Hassaniya Arabic

Hassaniya Arabic (حسانية; also known as Hassaniyya, Klem El Bithan, Hassani, Hassaniya, and Maure) is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic spoken by Mauritanian Arabs and the Sahrawi people. It was spoken by the Beni Ḥassān Bedouin tribes of Yemeni origin who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and Morocco's southeastern and Western Sahara between the 15th and 17th centuries. Hassaniya Arabic was the language spoken in the pre-modern region around Chinguetti.

The language has completely replaced the Berber languages that were originally spoken in this region. Although clearly a western dialect, Hassānīya is relatively distant from other Maghrebi variants of Arabic. Its geographical location exposed it to influence from Zenaga-Berber and Wolof. There are several dialects of Hassaniya, which differ primarily phonetically. There are still traces of South Arabian in Hassaniya Arabic spoken between Rio de Oro and Timbuktu, according to G. S. Colin. Today, Hassaniya Arabic is spoken in Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and the Western Sahara.

Phonology
The phonological system of Hassānīya exhibits both very innovative and very conservative features. All phonemes of Classical Arabic are represented in the dialect, but there are also many new phonemes. As in other Bedouin dialects, Classical /q/ corresponds mostly to dialectal ; and  have merged into ; and the interdentals  and  have been preserved. The letter ج is realised as.

However, there is sometimes a double correspondence of a classical sound and its dialectal counterpart. Thus, classical is represented by  in  'to take' but by  in  'scissors'. Similarly, becomes  in  'laugh (noun)', but  in  'to be sick'. Some consonant roots even have a double appearance: 'heavy (mentally)' vs. 'heavy (materially)'. Some of the "classicizing" forms are easily explained as recent loans from the literary language (such as 'law') or from sedentary dialects in case of concepts pertaining to the sedentary way of life (such as  'scissors' above). For others, there is no obvious explanation (like 'to be sick'). Etymological appears constantly as, never as.

Nevertheless, the phonemic status of and  as well as  and  appears very stable, unlike in many other Arabic varieties. Somewhat similarly, classical has in most contexts disappeared or turned into  or  ( 'family' instead of,  'insist' instead of  and  'yesterday' instead of ). In some literary terms, however, it is clearly preserved: 'suffering (participle)' (classical ).

Consonants
Hassānīya has innovated many consonants by the spread of the distinction emphatic/non-emphatic. In addition to the above-mentioned, and  have a clear phonemic status and  more marginally so. One additional emphatic phoneme is acquired from the neighbouring Zenaga Berber language along with a whole palatal series  from Niger–Congo languages of the south. At least some speakers make the distinction /p/–/b/ through borrowings from French (and Spanish in Western Sahara). All in all, the number of consonant phonemes in Hassānīya is 31, or 43 counting the marginal cases.

On the phonetic level, the classical consonants and  are usually realised as voiced  (hereafter marked ) and. The latter is still, however, pronounced differently from, the distinction probably being in the amount of air blown out (Cohen 1963: 13–14). In geminated and word-final positions both phonemes are voiceless, for some speakers /θ/ apparently in all positions. The uvular fricative is likewise realised voiceless in a geminated position, although not fricative but plosive:. In other positions, etymological seems to be in free variation with  (etymological, however varies only with ).

Vowels
Vowel phonemes come in two series: long and short. The long vowels are the same as in Classical Arabic, and the short ones extend this by one:. The classical diphthongs and  may be realised in many different ways, the most usual variants being  and, respectively. Still, realisations like and  as well as  and  are possible, although less common.

As in most Maghrebi Arabic dialects, etymological short vowels are generally dropped in open syllables (except for the feminine noun ending < ):  >  'you (f. sg.) write',  >  >  'he wrote'. In the remaining closed syllables dialectal /a/ generally corresponds to classical, while classical and  have merged into. Remarkably, however, morphological is represented by  and  by  in a word-initial pre-consonantal position:  'I stood up' (root w-g-f; cf.  'I wrote', root k-t-b),  'he descends' (subject prefix i-; cf.  'he writes', subject prefix jə-). In some contexts this initial vowel even gets lengthened, which clearly demonstrates its phonological status of a vowel: 'they stood up'. In addition, short vowels in open syllables are found in Berber loanwords, such as  'man',  'calves of 1 to 2 years of age', and  in passive formation:  'he was met' (cf.  'he met').

Code-switching
Many educated Hassaniya Arabic speakers also practice code-switching. In Western Sahara it is common for code-switching to occur between Hassaniya Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Spanish, as Spain had previously controlled this region; in the rest of Hassaniya-speaking lands, French is the additional language spoken.

Orthography
Hassaniya Arabic is normally written with an Arabic script. However, in Senegal, the government has adopted the use of the Latin script to write the language, as established by Decree 2005–980 of October 21, 2005.

Speakers distribution
According to Ethnologue, there are approximately three million Hassaniya speakers, distributed as follows:


 * Mauritania: 2,770,000 (2006)
 * Western Sahara and the southern area of Morocco, known as the Tekna zone: 200,000+ (1995)
 * Mali: 175,800 – 210,000 (2000)
 * Senegal: 162,000 (2015)
 * Algeria: 150,000 (1985)
 * Libya: 40,000 (1985)
 * Niger: 10,000 (1998)