, “Middle Arabic,” in Ency-
clopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, ed. Mushira eid and others
(Leiden: Brill, 2008).
32. Kees Versteegh, “Breaking the Rules Without Wanting to: Hypercorrection
in Middle Arabic Texts,” in Investigating Arabic: Current Parameters in
Analysis and Learning, ed. Alaa elgibali (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
33. Gunvor Mejdell, “Playing the Same Game? Notes on Comparing Spoken
Contemporary Mixed Arabic and (Pre)Modern Written Middle Arabic,” in
Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony, ed. Liesbeth

63
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

of samples of informal spoken Arabic in formal settings and provides

an excellent illustration of the kind of constraints that rule mixed
speech.34 The speakers are proficient in standard and vernacular
Arabic and skillfully mix the two. To some extent, her oral corpus
resembles one particular category of Middle Arabic texts, whose
authors intentionally deviate from the rules of grammar in order to
adapt the level of speech to the informal nature of the narrated
context. In treatises on mundane and practical matters, the nature of
the topic allows the writer to use more informal language than, say,
in theological treatises. In folktales, the use of colloquialisms helps
the author to enliven the text in order to entertain the audience. Since
the authors are proficient in both colloquial and standard Arabic, they
are able to engage in creative linguistic mixing.
The mixed spoken Arabic in Mejdell’s corpus differs, however,
from a second category of Middle Arabic texts, in which the
deviations from the norm occur because of a lack of proficiency in
the standard language. Semi-literate writers are able to write simple
messages, but because of their poor schooling, they fall short of their
target, the standard language. One characteristic of errors stemming
from a lack of proficiency is the conspicuous presence of hyper-
corrections, which betray the writers’ deficient grammatical educa-
tion.
A third category of deviations from the norm occurs in Middle
Arabic texts when non-normative language is used to signal one’s
membership in a group that has adopted this style of writing as part
of their identity. Since Christian and Jewish writers, as members of
a minority, were less restricted by the rules of the standard language,
they could afford to be more creative and less rule-bound than their
Muslim colleagues. For educated Christians and Jews, the use of
colloquialisms in written language became closely connected with
their group identity as one of the hallmarks of Christian or Jewish
writing. The degree of deviation from the Classical standard varied
not only with each writer, but even within texts written by one author.
educated Christian and Jewish authors of Middle Arabic texts
were perfectly well aware of the rules of grammar and did not
produce any hypercorrections. They were also able to vary between
levels: when they wrote writings intended for a general audience,

Zack and Arie Schippers (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

34. Gunvor Mejdell, Mixed Styles in Spoken Arabic in Egypt (Leiden: Brill,
2006).

64
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

their writings were devoid of colloquialisms, while in addressing

coreligionists, they adopted the ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish’ way of
writing.35 For these in-group styles, the labels Christian (Middle)
Arabic and Judeo-Arabic have been coined.36 The special flavor of
these varieties is achieved by various means: lexical expansion by
loanwords or by loan translation; the use of a different script; and
the use of ‘translational’ language.
In Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew loanwords are commonly used and
they are fully integrated into Arabic morphology.37 Hebrew nouns
may receive broken Arabic plurals, e.g. arwāḥ ‘profits’ (from
Hebrew singular rewaḥ), sadārīr ‘prayer books’ (from Hebrew
singular sadōr), and Hebrew verbs are fitted into Arabic verbal
measures, e.g. taʾabbala ‘to mourn’ (from Hebrew hitʾabbēl), asdara
‘to organize a prayer’ (from Hebrew hisdīr). Because of the
availability of Hebrew loanwords, there was less need for Jewish
writers to coin new Arabic words.
In Christian Arabic, the number of direct loanwords from Greek
or Syriac is more restricted. examples include mostly concrete
notions, like ayqūnah ‘icon,’ or names of functions and institutions,
like muṭrān ‘metropolitan.’ Some loanwords go back to pre-Islamic
times, e.g. usquf ‘bishop,’ kanīsah ‘church.’ The theology of the
Christian trinitarian doctrine is one of the fields in which the choice
of terms was crucial. This doctrine was difficult to explain even in
Greek, since it entailed the use of complicated philosophical and
logical concepts and therefore required a special lexicon, which could
also be used in discussions and polemics with Muslims.38 For

35. Ben Outhwaite, “Lines of Communication: Medieval Hebrew Letters of the

eleventh Century,” in Scribes as Agents of Language Change, ed. esther-
Miriam Wagner and others (Boston/Berlin, 2013) notes thaty in the 11th
century in Palestine and eypt, Jewish authors had a third choice in writing:
they could and frequently did use Hebrew as the language of correspon-
dence, especially about topics concerning religious law.
36. Joshua Blau, “Are Judaeo-Arabic and Christian Middle Arabic Misnomers
Indeed?,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 24 (2000); Jacques
Grand’henry, “Christian Middle Arabic,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic
Language and Linguistics, ed. Mushira eid and others (Leiden: Brill, 2006);
Geoffrey Khan, “Judaeo-Arabic,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and
Linguistics, ed. Mushira eid and others (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
37. Blau, Emergence, 133–66.
38. Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger, “Christian Arabic Theology in
Byzantine Antioch: ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl al-Anṭākī and his Discourse on
the Holy Trinity,” Le Muséon 124 (2011); Orsolya Varsányi, Ninth-century

65
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

‘trinity,’ for instance, the term ṯālūṯ was used alongside taṯlīṯ, possibly
in order to avoid the negative connotations of the latter term. For the
central notion of ‘hypostasis’ different terms were used, the most
frequent one being qunūm or uqnūm, a loanword from Syriac qnōmā
‘self,’ although the Arabic term waǧh ‘person’ was sometimes used
as an alternative. Many of these Arabic expressions are loan trans-
lations of Greek or Syriac words and phrases, for instance when
Greek basileía toû theoû ‘God’s kingdom’ is translated with malakūt
or mulk Allāh.39 even when neologisms are coined, they usually have
some semantic background in Greek or Syriac, like taǧassud for
‘incarnation,’ or qiddīs ‘saint,’ as the equivalent of Greek hágios.
The effectiveness of the lexicon in marking a text as belonging
to a specific religious community was enhanced when the texts were
written in a different script. Obviously, the use of a different script,
which people from outside the community are unable to read, is a
powerful marker of identity.40 These scripts were used even when
the authors were fully proficient native speakers of Arabic and
familiar with Arabic script. Jewish authors generally used Hebrew
script to record whatever new language they adopted as their new
mother tongue. Lily Kahn and Aaron Rubin go so far as to use this
as their main criterion in classifying languages spoken by Jews; they

Arabic Christian Apology and Polemics: A Terminological Study of ʿAmmār

al-Baṣrī’s Kitāb al-masāʾil wa-ʾl-aǧwiba (Berlin: Schwarz, 2015).
39. Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, “Loan Translations from Greek in Christian
Middle Arabic,” in The Arabic Language Across the Ages, ed. Juan Pedro
Monferrer-Sala and Nader Al Jallad (Wiesbaden: Reichert. 2010), 81.
40. Note that in two historical cases of religious language split, difference in
script constitutes one of the major ‘acts of identity.’ In former Yugoslavia,
Serbian, the language of the Orthodox community, is written in Cyrillic
alphabet, whereas Croatian, the language of the Catholic community, uses
the Latin alphabet. See Robert D. Greenberg, Language and Identity in the
Balkans: Serbocroatian and its Disintegration, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008); Daniel Bunčić and others, eds. Biscriptality: A
Sociolinguistic Typology (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016).
The split between Hindi and Urdu was accompanied by the introduction of
Devanagari for texts produced by Hindus, while the Perso-Arabic alphabet
remained in use for Muslim texts. See Tariq Rahman, From Hindi to Urdu:
A Social and Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Carmen Brandt, “Scriptal Pluricentricity: Hindi-Urdu,” in Biscriptality: A
Sociolinguistic Typology, ed. Daniel Bunčić and others (Heidelberg: Univer-
sitätsverlag Winter, 2016). The two varieties also used a different source
for borrowing. Hindi borrowed loanwords from Sanskrit, whereas Urdu
turned for its loanwords to Persian and Arabic.

66
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

distinguish between Judeo-languages, i.e. languages written in

Hebrew script, and Jewish languages, i.e. varieties of other
languages, spoken by Jews.41 Christian authors used this mechanism
more sparingly. Most Christian Arabic texts are written in Arabic
script; the largest body of hetero-scriptural Christian Arabic texts is
that of texts written in Syriac script (the so-called Garšūnī texts).
There are a few examples of Arabic texts written in Greek or Coptic
characters, but these are probably to be regarded as experiments
rather than regular products of a written tradition.42 Consequently,
while the distinction may be relevant for language varieties used by
Jews,43 it does not seem to have any added value for varieties used
by Christians.
A third factor in marking a text as religion-based is the influence
of Biblical translations. It is doubtful that there were any Bible trans-
lations in the period before Islam. Those Arabic-speaking tribes that
had converted to Christianity before Islam presumably did not have
an integral translation at their disposal, but practiced a liturgy that
included homiletic or exegetical elements in Arabic,44 and was trans-
mitted orally. Some religious terms from Greek and Syriac entered
Arabic in this way.

41. Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages
(Leiden: Brill, 2016), 3. Only non-coterritorial languages spoken by Jews,
such as Yiddish and Judezmo, are indicated with a special name, other vari-
eties are indicated by prefixed Jewish or Judeo-. Jewish english, for
instance, refers to english as spoken by Jews, which often does not differ
significantly from english spoken by non-Jews, except for a large number
of loanwords from Yiddish and Hebrew. See Sarah Bunin Benor, “Jewish
english,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, ed. Lily Kahn and Aaron D.
Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Judeo-French is an example of a Judeo-
language that is both spoken by Jews and written in Hebrew script. See
Kiwitt and Dörr, “Judeo-French.”
42. Joshua Blau, “Some Observations on a Middle Arabic egyptian Text in
Coptic Characters,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 1 (1979).
43. Sarah Bunin Benor, “Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language
in the Twenty-first Century,” Religion Compass 2, 6 (2008), 1065 correctly
points out that choice of script is too narrow a criterion for the determination
of what a Jewish language is.
44. Sidney H. Griffith, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the ‘People of
the Book’ in the Language of Islam (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2013), 41–53. The Qurʾān displays detailed knowledge of the content
of Jewish and Christian traditions but refers to the Torah and the Gospels
by paraphrase, rather than through direct quotations. This implies that the
tradition was transmitted orally, rather than through texts, cf. Griffith, Bible
in Arabic, 56.

67
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

After the advent of Islam, Arabic translations of the Bible started

to circulate from the eighth century C.e. onwards. The translators of
Jewish scripture into Arabic approached their task in different ways.
Rabbanite authors like Saʿadya Gaʾon (d. 942 C.e.) aimed at
producing a fluent translation in eloquent Arabic. For other Jewish
translators, the highest aim in translating consisted in representing
faithfully both content and structure of the source text, even if the
resulting text sounded unnatural. Karaite authors emphasized the
need to stay as close as possible to the Hebrew text.45 This is the
approach of the Jewish šurūḥ, which tended to present word-by-word
translations for pedagogical purposes.46 The term ‘literal/interpretive
tension,’ which Hary proposes, captures very well the problem faced
by these translators, who probably knew Arabic far better than one
might be tempted to think on the basis of the translated products.47
They probably never intended these texts to be regarded as models
of correct Arabic.48 Yet, this did not prevent later generations to
regard them as models for Jewish Arabic.
Most Christian translators strove to write correct Arabic. Accord-
ing to Sidney Griffith, the impetus for their producing Arabic trans-
lations of the Christian Bible came from the ʿUṯmānic initiative to
gather the fragments of the Qurʾānic revelation into a written
canonical copy.49 This provided the Christians with a motive to do
the same for an Arabic version of their own scripture, which until
then had been transmitted orally and in a fragmentary fashion.50

45. See Meira Polliack, “Medieval Karaite Views on Translating the Hebrew
Bible into Arabic,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996).
46. Khan, “Judeo-Arabic,” in Handbook of Jewish Languages, 25.
47. Benjamin Hary, “Judeo-Arabic as a Mixed Language,” in Middle Arabic
and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony, ed. Liesbeth Zack and Arie
Schippers (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 130.
48. A similar style of literal translation is used in the ‘translationese’ of Qurʾān
commentaries in Malay; see Peter G. Riddell, “Literal Translation, Sacred
Scripture and Kitab Malay,” Studia islamika: Indonesian Journal for
Islamic Studies 9, 1 (2002).
49. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 97–126.
50. Christian translators usually translated from a Greek original. Some trans-
lators, however, based themselves on the Syriac Peshīṭta and hardly ever
used the Greek Septuagint, for instance the one who translated parts of the
Pentateuch contained in Ms. Sinai-Arabic 2. Interestingly, this translator
also used a terminology that was at times highly reminiscent of Qurʾānic
phraseology, see Miriam Lindgren and Ronny Vollandt, “An early Copy
of the Pentateuch and the Book of Daniel in Arabic (MS Sinai-Arabic 2):
Preliminary Observations on Codicology, Text Types, and Translation Tech-

68
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

Some of the Christian communities, such as the Nestorian and

Melkite ones, soon adopted Arabic as their ecclesiastical language.51
These communities started to canonize their Arabic versions of the
Bible at an early date, while other communities, such as the Coptic
and Jacobite ones, were much slower in adopting Arabic, which
resulted in a more eclectic reception of translations of different
provenance.52 Since the linguistic level of the existing translations
varied, the influence of these texts on the way Christians spoke or
wrote is not always easy to determine. But because of the role of the
Bible translations in polemical discussions between Christians and
Muslims, generally speaking, the translators aimed at a correct and
understandable level of speech, in order to avoid ridicule from their
Muslim interlocutors. Thus, for Arabic-speaking Christians the
impact of ‘translated language’ was probably less intense than for
Jewish authors.

Christian Latin and Greek

Just like the Christians in the Islamic empire, Christians in the Roman
empire constituted a minority in the first three centuries after the birth
of Christianity. The nature and status of Christian Greek and Latin
have been the topic of extensive discussion. The main controversy
turned around the question of whether these varieties merited the
qualification of Sondersprache, a term sometimes assigned to them
by scholars like Jos Schrijnen (1869-1938), Christine Mohrmann

nique,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013). On this Bible

manuscript see also Ibrahim Bassal, “An early Copy of a Christian Arabic
Pentateuch: Ms Sinai Arabic 2 and its Affinity to the Peshīṭta,” in Graeco-
Latina et Orientalia: Studia in Honorem Angeli Urbani Heptagenarii, ed.
Samir Khalil Samir and Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, 13–33 (Cordoba:
CNeRU/Beirut: CeDRAC – Oriens Academic, 2013). Juan Pedro Monfer-
rer-Sala, “An early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition of the
Gospels into Arabic from Mār Sabā (MS. Vat. Ar. 13, 9th c.),” Intellectual
History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) presents another case of an early
translator, who translated a Gospel text from the Greek, but corrected it
with the version in the Syriac Peshīṭta.
51. Joshua Blau, “A Melkite Arabic Lingua Franca from the Second Half of
the First Millennium,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
57 (1994), 14–16.
52. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 130–31.

69
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

(1903-1988), and einar Löfstedt (1880-1955).53 The debate was at

its most intense in the first half of the twentieth century, but seems
to have lost its intensity in contemporary scholarship. The consensus
nowadays seems to be that in their writings Christians used the
colloquial varieties of Greek and Latin they spoke, rather than a
special variety of these languages.54
Originally, the spread of Christianity to the rest of the Roman
empire took place in Greek. This was the language of the Jewish and
early Christian communities, and it was also the language in which
their scripture was written, either the original text, as in the New
Testament, or the translation from the Hebrew original text, as in the
Septuagint. The Jewish translators who produced the Septuagint used
the Greek language of their community.55 Jan Joosten emphasizes
that this Jewish Greek was not a special variety of Greek, but the
common colloquial Greek language.56 In his view, the translators
were native speakers of Greek and the peculiarities of Septuagint
Greek are a by-product of their translating method rather than the
result of any lack of proficiency in Greek.57
Perhaps, the term ‘translating’ is not entirely appropriate for the
activity of the translators. According to Law, they intentionally
stayed as close to the Hebrew text as possible, especially during the
later period of the translations. As a result, language and style of these

53. Christine Mohrmann, “Altchristliches Latein: entstehung und entwicklung

der Theorie der altchristlichen Sondersprache,” Aevum 3 (1939).
54. James Clackson, Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 163.
55. See Julia G. Krivoruchko, “Judeo-Greek,» in Handbook of Jewish
Languages, ed. Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin (Leiden: Brill, 2016);
Nicholas de Lange, “Jewish Greek,” in A History of Ancient Greek from the
Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. Anastasios-Fivos Christidis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
56. Jan Joosten, “Jewish Greek in the Septuagint: On eΥΛOΓeΩ ‘to Praise’
with Dative,” in Biblical Greek in Context: Essays in Honor of John A.L.
Lee, ed. James K. Aitken and Trevor V. evans (Leuven: Peeters, 2015).
57. Timothy Micheal Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the
Making of the Christian Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
118, shows that even those writers who were well versed in Hebrew and
Aramaic, like the apostle Paul, apparently preferred the Greek text. When
they became aware of the discrepancies between the Greek and the Hebrew
text, only few of them maintained that the Hebrew text was superior. Philo
of Alexandria (d. 50 C.e.), for instance, believes in the divine inspiration
of the Greek translation and always quotes from the Greek text (ibid., 129–
30).

70
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

translations were rather unnatural.58 Nonetheless, for Christian

generations growing up with this text, who were constantly being
exposed to its stylistic peculiarities, the language did become an
example to be emulated in their own writing and speech.59 They
believed that the Greek Septuagint text had been established under
divine guidance and embodied in fact the new message God had sent
to the Christians to replace the old message in Hebrew and Aramaic
to the Jews.
In the eastern part of the Roman empire, the expression of the
numerous new religious notions by Christians took place naturally
in Greek. In the process, only a few loanwords from Hebrew and
Aramaic were introduced, e.g. geénna ‘Hell,’ sábbaton ‘Saturday,’
páscha ‘easter,’ satanás ‘Satan.’60 The majority of religious lexical
items were expressed, either through loan translations, e.g. ethnikós
‘Gentile’ (Hebrew goyim ‘non-Jewish peoples’), ángelos ‘angel’
(Hebrew malʾak ‘messenger’), cháris ‘grace; divine grace’ (Hebrew
ḥēn ‘grace, favor’), or through neologisms, e.g. epískopos ‘bishop,’
apóstolos ‘envoy; Apostle,’ agápē ‘(spiritual) love.’
The situation was different in the west. eventually, Christians in
the western part of the Roman empire and in North Africa shifted to
Latin as their in-group language, as is visible in the language choice
of their funerary inscriptions.61 One particularly interesting feature
of Latin as used by Christians in Rome is the facility with which they
accepted Greek terms. These terms were sanctified as it were by the
propagation of the faith: they were regarded as the most appropriate
terms for certain religious notions, and also served to underline the
special character of the community.62 While Hebrew was a foreign
language for non-Jewish converts in the east, Greek was not a foreign

58. Ibid., 56–57.

59. Something similar took place in the european languages, first on the basis
of the Latin Bible which affected the emerging literary languages, and later
on the basis of standard translations after the Reformation, which followed
the Hebrew text closely and affected the language of the Protestants.
60. Mark Janse, “The Greek of the New Testament,” in A History of Ancient
Greek from the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, ed. Anastasios-Fivos Christidis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 650–51.
61. See Leonard Victor Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of
Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
62. Christine Mohrmann, “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des chré-
tiens,” in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, ed. Anselmo María Albareda
(Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1956).

71
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

language in the western part of the empire, since it already had a firm
status as a language of culture and philosophy in Rome. Thus, Chris-
tian users of Latin readily borrowed Greek terms for religious
institutions, like ecclesia (from Greek ekklēsía ‘assembly’), for
ceremonies, like baptizare (from Greek baptízō ‘to baptize’), or for
functions, like episcopus (from Greek epískopos ‘bishop’), presbyter
(from Greek presbúteros ‘elder, priest’), etc.
It was not until much later that some of these terms were replaced
by Latin terms, for instance ethnicus (from Greek ethnikós), which
was first replaced by the calque gentilis and later by the Latin word
paganus,63 The or the verb anathematizare ‘to excommunicate,’
which was later replaced by excommunicare.64 From the beginning,
however, in Christian Latin, too, some religious notions were always
expressed by Latin loan translations, e.g., the soteriological
terminology around salus ‘salvation,’ salvator ‘Savior,’ etc.65
Another example is provided by the crucial opposition between caro
‘flesh’ with its derivation carnalis, and spiritus ‘spirit,’ with its
derivation spiritualis.66
Mohrmann explains that the best way to determine whether
Christian Latin was a Sondersprache is to look at the indirect Chris-
tianisms, i.e. those features of the language that set it apart from non-
Christian Latin, but without any direct relation with religion.67 She
mentions a number of morphological features that are characteristic
of Christian Latin, such as the prevalence of verbal compounds in -
ficare, e.g. beatificare, and the derivation of adjectives in -bilis, e.g.
incorruptibilis, and of nouns in -tor, e.g. fornicator. She also
mentions some syntactic features, for instance the high frequency of
constructions with possessive adjectives instead of constructions with
a genitive, e.g. dominica fides, ecclesiastica disciplina; and the const-
ruction of verba dicendi with the preposition ad.68
After the edict of Milan (313 C.e.), when Christianity obtained
a legal status in the Roman empire, there was an upsurge in Christian
writing, which generated a new vocabulary. Christianity had not yet

63. Christine Mohrmann, Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens (Rome: edizioni di
Storia e Letteratura, 1961), vol. I, 26–27.
64. Ibid., 43.
65. Ibid., 23–24.
66. Ibid., 24–25.
67. Mohrmann, “Altchristliches Latein.”
68. Mohrmann, “Quelques traits charactéristiques.”

72
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

reached the status of state religion, but, by the very fact of its public
acceptance, it had achieved a victory that found its expression in a
new lexicon. Thus, adverbs like infatigabiliter ‘tirelessly’ and nouns
like incommutabilitas ‘invariability’ were freely coined as part of a
triumphant Christian discourse. It is not surprising, then, that in the
fourth century C.e. not only the number of Christian religious terms
increased, but even more so that of indirect Christianisms.69 Chris-
tians still constituted a minority, but since they no longer needed to
hide, they could use their own way of speaking to show the world
who belonged to their group and who did not. Soon, of course, their
way of speaking and writing would become the language of the
majority in the empire.
The discussion about the special status of Christian Latin and
Greek is paralleled by that about Jewish Greek. Just like Christian
writers, Jewish writers varied between linguistic levels according to
their audience.70 As we have seen above in connection with Middle
Arabic texts, such a literary style with different levels could be
regarded as a marker of identity, especially when one of the levels is
expressed in a different script. In Rome, Jewish communities clung
to Greek for a longer time than the Christians did.71 even when,
eventually, they shifted to Latin as their spoken language, they
continued for some time using the Greek alphabet to represent their
new language in writing.72 Rutgers explains the difference between
the Jewish and the Christian community is explained by Rutgers by
the fact that Jewish immigrants came from the eastern Medi-
terranean, where Greek had become the language to express Jewish
identity.73 Greek also functioned as a means of communication
between Roman Jews and their Palestinian coreligionists.74 Their

69. Mohrmann, Etudes, vol. I, 35.

70. Dorota Hartman, “Jewish Greek,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek
Language and Linguistics, ed. Georgios K. Giannakis and others (Leiden:
Brill, 2014).
71. It would be wrong, however, as Willem Smelik, “The Languages of Roman
Palestine,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Palestine, ed. Catherine
Hezser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136, observes, to draw
hasty conclusions about the spoken language of these communities from
the language choice in the inscriptions.
72. Rutgers, Jews in Late Ancient Rome, 180.
73. Ibid., 183–84.
74. The attachment to Greek on the part of Christians and Jews may explain
why Greek survived rather longer in the Islamic empire than has commonly
been assumed. Recent research by Maria Mavroudi, “Greek Language and

73
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

linguistic variety was therefore bound to be more divergent from

non-religious language than Christian Latin was. And, of course,
unlike Christian Latin, Jewish Latin never became a majority
language.

Christian Arabic and Christian Latin/Greek: A

Comparison
A comparison between the use of Latin/Greek and Arabic by Chris-
tians shows that the two differ considerably. The communities in the
Hellenistic world that embraced Christianity had been speaking
Greek for a long time. What was new for them was the introduction
of a new religion, for which they had to reconfigure their old
language. The Islamic conquests, on the other hand, introduced a
new language, Arabic, to people who already had a religion, Chris-
tianity. These speakers had to adopt the new language in order to be
able to communicate with the conquerors. eventually, this became
the new mother tongue for many of them, which had to be recon-
figured for their old religion.
Speakers of Greek in the Roman empire became Christians and
had to adapt their language to their new faith, while Christians in the
Islamic empire became speakers of Arabic and had to adapt their new
language to their old faith. Usually, they did not feel the need to
underscore the special nature of their writings by using a different
script or a large number of loanwords. Because of this fundamental
difference, the structure of the Christian Greek/Latin and Arabic
lexicon is different. In Christian Greek, the number of loanwords
from Hebrew/Aramaic is relatively low, while the adaptation of the
language to the new faith manifests itself in the creation of new
words and the semantic extension of existing words. Additionally,

education Under early Islam,” in Islamic cultures, Islamic contexts: Essays

in honor of Professor Patricia Crone, ed. Behnam Sadeghi and others
(Leiden: Brill, 2015) and Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Why did Coptic Fail
where Aramaic Succeeded? Linguistic Developments in egypt and the Near
east after the Arab Conquest,” in Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman
Worlds, ed. Alex Mullen and Patrick James (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012) has shown that in egypt and the Levant, Greek
continued to be used as a written (and sometimes spoken) language until
the end of the 8th century C.e., perhaps even into the 9th century.

74
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

the translation of scripture into Greek resulted in an artifical ‘trans-

lational’ language, which affected the discourse of Greek-speaking
Christians.
In Christian Latin, there was no constraint against Greek
loanwords, which were borrowed in large numbers in order to
explain the new faith to converts. Greek, after all, had functioned for
a long time both as a cultural language and as the general means of
communication for all foreigners in Rome. In the course of time,
some of the Greek terms were translated into Latin, and once Chris-
tianity became a permitted religion and subsequently the state
religion, a huge expansion of the Christian lexicon took place, which
used the morphological tools of Latin in order to create the required
terms.
In the second place, the social status of the two communities
differed. In the first centuries after the introduction of Christianity
in the Roman empire, Christians belonged to the lower classes and
were viewed with disdain by the higher classes, or even actively
persecuted. After the edict of Milan of 313 C.e., and even more so
when Christianity officially became the state religion in 380 C.e.,
they became the majority in the Roman empire and its successor
states. By that time, western Christians had shifted to Latin as the
language of their religion, which thanks to their newly acquired status
they felt free to manipulate lexically and morphologically. In this
way, the domain of their language was expanded so that it became
more than just a religious language, hence the increase in indirect
Christianisms. In the Islamic world, Christians initially constituted
a majority in the conquered territories, but in the course of the
centuries, many of them converted to the new religion. Those who
remained Christian became part of a protected minority and were
allowed to practice their religion. Generally speaking, they did not
have to fear social ostracism or to face persecution, but still they
remained a minority.
A third difference between the linguistic situation of Arab and
Roman Christians concerns the role of canonical religious texts. In
the case of Greek- and Latin-speaking Christians, the translations of
the New Testament and the Septuagint were very influential, and,
despite its unnatural character, the language of these texts had a
strong impact on Christian Latin and Greek. In the case of the Arabic-
speaking Christians, the language of their scripture did not have such
an influence because the language of the Christian Bible translations
did not differ significantly from that of Standard Arabic texts.

75
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

A fourth difference between Roman and Arab Christians con-

cerns the role of direct and indirect Christianisms. We have seen
above that in Christian Latin writing Greek loanwords were readily
accepted and that after the edict of Milan the number of indirect
Christianisms increased considerably. A similar development is not
to be expected in Christian Arabic writing, since Christians never
obtained a comparable position of prestige in the Islamic empire.
Most Christian Arabic terminology originated in an apologetic and
polemical context, and always in opposition to dominant Islamic
thinking.75 Obviously, in such a context, it was hardly advisable for
Christian authors to use excessively ‘unnatural’ language, with large
numbers of loanwords and neologisms. Instead, they relied on loan
translations of Greek terms and occasionally on neologisms for major
notions of Christian theology.
Finally, Christian communities in the Roman empire were
engaged in a constant effort to spread their faith through
proselytizing, combined with the need to reformulate and translate
the basic tenets of the faith. The entire basis of Christian communities
was that they consisted of converts. In this respect, too, the situation
of Roman Christians was quite different from that of Christians in
the Islamic empire, because for the latter, proselytizing was out of
the question.

Was Christian Arabic a Sondersprache?

Christians in the Islamic empire had to adapt to the new circum-
stances, in which they no longer constituted the majority in the lands
that had come to be ruled by the Islamic caliphate. At the beginning
of the Islamic era, after the conquests had run their course, there was
no linguistic difference between converted and non-converted
inhabitants of the newly conquered Islamic territories. Just like all
inhabitants of the conquered territories, they Christians were engaged
in an acquisition process of the conquerors’ language, which led to
new forms of spoken Arabic. eventually, they all adopted the
conquerors’ language, although some Christian communities held on

75. Notwithstanding the fact that the development of Christian theological

terminology may well have been partly responsible for the development of
Islamic kalām, as shown by Varsányi, Ninth-Century Arabic Christian Apol-
ogy.

76
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

to their heritage language as well. But even for these bilingual

communities, Arabic was the standard language, the language of the
administration, and in general, the language of prestige. At first,
Arabic-speaking Christians did not speak any religiolect in the sense
of a special variety that served as an identity marker for their group.
Later demographic processes created a difference between Muslim
and Christian speech in some regions, depending on the level of
isolation in which the Christians lived. This led to the emergence of
communal dialects. For these varieties, religion clearly functions as
a linguistic variable, that is to say, they identify the speaker as
belonging to a Christian community, even outside a religious context.
For such ‘indirect Christianisms,’ to borrow Mohrmann’s term, the
label of ‘religiolect’ is appropriate.
Arabic texts written by Christians constitute an altogether
different matter. Those Christians who did not convert to Islam, had
to reconfigure their new language, Arabic, to express their old Chris-
tian religion. In this situation, it was hardly convenient for them to
introduce Greek loanwords. Rather, they translated the central
notions of their religion into Arabic, introducing large numbers of
loan translations and, in the process, contributing to the creation of
an Arabic theological and philosophical vocabulary. Because Chris-
tians were less constrained by the norms of the written language than
Muslims, they were relatively free in expressing themselves in by
writing in a form of Arabic that contained more vernacular forms.
The language of Christian Arabic texts, like that of Judeo-Arabic
texts, was less bound by the strictures of Classical Arabic than
Muslim Middle Arabic texts.
Benor defines Jewish language as “a distinctive linguistic
repertoire that Jews deploy selectively as they present themselves as
Jews and as various types of Jews.”76 Along these lines the language
of the Christian Arabic texts should be seen as part of the linguistic
repertoire of Christian communities, as a special register closely
connected to their religious identity.77 This is preferable to regarding

76. Benor, “Towards a New Understanding,” 1075.

77. Presumably, this conclusion also applies to other situations where a reli-
gious minorities write their texts in a different script, as in the case of the
Tamil Muslims, who use Arabic script for Islamic texts in Tamil, the so-
called Arwi literature, see Torsten Tschacher, Islam in Tamilnadu: Varia
(Halle (Saale): Institut für Indologie und Südasienwissenschaften der
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2001).

77
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

the language of these texts as a fixed and discrete Christian variety

of the Arabic language constituting a separate linguistic system.78

Bibliography
Abu Haidar, Farida. Christian Arabic of Baghdad. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1991.
Abu Haidar, Farida. “Turkish as a Marker of ethnic Identity and
Religious Affiliation.” In Language and Identity in the Middle
East and North Africa, edited by Yasir Suleiman, 117–32. Rich-
mond: Curzon, 1996.
Baker, Wendy, and David Bowie. “Religious Affiliation as a
Correlate of Linguistic Behavior.” University of Pennsylvania
Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 2 (2010).
http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol15/iss2/2.
Bassal, Ibrahim. “An early Copy of a Christian Arabic Pentateuch:
Ms Sinai Arabic 2 and its Affinity to the Peshīṭta.” In Graeco-
Latina et Orientalia: Studia in Honorem Angeli Urbani
Heptagenarii, edited by Samir Khalil Samir and Juan Pedro
Monferrer-Sala, 13–33. Cordoba: CNeRU / Beirut: CeDRAC –
Oriens Academic, 2013.
Bassiouney, Reem. Language and Identity in Modern Egypt.
edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Towards a New Understanding of Jewish
Language in the Twenty-first Century.” Religion Compass 2, 6
(2008): 1062–80.
Benor, Sarah Bunin. “Jewish english.” In Handbook of Jewish
Languages, edited by Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, 130–37.
Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Blanc, Haim. Communal Dialects in Baghdad. Cambridge, Mass.:
Center for Middle eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1964.
Blau, Joshua. “The Status of Arabic as Used by Jews in the Middle

78. Nor can Judeo-Arabic texts be regarded as evidence of the language spoken
by Jewish communities. Yosef Tobi, “Written Judeo-Arabic: Colloquial
Versus Middle Arabic,” in Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony
and Synchrony, ed. Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers (Leiden: Brill, 2012)
is certainly right when he insists on distinguishing between Arabic as a
spoken language of Jews and Judeo-Arabic as a written language, even
when it contains colloquial elements.

78
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

Ages: Do Jewish Middle-Arabic Texts Reflect a Distinctive

Language?” Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (1959): 15–23.
Blau, Joshua. A Grammar of Christian Arabic Based mainly on South
Palestinian Texts from the First Millennium. 3 vols. Louvain:
Peeters, 1966–67.
Blau, Joshua. “Some Observations on a Middle Arabic egyptian Text
in Coptic Characters.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 1
(1979): 215–62.
Blau, Joshua. “Das frühe Neuarabisch in mittelarabischen Texten.”
In Grundriss der arabischen Philologie. Vol. I. Sprachwissen-
schaft, edited by Wolfdietrich Fischer, 96–109. Wiesbaden:
Reichert, 1982.
Blau, Joshua. Studies in Middle Arabic and its Judaeo-Arabic
Variety. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988.
Blau, Joshua. “A Melkite Arabic Lingua Franca from the Second
Half of the First Millennium.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 57 (1994): 14–16.
Blau, Joshua. The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judeo-
Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Middle Arabic. 2nd revised ed.
Jerusalem: Ben Zwi, 1999. (1st ed., London: Oxford University
Press, 1965).
Blau, Joshua. “Are Judaeo-Arabic and Christian Middle Arabic
Misnomers Indeed?” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 24
(2000): 49–57.
Brandt, Carmen. “Scriptal Pluricentricity: Hindi-Urdu.” In
Biscriptality: A Sociolinguistic Typology, edited by Daniel
Bunčić, Sandra L. Lippert, and Achim Rabus, 149–58. Heidel-
berg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016.
Brenzinger, Matthias. “Language endangerment in Northern Africa.”
In Language Diversity Endangered, edited by Matthias
Brenzinger, 123-39. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007.
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. “Locating Identity in Language.” In
Language and Identities, edited by Carmen Llamas and Dominic
Watt, 18–28. edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Bunčić, Daniel, Sandra L. Lippert, and Achim Rabus, eds.
Biscriptality: A Sociolinguistic Typology. Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016.
Chambers, Jack K., Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-estes, eds.
The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002.

79
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

Clackson, James. Language and Society in the Greek and Roman

Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
enninger, Werner. “Linguistic Markers of Anabaptist Identity
Through Four Centuries.” In Language and Ethnicity: Focussch-
rift in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman on the Occasion of his 65th
Birthday, edited by James R. Dow, II, 23–60.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1991.
Fishman, Joshua. “Language and ethnicity in Bilingual education.”
In Culture, Ethnicity, and Identity: Current Issues in Research,
edited by William C. McCready, 127–37. New York: Academic
Press, 1983.
Fought, Carmen. “ethnicity.” In The Handbook of Language
Variation and Change, edited by Jack K. Chambers, Peter
Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-estes, 444–72. Oxford: Black-
well, 2002.
Germanos, Marie-Aimée. “Greetings in Beirut: Social Distribution
and Attitudes Towards Different Formulae.” In Arabic in the
City: Issues in Dialect Contact and Language Variation, edited
by Catherine Miller, enam Al-Wer, Dominique Caubet, and Janet
C.e. Watson, 147–65. London/New York: Routledge, 2007.
Germanos, Marie-Aimée, and Catherine Miller. “Is Religious
Affiliation a Key Factor in Language Variation in Arabic-speak-
ing Countries?” Language and Communication 42 (2015): 86–
98.
Grand’henry, Jacques. “Christian Middle Arabic.” In Encyclopedia
of Arabic Language and Linguistics, edited by Mushira eid, Alaa
elgibali, Kees Versteegh, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej
Zaborski, vol. I, 383–87. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Greenberg, Robert D. Language and Identity in the Balkans:
Serbocroatian and its Disintegration. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008. (1st ed., 2004).
Griffith, Sidney H. The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the ‘People
of the Book’ in the Language of Islam. Princeton/Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2013.
Hartman, Dorota. “Jewish Greek.” In Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek
Language and Linguistics, edited by Georgios K. Giannakis, Vit
Bubenik, emilio Crespo, Chris Golston, Alexandra Lianeri,
Silvia Luraghi, and Stephanos Matthaios, vol. II, 268–70.
Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Hary, Benjamin. “Religiolect.” In Critical Terms in Jewish Language
Studies, edited by Joshua L. Miller, Deborah Dash Moore, and

80
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

Anita Norich, 43–47. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Frankel Institute

Annual, 2011.
Hary, Benjamin. “Judeo-Arabic as a Mixed Language.” In Middle
Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony, edited by
Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers, 125–43. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Hary, Benjamin, and Martin J. Wein. “Religiolinguistics: On Jewish-
, Christian- and Muslim-defined Languages.” International Jour-
nal of the Sociology of Language 220 (2013): 85–108.
Holes, Clive. “Patterns of Communal Language Variation in
Bahrain.” Language in Society 12 (1983): 433–57.
Holes, Clive. Language Variation and Change in a Modernising
Arab State. London: Kegan Paul, 1987.
Holes, Clive. “Community, Dialect and Urbanization in the Arabic-
speaking Middle east.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 58 (1995): 270–87.
Jackson, Paul Allen. “These are Not Just Words: Religious Language
of Daoist Temples in Taiwan.” PhD diss., Arizona State
University, 2015.
Janse, Mark. “The Greek of the New Testament.” In A History of
Ancient Greek from the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, edited by
Anastasios-Fivos Christidis, 646–53. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007.
Jastrow, Otto. “Jüdisches, christliches und muslimisches Arabisch in
Mosul.” In Approaches to Arabic Dialects: A Collection of
Articles Presented to Manfred Woidich on the Occasion of his
Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Martine Haak, Rudolf de Jong, and
Kees Versteegh, 135–50. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Johnstone, Barbara. “Locating Language in Identity.” In Language
and Identities, edited by Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt, 29–
36. edinburgh: edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Joosten, Jan. “Jewish Greek in the Septuagint: On eΥΛOΓeΩ ‘to
Praise’ with Dative.” In Biblical Greek in Context: Essays in
Honor of John A.L. Lee, edited by James K. Aitken and Trevor
V. evans, 137–44. Leuven: Peeters, 2015.
Joseph, John e. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Joseph, John e. “The Shifting Roles of Languages in Lebanese
Christian and Muslim Identities.” In Explorations in the
Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi
and Joshua Fishman, 165–79. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins, 2006.

81
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

Kahn, Lily, and Aaron D. Rubin, eds. Handbook of Jewish

Languages. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Khan, Geoffrey. “Judaeo-Arabic.” In Encyclopedia of Arabic
Language and Linguistics, edited by Mushira eid, Alaa elgibali,
Kees Versteegh, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej Zaborski, II,
526–37. Leiden: e.J. Brill, 2007.
Khan, Geoffrey. “Judeo-Arabic.” In Handbook of Jewish Languages,
edited by Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, 22–63. Leiden: Brill,
2016.
Kiwitt, Marc and Stephen Dörr. “Judeo-French.” In Handbook of
Jewish Languages, edited by Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin,
138–77. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Krivoruchko, Julia G. “Judeo-Greek.” In Handbook of Jewish
Languages, edited by Lily Kahn and Aaron D. Rubin, 194–225.
Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Lange, Nicholas de. “Jewish Greek.” In A History of Ancient Greek
from the Beginnings to Late Antiquity, edited by Anastasios-
Fivos Christidis, 638–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Law, Timothy Michael. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and
the Making of the Christian Bible. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
Leiter, Sarah. “Christianese: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the
evangelical Dialect of American english.” BA thesis, emory
University, 2013.
LePage, Robert B. and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. Acts of Identity:
Creole-based Approaches to Ethnicity and Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Lentin, Jérôme. “Middle Arabic.” In Encyclopedia of Arabic
Language and Linguistics, edited by Mushira eid, Alaa elgibali,
Kees Versteegh, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej Zaborski, vol.
III, 215–24. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Lindgren, Miriam, and Ronny Vollandt. “An early Copy of the
Pentateuch and the Book of Daniel in Arabic (MS Sinai-Arabic
2): Preliminary Observations on Codicology, Text Types, and
Translation Technique.” Intellectual History of the Islamicate
World 1 (2013): 43–68.
Mavroudi, Maria. “Greek Language and education under early
Islam.” In Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor
of Professor Patricia Crone, edited by Behnam Sadeghi, Asad

82
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein, and Robert Hoyland, 295–342.

Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Mejdell, Gunvor. Mixed Styles in Spoken Arabic in Egypt. Leiden:
Brill, 2006.
Mejdell, Gunvor. “Playing the Same Game? Notes on Comparing
Spoken Contemporary Mixed Arabic and (Pre)Modern Written
Middle Arabic.” In Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony
and Synchrony, edited by Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers,
235–45. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Miller, Catherine. “Variation and Change in Arabic Urban
Vernaculars.” In Approaches to Arabic Dialects: A Collection of
Articles Presented to Manfred Woidich on the Occasion of his
Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Martine Haak, Rudolf de Jong, and
Kees Versteegh, 177–206. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Miller, Catherine. “Arabic Urban Vernaculars: Development and
Change.” In Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact and
Language Variation, edited by Catherine Miller, enam Al-Wer,
Dominique Caubet, and Janet C.e. Watson, 1–31. London/New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Mohrmann, Christine. “Altchristliches Latein: entstehung und
entwicklung der Theorie der altchristlichen Sondersprache.”
Aevum 3 (1939): 339–54. (Reprinted in Christine Mohrmann,
Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. I, 3–19. 2nd ed. Rome:
edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.)
Mohrmann, Christine. “Le latin langue de la chrétienté occidentale.”
Aevum 24 (1950): 133–61. (Reprinted in Christine Mohrmann,
Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. I, 51–81. 2nd ed. Rome:
edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.)
Mohrmann, Christine. “Le problème du vocabulaire chrétien:
expériences d’évangélisation paléo-chrétiennes et modernes.”
In Scientia Missionum Ancilla: Mélanges A.J.M. Mulders, edited
by edouard Loffeld and Johannes A.F. Wils, 254–62.
Utrecht/Nijmegen: Dekker en van de Vegt, 1953. (Reprinted in
Christine Mohrmann, Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. I,
113–22. 2nd ed. Rome: edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.)
Mohrmann, Christine. “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des
chrétiens.” In Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, edited by Anselmo
María Albareda, vol. I, 937–66. Vatican City: Bibliotheca
Apostolica Vaticana, 1956. (Reprinted in Christine Mohrmann,
Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. I, 21–50. 2nd ed. Rome:
edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.)

83
 KeeS VeRSTeeGH

Mohrmann, Christine. Etudes sur le latin des chrétiens. 2 vols. 2nd

ed. Rome: edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1961.
Monferrer-Sala, Juan Pedro. “Loan Translations from Greek in Chris-
tian Middle Arabic.” In The Arabic Language Across the Ages,
edited by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Nader Al Jallad, 75–
91. Wiesbaden: Reichert. 2010.
Monferrer-Sala, Juan Pedro. “An early Fragmentary Christian Pales-
tinian Rendition of the Gospels into Arabic from Mār Sabā (MS.
Vat. Ar. 13, 9th c.).” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World
1 (2013): 69–113.
Noble, Samuel, and Alexander Treiger. “Christian Arabic Theology
in Byzantine Antioch: ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl al-Anṭākī and his
Discourse on the Holy Trinity.” Le Muséon 124 (2011): 371–417.
Omoniyi, Tope, and Joshua Fishman, eds. Explorations in the
Sociology of Language and Religion. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins, 2006.
Outhwaite, Ben. “Lines of Communication: Medieval Hebrew
Letters of the eleventh Century,” In Scribes as Agents of
Language Change, edited by esther-Miriam Wagner, ben
Outhwaite, and Bettina Beinhoff, 183-98. Boston/Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2013.
Palva, Heikki. “From qǝltu to gǝlǝt: Diachronic Notes on Linguistic
Adaptation in Muslim Baghdad Arabic.” In Arabic Dialectology:
In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of his Sixtieth
Birthday, edited by enam Al-Wer and Rudolf de Jong, 17–40.
Leiden: Brill, 2009.
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. “Why did Coptic Fail where Aramaic
Succeeded? Linguistic Developments in egypt and the Near east
after the Arab Conquest.” In Multilingualism in the Graeco-
Roman Worlds, edited by Alex Mullen and Patrick James, 58–
76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Pereira, Christophe. “Urbanization and Dialect Change: The Arabic
Dialect of Tripoli (Libya).” In Arabic in the City: Issues in
Dialect Contact and Language Variation, edited by Catherine
Miller, enam Al-Wer, Dominique Caubet, and Janet C.e.
Watson, 77–96. London/New York: Routledge, 2007.
Polliack, Meira. “Medieval Karaite Views on Translating the Hebrew
Bible into Arabic.” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996): 64–84.
Rahman, Tariq. From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Riddell, Peter G. “Literal Translation, Sacred Scripture and Kitab

84
 ReLIGION AS A LINGUISTIC VARIABLe

Malay.” Studia islamika: Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies

9, 1 (2002): 1–26.
Rosen, Nicole, and Crystal Skriver. “Vowel Patterning of Mormons
in Southern Alberta, Canada.” Language and Communication 42
(2015): 104–15.
Rutgers, Leonard Victor. The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence
of Cultural Interaction in the Roman Diaspora. Leiden: Brill,
2000.
Smelik, Willem. “The Languages of Roman Palestine.” In The
Oxford Handbook of Roman Palestine, edited by Catherine
Hezser, 122–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Souza, Ana. “Language and Religious Identities.” In The Routledge
Handbook of Language and Identity, edited by Siân Preece, 195–
209. London: Routledge, 2016.
Tobi, Yosef. “Written Judeo-Arabic: Colloquial versus Middle
Arabic.” In Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and
Synchrony, edited by Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers, 265–
77. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Tschacher, Torsten. Islam in Tamilnadu: Varia. Halle (Saale): Institut
für Indologie und Südasienwissenschaften der Martin-Luther-
Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2001.
Varsányi, Orsolya. Ninth-century Arabic Christian Apology and
Polemics: A Terminological Study of ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī’s Kitāb
al-masāʾil wa-ʾl-aǧwiba. Berlin: K. Schwarz, 2015.
Versteegh, Kees. “Breaking the Rules without Wanting to:
Hypercorrection in Middle Arabic Texts.” In Investigating
Arabic: Current Parameters in Analysis and Learning, edited by
Alaa elgibali, 3–18. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Walters, Keith. “Communal Dialects.” In Encyclopedia of Arabic
Language and Linguistics, edited by Mushira eid, Alaa elgibali,
Kees Versteegh, Manfred Woidich, and Andrzej Zaborski, vol.
I, 442–48. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah. “Religion as a Sociolinguistic Variable.”
Language and Linguistics Compass 8, 11 (2014): 577–89.
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah. “Religious Choice, Religious Commitment,
and Linguistic Variation: Religion as a Factor in Language
Variation.” Language and Communication 42 (2015): 69–74.

85