Religion: The Spread of Arabic

Arabic progressed from the language of the mosque to establish itself permanently as the common vernacular of the people only in countries that had previously spoken some related language, one that belonged to the Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic) family.
This Afro-Asiatic zone included the Fertile Crescent, where Arabic replaced Aramaic; Egypt, where it overwhelmed Coptic; Libya and Tunisia, where it finally supplanted Berber and erased - or merged into - Punic; and the Maghreb (the north of modern Algeria and Morocco), where it also pushed Berber back into a set of smaller pockets. The tiny island of Malta, too, which had a Punic background from its origins in the Carthaginian empire, became Arabic-speaking after Arab conquest in 870 AD, belying its millennium of control from Rome since 218 BC. The area of permanent Arabic advance also included, at the margin, and rather later, a more southerly zone in Africa, Mauritania in the west, and Chad and Sudan in the east; here Arabic spread later through trade contacts, and would have replaced some Chadic and Cushitic languages.1

The Arab conquests after the death of Muhammad spread Islam thousands of miles across Africa, into southern Spain, and to the east into Afghanistan. The long term consquences were that Arabic persisted where, only where, and everywhere people already spoke a language from the Afro-Asiatic family, the single exception is the Hausa speaking peoples of central Africa, who adopted Islam, but only used Arabic for religious purposes.2 . One could make the argument that centuries of existence on the border between the Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Kordofanian language families gave Hausa some elements which made it dissimilar from other Afro-Asiatic languages. 3 Iranians speak an Indo-European language, and its role in the spread of Islam, but not Arabic, is useful.

Ironically, the march of Islam seems to have supported the spread of Persian out to the east; the Arab conquests in what had been Buddhist central Asia in the eighth century spread Persian, at the expense of local languages, especially Sogdian. Presumably most of the troops were from the east of Iran, where Persian was still the lingua franca. That is why Tajikistan, and the north-western half of Afghanistan, is Persian speaking to this day. And when five hundred years later an Islamic army penetrated into India beyond, and set up the Delhi Sultanate, it brought Persian rather than Arabic in its wake.4

Starting with their presence in the mid 1600s, the British East India Company, and later the Colonial adminstration, used Persian as a government language into the nineteenth century.5 Spain provides another useful example. Islamic rulers had much of the country for over 750 years, and yet it reverted to Spanish, an Indo-European language, within a century, even if it took several Imperial and Royal decrees to get there6 .

Ancient Egypt is another useful example. It is now an Arabic speaking country, but for thousands of years, and numerous invasions, it maintained its own language, known for its hieroglyphics, now surviving only in the liturgy of the Coptic Christian Church. Ostler, in Empires of the Word , suspects that population density had a lot to do with Egyptian surviving as long as it did. By more than a factor of ten, the Nile river area was the mostly densely populated area on Earth, hence "the sheer number of speakers in their [Chinese and Egyptian] populated regions game them immunity against swamping by incomers speaking foreign languages, even when they could not deny them entry."7 . Egypt, after the New Kingdom, faced successive invasions of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. The vernacular of Egypt, even though ruled by Greek speaking rulers for 1000 years, never became Greek, but eventually did become Aramaic, and, eventually Arabic. All of Coptic, Aramaic and Arabic are Afro-Asiatic8 .