When did Faṣīḥ become Qabīḥ? Rehabilitating Classical phonological and morphological features

Abstract Most of the linguistic variation reported by the Arab grammarians has been ignored in linguistic scholarship, which has assumed that the grammarians prescribed a set of strict norms. This paper argues that the scholarly assumption is a misreading of what the grammarians say, and it is not reflected in written Arabic. By not appreciating the linguistic variation in Classical Arabic writing, classicisms are potentially misinterpreted as vernacularisms. Presenting the work of the grammarians, who were much more permissive of linguistic variation than usually appreciated, this paper goes on to show that such variation is in actual use. This provides evidence that what the grammarians describe is not just a collection of (non-standard) curiosities. By examining the use of linguistic features described by the grammarians, Quranic recitation and later classical Arabic prose texts, this paper shows that these features are part of Classical Arabic proper. This casts new light on how we evaluate linguistic features in Middle Arabic.