# All dialects: possessive determiners (not possessive suffixes)



## k8an

For clarity, I'm referring to ways of indicating that something belongs to someone without attaching the possessive suffix to the noun. Eg: my house = بيتي or البيت ديالي.

So I know some of the major possessive determiners, but I'm not aware of all of them or how they work. Also, some of them seem to be used more prominently than others. Furthermore, some have to agree with the noun while others remain the same regardless.

Please let me know if I'm making any mistakes, any I've missed, and any more information you can provide.

تبع + suffix: Lebanese and some Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian dialects. In some dialects it remains unchanged, but in some dialects agrees with the gender and number of the noun as well as the suffix.

بتاع + suffix: Egyptian and some Palestinian dialects. Sometimes agrees with gender, sometimes with gender and number.

تاع + suffix: I think some Palestinian and Algerian dialects. Unsure of changes.

ديال + suffix: Moroccan. Remains unchanged.

مال + suffix: Baghdadi Muslim, Baghdadi Jewish, North Mesopotamian, some Khaleeji. Remains unchanged.

حق + suffix: Saudi, some Yemeni, some Khaleeji. Remains unchanged.

شيت + suffix: Some Palestinian dialects, some Syrian dialects. Unsure of changes.

گيت\كيت + suffix: some northern Syrian dialects.

متاع + suffix: Tunisian. Unsure of changes.


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## Hemza

Regarding Morocco, there is ديال which may be the most widespread today (not in the past though). It may change or not according to the area.
You also find تاع (pretty common) as well as نتاع (in the East) and متاع. I think but I'm not sure some people also say شغل (as in Algeria).

In the Southern dialects (as in Mauritania)  there is no possessive determiner at all. Only the إضافة is used (which is also used elsewhere beside the possessive determiners).

Broadly speaking, rural and especially bedouin dialects tend to use الإضافة more than urban speakers though today urban uses influenced rural speakers.

In Libya as well as in Western Egypt, متاع is used and I think I heard Lebanese using تاع is as well. Note that these determiners aren't strictly determined by the current political borders, it's more blurred than one may think. For instance, ديال is also used in Algiers but not in other Algerian areas.


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## tounsi51

I think Lebanese have تاعيت


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## k8an

Hemza said:


> I think but I'm not sure some people also say شغل (as in Algeria).



Interesting - never heard of this one!


Hemza said:


> In the Southern dialects (as in Mauritania)  there is no possessive determiner at all. Only the إضافة is used (which is also used elsewhere beside the possessive determiners).
> 
> Broadly speaking, rural and especially bedouin dialects tend to use الإضافة more than urban speakers though today urban uses influenced rural speakers.



Do we know why this is?


Hemza said:


> Note that these determiners aren't strictly determined by the current political borders, it's more blurred than one may think. For instance, ديال is also used in Algiers but not in other Algerian areas.



That's for sure!



tounsi51 said:


> I think Lebanese have تاعيت



Very interesting! Have never heard this one.


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## WadiH

k8an said:


> مال + suffix: Baghdadi Muslim, Baghdadi Jewish, North Mesopotamian, some Khaleeji. Remains unchanged.



Certainly in Gulf dialects (e.g. Kuwait) it does typically agree with the modified noun in gender and number (ماله، مالته، مالوته).  I would expect Iraqi to behave similarly (at least مالتنا v مالنا) but don't know for sure.



k8an said:


> حق + suffix: Saudi, some Yemeni, some Khaleeji. Remains unchanged.



حق always agrees in gender and number with the modified noun:

حقّ
حقّة
حقّين (though Urban Hijazi dialects interestingly have حقّون)
حقّات


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## Ihsiin

Wadi Hanifa said:


> I would expect Iraqi to behave similarly (at least مالتنا v مالنا) but don't know for sure.



It does, though a lot of people use مالة invariably these days. Also the plural (when it’s used) is مالات.


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## wriight

k8an said:


> tounsi51 said:
> 
> 
> 
> I think Lebanese have تاعيت
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Very interesting! Have never heard this one.
Click to expand...

See here for other Lebanese/Levantine options (and the rest of the thread for more info in general): All dialects: belonging to (possessive)

Since making that post, I've also learned that at least some people use _ta3iin_ and similar forms as a plural.

A rarer Lebanese/Levantine one is شَيَّات _shayyēt/shayyāt_, which is like 7agg and some people's taba3 in being ungendered and both singular and plural, even though it ends in ـات.


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## k8an

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Certainly in Gulf dialects (e.g. Kuwait) it does typically agree with the modified noun in gender and number (ماله، مالته، مالوته).  I would expect Iraqi to behave similarly (at least مالتنا v مالنا) but don't know for sure.





Ihsiin said:


> It does, though a lot of people use مالة invariably these days. Also the plural (when it’s used) is مالات.



Very interesting! I really didn't know this. Is it universal in the dialect? Is this specifically for the Baghdadi Muslim dialect or for all Iraqi dialects? I am not certain about this in the Jewish Baghdadi dialect or Maslawi. Now I'm super curious to find out.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> حق always agrees in gender and number with the modified noun:
> 
> حقّ
> حقّة
> حقّين (though Urban Hijazi dialects interestingly have حقّون)
> حقّات



I'm amazed - genuinely had only ever noticed "7agg". Then again, I have barely heard any Khaleeji dialects in real life for years. Thanks for the correction.


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## k8an

wriight said:


> See here for other Lebanese/Levantine options (and the rest of the thread for more info in general): All dialects: belonging to (possessive)
> 
> Since making that post, I've also learned that at least some people use _ta3iin_ and similar forms as a plural.
> 
> A rarer Lebanese/Levantine option is شَيَّات _shayyēt/shayyāt_, which is like _7agg_ and some people's _taba3_ in being ungendered and both singular and plural, even though it ends in ـات.



Thanks for the post - very interesting. Is this all for southern Lebanon? 

As for shayyēt/shayyāt, that must be related to the Jerusalem شيت...right?


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## Ihsiin

k8an said:


> Very interesting! I really didn't know this. Is it universal in the dialect? Is this specifically for the Baghdadi Muslim dialect or for all Iraqi dialects? I am not certain about this in the Jewish Baghdadi dialect or Maslawi. Now I'm super curious to find out.



It's certainly the case in the south, and I think probably also in the north and in the old Jewish and Christian dialects, though for those I'm not so sure.

Incidentally, I feel that the term 'Jewish Baghdadi' is a bit of a misnomer - I believe the Jewish Iraqi dialect (that resembles Maslawi) was spoken throughout Iraq, not just in Baghdad.


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## k8an

Ihsiin said:


> Incidentally, I feel that the term 'Jewish Baghdadi' is a bit of a misnomer - I believe the Jewish Iraqi dialect (that resembles Maslawi) was spoken throughout Iraq, not just in Baghdad.



The one spoken in Baghdad is very slightly different to the other Jewish dialects of Iraq. I can't exactly give a summary of all of the differences because I only know very few.

There are some books on the various Iraqi Jewish dialects, but obviously they're hard to get. I'm currently studying Baghdadi Jewish so hopefully I'll learn more soon.

Edit: I wrote some specific differences in Baghdadi Jewish that I suspect don't exist in other Jewish dialects of Iraq, but I've deleted them as I'm not 100% certain. Will check in future.


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## Ihsiin

k8an said:


> The one spoken in Baghdad is very slightly different to the other Jewish dialects of Iraq. I can't exactly give a summary of all of the differences because I only know very few.
> 
> There are some books on the various Iraqi Jewish dialects, but obviously they're hard to get. I'm currently studying Baghdadi Jewish so hopefully I'll learn more soon.
> 
> Edit: I wrote some specific differences in Baghdadi Jewish that I suspect don't exist in other Jewish dialects of Iraq, but I've deleted them as I'm not 100% certain. Will check in future.



Fair enough - I just once remember watching an interview with فؤاد عكا, who is an Iraqi Jew from Nasriyyia (his family coming previously from Hilla), and him saying that the same Jewish dialect was spoken. Though I daresay there are differences from city to city, just as there are with the dominant dialect (I once again hesitate to say ‘Muslim dialect’, because certainly by the time you get to the 20th Century, this dialect was also spoken by Jews, Christiana and other non-Muslims).


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## raamez

As far as I know Baghdadi Jewish dialect resembled more or less the old dialect of Bagdad which was similar to that in Mossul. The dialect of Bagdad changed in recent times under the influx of Arabs from other regions into the capital.


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## k8an

Ihsiin said:


> Fair enough - I just once remember watching an interview with فؤاد عكا, who is an Iraqi Jew from Nasriyyia (his family coming previously from Hilla), and him saying that the same Jewish dialect was spoken. Though I daresay there are differences from city to city, just as there are with the dominant dialect (I once again hesitate to say ‘Muslim dialect’, because certainly by the time you get to the 20th Century, this dialect was also spoken by Jews, Christiana and other non-Muslims).



As I understand, this is correct. The Jewish dialects throughout Iraq are probably part of a "group" with each city having its own variations. What I had written but deleted due to uncertainty was that the Baghdadi Jewish dialect has some influences from the Muslim (or dominant, as you put it) dialect in terms of words and pronunciation that may or may not be the same as in other Jewish dialects; but I don't have proof that they don't exist in the other dialects, so I won't list them.


raamez said:


> As far as I know Baghdadi Jewish dialect resembled more or less the old dialect of Bagdad which was similar to that in Mossul. The dialect of Bagdad changed in recent times under the influx of Arabs from other regions into the capital.



More or less, yes. There is also the theory that many (or all) of Baghdad's Jews fled to Aleppo at some point and then the Aleppo and Baghdad Jewish communities had many migrations back and forth, so the Jews preserved the old Baghdad dialect - while Baghdad was repopulated with Muslims from other areas and came to speak a Bedouin dialect. 

Just FYI, I'm mindful that mods might delete these posts as they don't relate to the thread title.


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## WadiH

wriight said:


> A rarer Lebanese/Levantine one is شَيَّات _shayyēt/shayyāt_, which is like _7agg_ and some people's _taba3_ in being ungendered and both singular and plural, even though it ends in ـات.



حق is not ungendered (see my post above).  By the way, in Yemeni q-dialects it’s pronounced _7aqq_.



k8an said:


> Just FYI, I'm mindful that mods might delete these posts as they don't relate to the thread title.



It is relevant since the topic is about different dialects, but even if not, one would hope the posts be moved at another thread rather than be deleted since the discussion is interesting.


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## Hemza

If the situation is similar to Morocco, then in my opinion, it's not really a Jewish dialect but rather the old urban dialect of Baghdad still spoken by Jews while the Muslim majority having progressively left it out because of rural/bedouin migration to Baghdad. I suppose a while ago, Muslims and Jewish Baghdadi dwellers used to speak the same way (why otherwise?) But the first group has been influenced through contacts with other dwellers of Iraq and other areas.

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I tend to dislike this religious division which is rather a sociological one. I would support it if it was applied to many other countries (like the UK for instance) but it is not (I cannot remember the last time I read about a Jewish English dialect spoken in London for instance or at least directly linked to a religion). I mean whatever the religion, people still talk the same language with few variations according to social factors and not really religious one (although these social factors coincidentally sometimes stack with religious one).

In Morocco, Jews from Fes do speak a slightly different dialect from their Muslims counterpart but then it's because Muslims have also been influenced by rural exodus and diverged further. On the other hand, Jews from Fes do not speak like those of Rabat for instance. There is no Jewish dialect but there are Jewish dialects varying from a city to another as it occurs with Muslims. In this way they're no different.

Talking about the determiners, Jews in Morocco speaking mostly urban dialects will rarely if ever use تاع while it find occurrences amongst Muslims because most of them are rural dialects speakers. Do you get my point? تاع isn't used by Jews not because it is a "Muslim dialect determiner" but because it is not urban.

Libya's case is even more interesting: Jewish Libyans from Tripoli speak a dialect close to Northern urban Tunisians (Jews or Muslims) and it was the old dialect of Tripoli which has kind of disappeared amongst the Muslims because of rural/bedouin influence on Tripoli and then one of the few urban dialects of Libya has disappeared with Jews exodus.


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## k8an

Hemza said:


> If the situation is similar to Morocco, then in my opinion, it's not really a Jewish dialect but rather the old urban dialect of Baghdad still spoken by Jews while the Muslim majority having progressively left it out because of rural/bedouin migration to Baghdad. I suppose a while ago, Muslims and Jewish Baghdadi dwellers used to speak the same way (why otherwise?) But the first group has been influenced through contacts with other dwellers of Iraq and other areas.


Well, that's exactly what you've just described - a Jewish dialect. It's a dialect spoken by Jews. That makes it a Jewish dialect 

I apologise in advance for writing this very lengthy post and welcome any corrections, but I wanted to dive into the historical bases for the dialects as much as possible.

I think what needs to be established here is that the Jews of Iraq and the non-Jews are of different heritage and different histories, which has led to the different dialects spoken; it's not that they have the same origin and some converted to Islam and some converted to Judaism.

The communities did used to speak similarly, but Jews had lived as a separate community since their arrival as slaves in the Babylonian Captivity. They weren't residents in Babylon who converted to Judaism. It's considered that this is actually when Judaism began to be a religion, and Jews became an ethnoreligious group rather than just Judean people who practiced the religion of ancient Israel based on the temple which had been destroyed by Babylonians. In some periods there was more integration, but it had always been a separate community.

A prominent theory is that in the siege of Baghdad by Mongols, much of the Jewish community was gone. Baghdad was then supposedly repopulated by Muslims from other places and developed the Bedouin "gilit" dialect spoken today. Members of the Jewish communities of Baghdad and Aleppo may have back and forth, as well as other Jews immigrating to Baghdad, enhancing the isolation of the Jewish "qeltu" North Mesopotamian dialect from the rest of the population and giving it some elements of the Levantine Aleppo dialect.

This was even further complicated in the 1700s, when a disease killed much of the Baghdad Jewish community and its rabbis. The community requested a rabbi from Aleppo, who came with 50 families - all of whom were Sephardic (meaning their families came to Aleppo after being expelled from Spain, rather than being of the longer-term Aleppo Jewish community). As a result, the Baghdad Jewish community switched from its traditional Baghdad rite of Judaism to the Sephardic rite and became further intertwined with the Aleppo community.

As I'm sure is obvious, this didn't affect the non-Jewish Baghdad population in the same way.



Hemza said:


> Someone correct me if I am wrong but I tend to dislike this religious division which is rather a sociological one. I would support it if it was applied to many other countries (like the UK for instance) but it is not (I cannot remember the last time I read about a Jewish English dialect spoken in London for instance or at least directly linked to a religion). I mean whatever the religion, people still talk the same language with few variations according to social factors and not really religious one (although these social factors coincidentally sometimes stack with religious one).



You're not wrong!  But there is more to history than what we feel today.

While most of us dislike division today, that doesn't mean it hasn't been historically fact. Jews are an ethnoreligious group rather than just a religious group; the Jews of Iraq have a completely different history to the Arabs of Iraq, arriving as slaves and mourning for Jerusalem before eventually establishing real communities and adapting to life in Mesopotamia (hence the famous lines from Psalm 137, which has been made into a song):

Verses 1-4:


1.By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.2.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.3.For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.4.How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?


Verses 5-6:


5.If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget [her cunning].6.If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.



As I'm sure is obvious, this is not central to the history of non-Jewish Iraqis because it isn't describing their heritage. The Jewish community lived separately with some interaction with the wider society, and as in the above paragraph I wrote about integration with the Aleppo community and preservation of the older dialect, we can see how vastly different the Jewish and non-Jewish communities' histories are. The majority trace their history to a totally different path and origin, and hence to this day speak a different dialect.

In the case of religious differences in Europe or western society (or even in places like Egypt and Lebanon), it's known that native people converted to Islam and Christianity at various points. This isn't the case of the Jewish communities, who arrived in (or were taken to) different places at different times for different reasons - like to Iraq as slaves in Babylonian Captivity. Mass conversion to Judaism has been very rare compared to other religions* because Judaism discourages conversion. That doesn't mean that nobody has converted, but it means that the communities have by and large remained separate.

It's not comparable to a Protestant and Catholic in England or France; they have mostly the same history and culture (until recent times, anyway) and belong to the same ethnic group (with some exceptions). Protestants and Catholics were not imported, nor do they have different historical origins and whatnot.

*there have been a few such cases in history, but the overwhelming majority did not remain Jewish. An exception may be some elements of the Yemenite Jewish community. Additionally, in the Babylonian Captivity, it's known that some Assyrians and Jews at times converted to each others' religions and there has been a fair amount of mixing between the communities.



Hemza said:


> In Morocco, Jews from Fes do speak a slightly different dialect from their Muslims counterpart but then it's because Muslims have also been influenced by rural exodus and diverged further. On the other hand, Jews from Fes do not speak like those of Rabat for instance. There is no Jewish dialect but there are Jewish dialects varying from a city to another as it occurs with Muslims. In this way they're no different.



Well, you're describing a Jewish dialect again   if Jews and Muslims live in the same place but speak differently, then the Jews are speaking a Jewish dialect and the Muslims are speaking a Jewish dialect. Just like if I live in Alabama and people in New York speak differently, I'm speaking the Alabaman dialect and they're speaking the New York dialect.

Now it does need to be said that if Jews in Baghdad speak differently to Jews in Mosul, and Jews in Mosul speak the same as the non-Jews in Mosul - then the Jews of Mosul are not speaking a Jewish dialect, just the Mosul dialect. The Jews of Baghdad are speaking the Baghdadi Jewish dialect, because the non-Jews speak differently.



Hemza said:


> Talking about the determiners, Jews in Morocco speaking mostly urban dialects will rarely if ever use تاع while it find occurrences amongst Muslims because most of them are rural dialects speakers. Do you get my point? تاع isn't used by Jews not because it is a "Muslim dialect determiner" but because it is not urban.



Makes sense!



Hemza said:


> Libya's case is even more interesting: Jewish Libyans from Tripoli speak a dialect close to Northern urban Tunisians (Jews or Muslims) and it was the old dialect of Tripoli which has kind of disappeared amongst the Muslims because of rural/bedouin influence on Tripoli and then one of the few urban dialects of Libya has disappeared with Jews exodus.



So I have heard - it's very interesting how Jewish dialects tend to preserve the non-Bedouin forms.


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## k8an

Wadi Hanifa said:


> حق is not ungendered (see my post above).  By the way, in Yemeni q-dialects it’s pronounced _7aqq_.



I'm very uninformed about Yemeni dialects, but I know there is significant variation. Is 7agg/7aqq used throughout?



Wadi Hanifa said:


> It is relevant since the topic is about different dialects, but even if not, one would hope the posts be moved at another thread rather than be deleted since the discussion is interesting.



I hope so too. Mods, if you decide to delete this, please allow me to make a separate thread about the history of the Baghdadi Jewish dialect and include these posts.


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## WadiH

I can understand why one would call it a "Jewish" dialect if all its current / former speakers were Jewish, but I think it obscures the fact that it descends from the medieval Mesopotamian Arabic dialects spoken by Muslims and Christians as well and in that sense is not specifically 'Jewish' but rather an 'urban' dialect that happens to have been retained by Jews.  I don't see how Jews having a 'different background' from non-Jews is relevant to this.

As an side, this is probably not the place to discuss Jewish history, but I think it should be stated that k8an's characterization of it is very much debatable.



k8an said:


> I'm very uninformed about Yemeni dialects, but I know there is significant variation. Is 7agg/7aqq used throughout?



I'm not especially familiar with them either to be honest.  Yemen is a pretty diverse and complicated place linguistically so I hesitate to give a definitive answer.  All I can say is I've never heard anything other than حق being used by speakers of multiple dialects.


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## k8an

Wadi Hanifa said:


> I can understand why one would call it a "Jewish" dialect if all its current / former speakers were Jewish, but I think it obscures the fact that it descends from the medieval Mesopotamian Arabic dialects spoken by Muslims and Christians as well and in that sense is not specifically 'Jewish' but rather an 'urban' dialect that happens to have been retained by Jews.  I don't see how Jews having a 'different background' from non-Jews is relevant to this.



I really appreciate this response. I do want to try to keep it on topic, but just to respond to this naming issue.

I just want to point out before going further that I am not the one who decided the dialect should be known as "Jewish"; this is how the language was referred to by its own speakers (حكي مال يهود\حكي مالنا) and is currently referred to by scholars. I don't know how much I can argue for its justification when I didn't classify it.

It's not at all wrong to say that it descends from medieval Mesopotamian Arabic, and that it's a sub-dialect of North Mesopotamian Arabic group - as are the Maslawi and Tikriti dialects, among others. However, it's not exactly the same as those dialects. It contains specifically Jewish vocabulary that isn't found in non-Jewish dialects, as well as grammatical and phonological features that aren't found in all North Mesopotamian dialects. It really is/was a Jewish community language.

Not applying the "Jewish" classification feels a bit like saying that Lebanese should only be referred to as a "Levantine" dialect and not as Lebanese; it is indeed a Levantine dialect, but that's an umbrella term for a group of dialects rather than a specific dialect. The Jewish dialect of Baghdad is indeed North Mesopotamian, but it's necessary to be more specific than that when discussing features of the dialect. I don't think calling a dialect Lebanese or Palestinian obscures that they're Levantine, does it?

It's also known as Jewish Baghdadi because it contrasts with the dialects spoken by Christians and Muslims in the exact same place (Baghdad). It's really the most accurate way to describe it vis-a-vis the other dialects spoken in the region, as a qeltu dialect surrounded by gilit dialects (other than Christian Baghdadi, which is also qeltu - but different to the Jewish dialect). Linguistically, they're referred to as such; that's how the speakers of each dialect were divided. The Jewish dialect is and was natively spoken by Jews; they even used it as a "secret" community language at times. In one of the texts I was reading this week, one of the speakers mentions their shock when they met a man who could speak "Jewish" but wasn't actually Jewish.

The discussion of the "different background" is important to this conversation - it explains why the dialect came to exist, and why it's of a different dialect branch to the main dialect of Baghdad. When one asks why the Jews spoke differently - that's why.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> As an side, this is probably not the place to discuss Jewish history, but I think it should be stated that k8an's characterization of it is very much debatable.



I agree that this isn't the place to discuss it, but I felt it was important to explain the historical development of the dialect and why it is named as it is.

I don't claim to be an expert, but I am currently studying the language and its history and am very well acquainted with the community; I'm not sure if the major themes in my post really are very much debatable (some of the details probably could be debated, however), though I'd be open to reading anything that might enhance or contradict my current understanding if you'd like to share. I did try to simplify it but obviously I didn't do a great job of keeping it short, and I know I also waffled on a bit. Apologies.

In any case, I'm happy for all the discussion around this dialect and its history to be deleted from the thread. It really is a bit off-topic.



Wadi Hanifa said:


> I'm not especially familiar with them either to be honest.  Yemen is a pretty diverse and complicated place linguistically so I hesitate to give a definitive answer.  All I can say is I've never heard anything other than حق being used by speakers of multiple dialects.



Yemeni dialects are much more diverse and complex than I ever knew. I had always assumed that Yemeni Arabic was very closely related to Najdi or the Khaleeji dialects.

Do the various dialects of Saudi Arabia all use حق? Are there some dialects that don't use possessive determiners at all?


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## Hemza

Wadi Hanifa said:


> I can understand why one would call it a "Jewish" dialect if all its current / former speakers were Jewish, but I think it obscures the fact that it descends from the medieval Mesopotamian Arabic dialects spoken by Muslims and Christians as well and in that sense is not specifically 'Jewish' but rather an 'urban' dialect that happens to have been retained by Jews.  I don't see how Jews having a 'different background' from non-Jews is relevant to this.


I fully agree with that and you summarised my point much better than I could develop it (my English skills are rusty ).
Moreover what you said is exactly what happened in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya (especially Libya): Jews merely retained the urban dialect as it was spoken by the Muslims but these ones lost it because of the newcomers who spoke a bedouin type of dialect.

@k8an the issue with some scholars and with all my respect due to their work, is that they analyse some phenomenon through their own lens without taking into account the people being studied view they bear on themselves or come with their own view on their own society and apply it to the studied one. In Morocco no one would ever talk about a Jewish or a Muslim Moroccan dialect, you only find this label in French/English language scholar work. People in their daily life are aware of the religious split but don't go as far as applying it to their language. Again, it's surprising that you find so many articles talking about Christian Arabic dialect, Jewish dialect, Muslim dialect (divided between Shiaa dialect and Sunni dialect) etc while these splits do exist, they exist for sociological and political reasons and aren't linked to religious factors at all. Now I'm waiting to see articles on this French Catholic dialect and this Jewish dialect and those English Catholic dialect and Protestant one(s) since these communities also stayed divided for a while and had their own characteristics which could distinguish them (again, for sociological and political reasons, not strictly religious). Yiddish is called this way to distinguish it from German because of political and historical reasons and not religious one (although religion stack with it).

As claimed above, the differences are merely the result of the urban/rural dialects split and I feel the linguistic split is often considered through a religious split which is greatly emphasised on when it comes to Arabic speaking countries or at least, the differences are automatically linked to religious factors while the religious split is only due to the urban/rural split because Jews mainly live in cities while the majority of the Muslim population live in rural areas hence you tend to think that there is a Jewish dialect (urban) as opposed to a Muslim one (considering that even Urban Muslim talk a rural type of dialect since it overwhelmed the urban type spoken by Muslim). I think this is what happened in Iraq.

I have to say I disagree with your (and some scholars) view on Iraqi Jews but it'a another topic although I thank you for taking the time to express your view). Again, I think this split is rather sociologically related rather than religiously.

I'm sorry if I'm not clear enough because my English knows more borders than by thoughts 

No one in Arabia use a تاع related word? How did this spread almost everywhere else?


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## WadiH

For the record, I did not mean that the term “Jewish Baghdadi Arabic” was wrong or should not be used - just that it could be misleading for those who don’t know the history.

I also wasn’t commenting on the history of Jewish Iraqi Arabic or the Baghdadi Jewish community.  I just wanted to say there is a lot more complexity to the history of Jews and Judaism in general than what was mentioned here, especially around conversion and origin of various communities. Again this isn’t the place to debate it but I felt readers should know that this account of the history is debatable.



k8an said:


> Yemeni dialects are much more diverse and complex than I ever knew. I had always assumed that Yemeni Arabic was very closely related to Najdi or the Khaleeji dialects.



Many of them are, while others are quite different. There is also a continuum in the Tihama region between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.



k8an said:


> Do the various dialects of Saudi Arabia all use حق? Are there some dialects that don't use possessive determiners at all?



I am not aware of any others but my knowledge of the Eastern dialects are rusty — it’s possible that مال appears there but I’m not sure (and don’t have any sources at hand at the moment unfortunately).

I don’t think there are any dialects that lack these ‘possessive determiners’ but some dialects use them less than others.  More conservative bedouin and Najdi dialects use them less often (they are not considered eloquent and never appear in poetry to my knowledge) but they are (were) definitely used.


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## Hemza

Sudanese if I'm not wrong also say بتاع.


Wadi Hanifa said:


> For the record, I did not mean that the term “Jewish Baghdadi Arabic” was wrong or should not be used - just that it could be misleading for those who don’t know the history.


Not that it doesn't mean anything. It does exist yet it may be misleading as you said, since it seems to imply that Jews have their own dialect because they're Jews while to me, it is not because their religion but because Jews went through كذا كذا which explain they have their sociolect. It's different. But you're right it's not the topic.


k8an said:


> Do we know why this is?


I unfortunately have no idea. I'm tempted to say it's because of its bedouin nature but then how can we explain other bedouin dialects make use of a possessive determiner? Or may be it is peculiar to this dialect (الحسانية) I don't know.


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## WadiH

Hemza said:


> No one in Arabia use a تاع related word? How did this spread almost everywhere else?



We have it as a predicate:

- الشنطة هذي تبعك؟
- لا هذي تبع فلان

But we wouldn’t say وين الشنطة تبعتك for example.


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