The Arabic Strata in Awjila Berber*

chapter 16 The Arabic Strata in Awjila Berber*

Marijn van Putten and Adam Benkato

1 Introduction

The Berber language family is a cluster of closely related languages spoken across North Africa, which today share much of the same geographical space as the Arabic dialects spoken there. This geographic overlap has led to massive lexical and grammatical borrowing from Arabic into the Berber languages, beginning already in the earliest period of contact between the two. As we will show, this early contact has left traces in the Berber languages from stages or varieties of the Arabic language that are not necessarily the Arabic varieties spoken in North Africa today. Scholars have previously devoted attention to the influence of Arabic dialects on Berber varieties regarding lexicon and grammar, most recently Koss- mann (2013a) and Souag (2009; 2015). However, a corollary of such work is to study those Arabic strata in Berber more closely with the goal of illuminating the history of Arabic in North Africa. This paper hopes to present an approach to the Arabic material in Berber, as well as to develop a method of examin- ing the dialectal features displayed by Arabic loans in Berber. To do so, this paper will investigate features of the Arabic loans in the Berber language of Awjila, spoken today only in an oasis in eastern Libya. The investigation will be informed throughout by Arabic dialectological approaches as well as by Berber comparative linguistics, with special reference to Eastern Berber languages.1

* We would like to thank Lameen Souag, Ahmad Al-Jallad, Maarten Kossmann and Simone Mauri for commenting on early drafts of this paper. 1 The Awjila Berber material is based on Paradisi’s wordlist and texts (Paradisi 1960a, 1960b) and the subsequent analysis of the material by van Putten (2014). The phonemic transcription employed in this text is an adaptation of the phonemic transcription in van Putten (2014), with the difference that the consonant ɣ is represented here as ġ, the long vowels a, i, u are represented as ā, ī, ū, and the accent is marked with an acute accent in all cases. The ‘-’ sign marks morpheme boundaries and the ‘=’ sign marks clitics. Eastern Libyan Arabic where cited is from the materials of Adam Benkato. For Eastern Berber languages we consulted: Naumann

1.1 Introduction to Awjila Awjila is an oasis in eastern Libya, about 250 kilometers south of the coastal city of Ajdabiya and about 400 kilometers west of the Berber-speaking oasis of Siwa in western Egypt. The earliest mention of the oasis is in Herodotus (Histories 4.172), and it appears frequently in the works of the Arab geographers as noteworthy for its dates—for which it is famous even today (e.g. al-Yaʕqūbī, Buldān, p. 44). It is the last remaining enclave where Berber is spoken in eastern Libya, possibly representing what was once a wider Berber-speaking region. Awjila has a population of fewer than 10,000, and an even smaller (though currently unknown) number of people still speak Berber;2 the language of Awjila should probably be considered endangered. Very little research has been done on the Awjila language until now, the most comprehensive source being Umberto Paradisi’s material (1960a, 1960b) collected in the late 1950s. Recent fieldwork has not been possible due to the political situation in Libya. Earlier material is often difficult to interpret and of questionable quality (most notably Müller 1827, Zanon 1932–1933. Beguinot 1921, 1924, 1925 provides a very small amount of lexical data that is of much better quality). All the material published so far on Awjila has been collected and reanalyzed in van Putten (2014), which is the source that the material in this paper is based on.

1.2 Current Contact Situation of Awjila To discuss the historical contact of Awjila Berber and Arabic, one also needs to take the current contact situation into account. Libyan Arabic varieties are to a certain extent quite similar, but generally Western and Eastern Libyan Arabic dialects can be distinguished (WLA and ELA, respectively). The eastern geographic location of Awjila obviously means that Eastern Libyan Arabic is

(n.p.) for Siwa, Paradisi (1963) for El-Foqaha, Sarnelli (1924) for Sokna, Beguinot (1942) for Nefusa, and Lanfry (1973) for Ghadames. 2 The extent to which Awjila Berber is still spoken has become clearer in recent months. First there is the (completely Arabic!) call for recognition of the Berber language of Awjila posted to Youtube: http://youtu.be/ygyHs5rYk_U (accessed on 17 December 2013), which indicates awareness and interest in the preservation of the language. There is also the Ashal-ennax Facebook group on which natives of Awjila communicate with each other in Awjila Berber. Many of the speakers on this page do not seem to speak the language fluently, nevertheless, their knowledge of vocabulary is broad, and it is clear that older inhabitants of the oasis still speak the language fluently. This material is discussed in more detail by Van Putten & Souag (2015). When relevant to the discussion, some of the lexical data of this corpus will be cited herein.