The BALAGHA Score: A Quantitative Linguistics Approach to Arabic Rhetorical Analysis

The “Balāgha Assessment for Literature in Arabic with diGital Humanities Approaches” (BALAGHA) Score is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods framework for the quantitative assessment of Arabic Rhetoric (al-balāgha), derived from well-established Quantitative Linguistics methodologies. Widely employed across Arabic literature – including in poetry, prose, and the Qur'ān – Arabic Rhetoric utilises approximately 100 rhetorical devices such as metaphor, simile and allegory to enhance textual cohesion, aesthetic impact, and persuasive force. However, the literary criticism of Arabic Rhetoric remains qualitative and subjective, leading to large inconsistencies in critical assessments. There are currently no quantitative frameworks for evaluating Arabic Rhetoric, limiting empirical comparisons across different texts and authors. The BALAGHA Score draws upon previous work in lexical density and relative frequency analysis (Ure, 1971; Halliday, 1985, 2014; Al-Wahy, 2019). It uses rhetorical device density as a surrogate marker of the rhetorical qualities of Arabic discourse. The BALAGHA Score is calculated as the total number of rhetorical devices in a sample, divided by the total number of morphemes in the sample (as a measure of sample size), scaled by a multiplication factor of 100. This easy-to-calculate metric enables cross-corpus, diachronic, inter-author, and cross-genre analyses of rhetorical expression, facilitating empirical comparisons across historical periods, authors, and genres. Establishing a new quantitative foundation for Arabic rhetorical assessment, the BALAGHA Score is a novel application of Quantitative Linguistics in Arabic literary studies. It provides objective and reproducible insights into Arabic rhetorical use. Furthermore, its methodological framework is adaptable to other languages, contingent upon appropriate language-specific modifications for rhetorical feature extraction. Keywords: rhetorical density, rhetorical device, rhetoricity, balagha, BALAGHA Score, Arabic, Arabic rhetoric, quantitative linguistics, corpus linguistics, digital humanities. Presented as an oral presentation at The 13th International Quantitative Linguistics Conference, QUALICO 2025, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 26–28 June 2025. A full manuscript based on this abstract is currently in preparation. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15765026 ------- This is an abstract accepted for oral presentation at the 13th International Quantitative Linguistics Conference (QUALICO 2025), held at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 26–28 June 2025. The abstract and oral presentation introduced a novel quantitative linguistics metric called "Rhetorical Density" for quantifying the rhetoricity of texts in any language. Rhetorical Density (or Rhetoric Density) is defined as the number of rhetorical devices in a text, divided by the word count of the text, multiplied by 100. The abstract and oral presentation also proposed a framework called the BALAGHA Score for measuring the Rhetorical Density of Arabic texts in particular. For the presentation slides, see: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15765272 This abstract and presentation are part of the ongoing BALAGHA Score project, which includes online tools, corpus development, and a forthcoming full manuscript. For project resources, visit: https://al-Balagha.com (Encyclopedia of Arabic Rhetoric) https://BalaghaScore.com (Main project website with online tools) https://Balagha-Corpus.com (Arabic texts annotated with rhetorical devices)