Qaṭrāyīṯ and the Linguistic History of Ancient East Arabia

Qaṭrāyīṯ is a Syriac term that refers to the vernacular of east Arabia in the Early Islamic period. This linguistic variety is known from a small collection of lexical glosses in Syriac sources. Recently, Mario Kozah (2021, 2022) collected and examined about 40 Qaṭrāyīṯ lexical items, based on which he declared Qaṭrāyīṯ to be a dialect of Arabic. The purpose of this study is to re-assess the evidence, using a sounder linguistic methodology, to better determine the etymological origin of the Qaṭrāyīṯ vocabulary and, as much as possible, its phylogenetic position in Semitic. The results of this study increase the resolution of our image of east Arabia’s early linguistic history.