It is a history of Arabic language in context of world languages and literature. It focuses on that which is unique about Arabic when it is compared to other languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, or Spanish and the types of historical experience that cultivated its distinctive characteristics. In comparison to other world languages this work illustrates how Arabic emerged from a hub of interaction and mutation of ancient oral traditions of the Middle East that finally distilled into an exceptionally well developed poetic. It demonstrates how Arabic prose expanded and regulated its poetic vision and created clear, penetrating, and comprehensive worldviews. It illustrates that Arabic literature contained as well as elevated ancient poetic by embracing various non-Arabic expressions (Greek, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish) and this constantly enriched and reinvented literature further nurtured a variety of regional traditions around world.

Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies that there are no native speakers of this language. As a result, no speech community of standard Arabic exists. Depending on the region or state, Arabs (understood here as Arabic speakers) belong to over 20 different vernacular speech communities centered around Arabic dialects. This feature is unique among the so-called " large languages " of the modern world. However, from a historical perspective, it can be likened to the functioning of Latin as the sole (written) language in Western Europe until the Reformation and in Central Europe until the mid-19th century. After the seventh to ninth century, there was no Latin-speaking community, while in day-today life, people who employed Latin for written use spoke vernaculars. Afterward these vernaculars replaced Latin in written use also, so that now each recognized European language corresponds to a speech community. In future, faced with the demands of globalization, the diglossic nature of Arabic may yet yield a ternary poly-glossia (triglossia): with the vernacular for everyday life; standard Arabic for formal texts, politics, and religion; and a western language (English, French, or Spanish) for science, business technology, and the perusal of belles-lettres. I thank Peter Polak-Springer (Qatar University) and the three anonymous reviewers for their advice and useful suggestions.These corrections and suggestions for improvement are the more important, given the fact that I have no command of Arabic. Hence, necessarily, my reflection is based on secondary literature. This is the usual problem of large-scale comparisons through time and space. A scholar attempting such a feat is always bound to overlook some important details, because she or he will never be able to master all the skills and gather all the information to be able to deal adequately with each single nuance. Hopefully, other researchers interested in the subject may come to succor, correcting errors, and misconceptions that may remain in this text for the sake of either improving such a comparison or falsifying it on the way to working out a better model for analyzing a phenomenon at hand. As mentioned in the article's title, I propose that on the general plane the sociolinguistic situation of today's Arabic-speakers is similar to that of the speakers of vernaculars who employed Latin for written purposes in medieval and early modern (western and central) Europe, usually prior to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. A reflection on such a comparison may usefully bring together for the sake of deepened dialog medievalists, sociolinguists, historians, neolatinists, arabists, sociologists, and political scientists, whose research paths would not have crossed otherwise. The alluded interdisciplinary dialog may yet yield a better understanding of both Europe's Latin past and the Arabicphone present of the Middle East and North Africa.

This is an author’s manuscript of a book review, which is made available in accordance with the terms of the publishing agreement of Taylor & Francis. The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available on the publishers' website.

Peripheral Arabic varieties have been the focus of many researchers in recent Arabic dialectology history. They represent varieties of Arabic spoken outside the boundaries of Arab countries. Because of that, they took a different development route from that of “mainstream” Arabic varieties. Some of these varieties have developed in regions situated close to the borders of Arab countries (Turkey, Iran, Chad ,etc.), but others are still spoken in more remote areas, like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Cameroon, Nigeria, etc. These varieties manifest different linguistics features, due to the close linguistic contact they had with the languages spoken in their areas (Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Neo-Aramean, Uzbek, Greek, etc.), which rendered them virtually unintelligible to speakers of main stream Arabic varieties. In their case, the diglossia present in Arab countries (where the different domains of communication are covered by Fusha Arabic or Ammiyya Arabic, in a simplified schema) has been replaced by a bilingualism or multilingualism situation (for example, the Spoken Arabic of Mardin is found in the macro-context of a Turkish speaking country, but, in the same time, inside a micro-context of a Kurdish and Neo-Aramean speaking area).On top of the peripheral varieties, there are Arabic varieties spoken by Arab immigrants, in the contemporary and modern period, across the globe, where they formed more or less stable communities and whose language has witnessed various changes, due to the same socio-linguistic factors that modulated the peripheral varieties.

This review has been published in Romano-Arabica XVII (2017): Fictional beings in Middle East Cultures. Muhammad al-Sharkawi, History and Development of the Arabic Language, London and New York, Routledge, 2017, 274 p. ISBN 978-1-138-82152-1