The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Languages of India

When the Arabs began their conquests and their policy of expansion some one thousand three hundred years ago, they came to every land they conquered with the language which, thanks to its richness and breadth, took the place of the national languages or changed them fundamentally. Arabic took the place of Syriac, of Egyptian Coptic, and of African Berber, while Iran, during the 250 years following the Arab conquest (from 750 to 1000 A.D.), was deeply influenced by Arabic, which throughout that period remained almost the sole language of letters in that country. When the Persian language came back to life as a language of literature after the end of the tenth century A.D., it had been powerfully grafted with Arabic and had adopted a large portion of the Arabic vocabulary.

The reason for this was not that the conquering Arabs forced their language upon the inhabitants of those lands; rather, the cause of Arabic's ascendancy over the languages of the inhabitants goes back to the ease with which its abundant vocabulary can express the subtlest philosophical and scientific meanings and shades. One can imagine no greater tribute to the Arabic language than that great truth: when the Tatar conquerors swept down upon the lands of the Muslims, carrying everything before them on their way from Khwarizm to Baghdad, Arabic not only stood fast but conquered the conquerors themselves. To this day the Tatar and Turkish languages contain a large share of Arabic words.

The great influence that Arabic has had on the languages of India likewise forms a part of this remarkable linguistic phenomenon. India's contact with the lands of the Arabs goes back several centuries before the appearance of Islam. Arab merchants used to buy scents and aromatics from the coasts of Sind, Gujarat, and Malabar, so that Arabized Sanskrit words — such as those for ginger, pepper, musk, sandalwood, and the water-lily — entered the very body of the Arabic language in the pre-Islamic age. It is highly probable that some Arabic words seeped into the Indian languages too in the same way before the dawn of Islam. In any case, the first cultural imprint of Arabic that took on a lasting character came when the Arabs conquered the land of Sind under the command of Muhammad ibn Qasim in the year 710 A.D. The Baghdad traveler al-Istakhri, who visited the land of Sind in the late eighth century A.D., relates: "The language of Mansura — now known as Bahkar — and of Multan and its districts is Arabic and Sindi; as for the language of the people of Makran, known today by the name of Baluchistan, it is Persian."

This testimony is confirmed, seventeen years later, by the famous Arab geographer Ibn Hawqal, who says: "The people of Mansura and its outskirts speak Arabic." And al-Maqdisi, writing in 985 A.D. when he came to Multan, set down the following: "Daybul (Thatta) lies on the seacoast, and around it are about a hundred villages, most of whose inhabitants are non-Muslims. The sea washes the walls of the city. The inhabitants are all merchants, and they speak the two languages, Sindi and Arabic." Thus we see that the first of the Indian languages to be taken by the spell of Arabic was Sindi. The influence of the Arabic language seeped into the rest of the languages of northern India by another route — that of the Persian language, which was full of Arabic words when it became the language of the courts in the age of the Muslim emperors who ruled the greater part of northern India, with Delhi as their capital, for six full centuries beginning in the year 1206 A.D.

It may be said that Hindustani is the most widespread of the Indian languages among the inhabitants of India generally, with its two branches, Hindi and Urdu. It arose from the Indo-Aryan dialect known by the name of Sauraseni, which was current around Delhi. Naturally, many Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words entered it thanks to contact with the Islamic world, and this imprint and its results appear plainly in the two modern languages, Hindi and Urdu. Here we find another astonishing proof of the vitality of the Arabic language: although Persian enjoyed all the advantages of the languages of courts, and although it exerted a great influence on the form of literature in northern India, the Arabic words that have entered Hindi and Urdu are far more numerous than the words of Persian origin. Indeed, the upshot today is that if India were suddenly to decree the banning of the use of Arabic and the deletion of its words from her various languages, at least three of them would die out, and several other languages would be affected to a great degree.

The languages that would be doomed to immediate death if the use of Arabic words were banned

are Urdu, Sindi, and Pashto. For of every hundred words used in elevated Urdu poetry there are some twenty words either Arabic or Persian, and this number may rise to 50 or 60 in the writing of prose that is not elevated. This holds generally of the Sindi language as well, which preserves to this very day the old Arabic Naskh script. The people of Sind use pure Arabic words to denote everyday things: they apply the word jabal, for example, to a hill, and they use other Arabic words for common objects, among them the words for the onion and the egg. The Pashto language, too, has adopted a great number of Arabic words, and its speakers — the people of Afghanistan and the people of the North-West Frontier Province of India — use the Arabic Nastaliq script. Most of the Arabic words used in Urdu are used in Pashto as well.

The important regional languages, such as Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, draw most of their vocabulary from Sanskrit, yet they contain no small quantity of Arabic words, most of them expressions connected with the laws and the Islamic religion, such as the following: Allah, rasul, imam, hajj, zakat, iftar, du'a, khayrat, janna, jahannam, etc. — words known and familiar in every province inhabited by Muslims. Among the many legal expressions used in Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, with slight modifications, are the following words: na'ib, zawja, sakin, da'ir, wakil, 'adala, munsif, hakim, muharrir, 'ardi, rida, istimrari, etc. It is worth mentioning that the use of these words is not confined to the educated few: the illiterate peasants of the remote districts use them in their daily talk. But Arabic has played a great role in increasing the wealth of the Urdu language and strengthening it — the language written in the Arabic Nastaliq script and spoken by some 80 million souls in the Punjab, Delhi, Bihar, Kashmir, Hyderabad, and other parts of India. It is the language of instruction in at least one university, namely the Osmania University in Hyderabad. This language employs, in the hundreds of newspapers and magazines edited in it, and in the great number of literary and scientific works, all the technical terms taken from the Arabic language. In the science of law, for instance, Arabic terms prevail — so much so that one is delightedly astonished to hear the illiterate peasants of the Punjab, Delhi, and Bihar, where Urdu is used in the courts, uttering pure Arabic words such as: da'wa, istighatha, mudda'i, mudda'a alayhi, mulzam, shahadat, manqula, fard ahkam (that is, the copy of the judgment), fard jurm (that is, the bill of indictment), iqbal (that is, confession), inkar, 'unwan, daf'a (that is, section), etc. And there are no fewer than a thousand Arabic terms used in the legal documents alone. There are also hundreds of Arabic words that have lost their original Arabic meanings and come to be used in other senses, their very forms so much changed that neither the Indian nor the Arab can distinguish them and know them to be of Arabic origin. In other words, they have become (mustahnada), just as we say musta'raba. The Arabic word wajh, for example, is pronounced wajba in Urdu, and its meaning there is (reason). The word asbab — whose singular in Arabic is sabab, literally meaning a rope — came to be used in the philosophical sense, and its use in that sense became widespread in the Arabic language; in Urdu, however, it is used for baggage. Here follows a list of some current examples:

Urdu / Its Arabic meaning / Its Urdu meaning
naqd / verifying the soundness of a thing / money
matin / able to bear weight / respected, of good character
madhaq / taste / a joke, humor
shakil / of the same kind / beautiful
manzur / that which is seen / accepted
dimagh / mind / pride

When writers in the Urdu language were obliged to compose scientific and technical works, or to translate them from foreign languages, the wealth and fertility of the Arabic language led them to take most of their technical and scientific terms from that language. The names of all the modern sciences accordingly became Arabic: people used the word siyasiyat for the political sciences, iqtisadiyat for the economic sciences, nafsiyat for the science of psychology, tibb for the science of medicine, a'sabat for the science of the nerves, madaniyat for the science of civic principles, and mantiq for the science of logic, and so on through the rest of the names of the sciences. All the modern scientific instruments are called by purely Arabic names: the thermometer, for instance, is called the instrument of the measure of heat, and the loudspeaker the instrument of the spreading of sound. Among the reasons that have made Urdu indebted to Arabic for this quantity of words is, first, that these two languages are close to each other phonetically; and second, that Arabic is one of the living languages, digesting the Western sciences rapidly and thereby furnishing a suitable fund of the technical terms required to express the various shades of modern thought. And because the students of science and theology in all parts of India

are now flocking to the learning of Arabic, most of its words and phrases have become familiar to a large body of the population. Add to this that the use of Arabic words lends a splendor and fluency to speech and an economy to expression — qualities that would not have existed in the Urdu language had it borrowed words from any language other than Arabic. And notwithstanding the fertility of Urdu literature, resting as it does upon the literatures of the two languages, Persian and Arabic, it contains a great quantity of Arabic words. One may easily cast one's eye over passages of elevated Urdu poetry and prose by some of the master poets and writers, in which they have used the adjectives, the nouns derived from verbs, and the forms known in Arabic.

The Hindi language, whose basic grammar is the same basic grammar as that of Urdu, and which is written in the Sanskrit characters and contains a vast quantity of Sanskrit words and words of the Indo-Aryan dialects, has also been influenced to a great degree by the Arabic vocabulary. Publications in Hindi are reckoned equal in number to publications in Urdu, if not more numerous, since they are read by millions of inhabitants in Bihar, the Punjab, Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and the provinces of southern India. The poets and writers in Hindi, such as Kabir, Surdas, Tulsidas, and Bihari, used many Arabic expressions; indeed the first to compose poetry in the Hindi language, Chand Bardai (1159–1192), used many Arabic words in his famous poem "Prithviraj Raso," among the Arabic words occurring in it being dunya, khalq, and salam. And in the fifteenth century Kabir used a vast number of Arabic words, such as 'ilm, kamal, baqi, and dhawq.

In this way a vast number of Arabic words has entered ordinary Hindi and its literature, in poetry and prose alike, until the great mass of its speakers understand the meanings of these Arabic words more easily than they understand their Sanskrit equivalents. The number of Arabic words used by writers in the Hindi language is not known exactly, because no extensive dictionary on scientific principles has yet been compiled; but it may be inferred from the information we possess that the number of Arabic words exceeds eight thousand. The "Hindi Shabd Sagar," the Hindi dictionary compiled by the society for the propagation of the Hindi language, contains 7,584 Arabic words that have entered the Hindi language.

As for the languages of southern India, such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kanarese, the Arabic words that have entered them are comparatively few in number; nevertheless they contain no small quantity connected with the language of the laws and the collection of taxes, such as the following words: 'ardi, tahsil, munshi, wakil, etc. Add to this that the Muslims of southern India, like other Muslims, use a great number of Arabic words in their daily converse — the expressions taken from their religious rites. They customarily close their public prayers with an address delivered to them by the religious head, which they call a khutba. As for the ceremonies connected with births, marriage contracts, and deaths, these are recited in the Arabic language, and through them certain Arabic words have seeped into the language of everyday speech, such as: nikah, talaq, kafan, dafn, talqin, and others.