14 - Poetry in the vernacular

Summary

The lively presence of Arabic dialect poetry in the eighth to the fourteenth centuries is remarked upon by Ibn Khaldūn. Criticizing the grammarians' rejection of colloquial poetry, he notes that it has its own rules and eloquence, rooted in each dialect's milieu. Eloquence, he states, has nothing to do with grammatical rules, but is ‘the suitability of the utterance to the meaning desired and the demands of the situation.’

DEFINITIONS

Today, vernacular Arabic is chosen by poets who feel that what they want to express, and the milieu in which they practise their art, demand an idiom based on everyday speech. Drawing upon a heritage of local oral folk traditions and an elite colloquial poetry originating in medieval Andalusia, this poetry is often labelled al-shiʿr al-shaʿbī (folk or popular poetry), or zajal, as colloquial Andalusian strophic verse was called, attesting to these links. Other terms define it by what it ‘lacks’, echoing attitudes that Ibn Khaldūn attacked: in the Maghrib, it is known as al-shiʿr al-malḥūn (from laḥn, that is, not adhering to fuṣḥā grammar) and, in the Arabian peninsula, as al-shiʿr al-nabaṭī (Nabatean, thus ‘non-Arab’). While contemporary poets refer to it as shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyyah (poetry of the colloquial), negative connotations remain: ʿāmmī means not only ‘colloquial’ but also ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’.