To be fair, more oft than not in the form of a mixed dialect such as Latino-Punic and African Romance - plus other regional derivative vernaculars.
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None of the modern Romance languages mixed in any notable way with the languages they replaced except of course the odd word here and there.
And to this day have far more Germanic or Slavic loanwords in their vocabulary than anything pre-Roman.
African vulgar latin is poorly understood considering that it was not a written language just like any other vulgar variety until the IXth century by which point it was firmly in Muslim hands and Latin had lost its elitist position.
Still I've yet to see any evidence that it was influenced by punic in any way. Which would have made it notable compared to other latins dialects. And considering that neither Sardinian nor Corsican have any form of major punic influence (both islands were settled by Phoenicians) I find it doubtful that Africa would have fared differently.
EDIT: Maybe you are thinking of Neo-Punic which is the descendant of punic languages spoken in North Africa in late antiquity and was heavily influenced by Latin.
But that's something else entirely and is more comparable with Britonnic Celtic or Byzantine Greek than anything Latin.
And to this day have far more Germanic or Slavic loanwords in their vocabulary than anything pre-Roman.
African vulgar latin is poorly understood considering that it was not a written language just like any other vulgar variety until the IXth century by which point it was firmly in Muslim hands and Latin had lost its elitist position.
Still I've yet to see any evidence that it was influenced by punic in any way. Which would have made it notable compared to other latins dialects. And considering that neither Sardinian nor Corsican have any form of major punic influence (both islands were settled by Phoenicians) I find it doubtful that Africa would have fared differently.
EDIT: Maybe you are thinking of Neo-Punic which is the descendant of punic languages spoken in North Africa in late antiquity and was heavily influenced by Latin.
But that's something else entirely and is more comparable with Britonnic Celtic or Byzantine Greek than anything Latin.
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There is one key (maybe even critical) difference between Mesopotamia and Egypt on one hand, and Iran on the other - Mesopotamian and Egyptian agriculture both require and depend on a top down command and control state to make the irrigation systems function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire
Once a conqueror has the military power to control the means of water distribution and control in a place like that, everyone else must fall in line with what they want, or they will literally starve to death. Iran is different - sure there are large arid, or even barren areas, but most of the population is in areas which receive sufficient rainfall to support dryland agriculture, or which have sufficiently widespread and dependable streams and rivers for short term and localized irrigation to ensure a good crop. This makes all the control mechanisms over water useless for a conqueror.
That is true for Egypt, but I'm not quite convinced that it is true for Mesopotamia. The Nile requires a great deal of central organization for humans to make use of it, but that is not quite true for the Tigris and the Euphrates - hence why city-states developed in Mesopotamia, while Egypt developed a centralized kingdom.
Yea, the funny thing about the hydraulic empire thesis is that this has happened in exactly one place in human history.
It's not 100% necessary in Mesopotamia, but it's definitely needed to maintain a high population density. Remember - Mesopotamia started as city states in it's early history, but has been unified almost without interruption since then.
Only one? That's a bold statement considering how many empires have been founded or felled based on control of water supplies.
Even if you want to stand by it, the one definate one in question is one of the two the Arabs conquered.
Well, I'd say yes ... and no. In many parts of Iran, hydraulic systems have been in place since Achaemenid and Arsacid times. The issue is that they were not centralized systems like in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In these areas, all the irrigation system depended on one or two rivers at most, but not in Iran. Rainfall is only enough for agriculture in the mountains and in the coastal strip by the Caspian, and obviously the mountainous areas are not very conductive to agriculture, especially agriculture on a large enough scale and with enough surplus to support a large empire. Instead, what was bult there was a series or elaborate subterranean aqueducts (karens or qanats in Farsi) that take the water from the mountains to the plain areas of the inner plateau that are located next to them; and the existing rivers were also dammed to feed elaborate systems of irrigation. The plain of Isfahan for example was dependant on such systems, and in the southeast of Iran (Iranian Balochestan, the driest part of the country) irrigation systems were also built to carry water from the few mountain springs to the valleys, combined with other techniques like seasonal dam construction. The problem with all these elaborate systems from a political point of view is that they were completely fragmented across the Iranian geography, and to establish political control over it, it was necessary to control vast expanses of land that were several orders of magnitude greater than the Nile valley or the Mesopotamian plain.
This was further complicated because until the second half of the XX century about half of the Iranian population was nomadic, both in the mountains (especially in the Zagros and Fars) and in the central plateau, with its vast expanses of steppe and desert. And unlike in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where nomads dwelled in the physical periphery of the irrigated lands, in Iran it was exactly the opposite: the nomads lived in the very center of the plateau, surrounded by sedentary populations.
Centralized control was much easier in the Sogdian oasis and Khwarazm, where the water supply depended on a single water current, and so since the Achaemenid and Arsacid eras, Khwarazm appears to have been a united polity, and the same goes for most of the Sogdian oasis. The problem in this case came when trying to expand political power outside the borders of the oasis. Until the rise of the Samanids in the X century, these Central Asian territories had been only ever unified by foreign conquerors: Achaemenids, Macedonians (only the southern parts of Sogdiana), Kangju, Huns (in their various incarnations) and finally the Arabs. The Samanids were the first local Iranian dynasty (based in Samarkand) that managed to create a Central Asian empire.
The problem with that argument is that Egypt and Mesopotamia were ruled by Persians and Hellenes for about a thousand years before the Arabic conquest and most of the people living there were still speaking their pre-conquest languages.
While one thousand years after the conquest, Arabic was spoken by the large majority reducing languages such as Aramaic or Coptic to non-islamic liturgy and small dwindling minorities and this despite by then centuries of Turko-Persian rule.
Now tbf one could say that Achaemenid Persia played an important role in the spread of Aramaic but that's another subject.
600ish b.c. to 650ish a.d.
1200 years of Persian/Greek/Roman rule. Maybe you could argue every time a new conquerer hit you'd start the assimilation countdown over, but Greek was still the major trade language in the eastern Mediterranean basin even in Roman times, which really gives us from 300 b.c. to 650 a.d.
however if what books I've read are to be believed then by 1000 a.d. Islam and Arabic were already toeing around the majority. Even if that's pushing the truth, it's not by too much.
It's obvious the Arabs did SOMETHING different to encourage and then completely absorb the sedentary agriculturalist populations in the fertile crescent. It's always going to be a lifelong fascination of mine.
Probably.
Then again considering the areas where the Arabs conquered that nowadays speak Arabic, such as in the Levant, Mesopotamia & North Africa; those areas already had substantial populations which spoke languages (i.e. Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Berber) which were part of the same language family (the Afroasiatic language family to be specific) as Arabic.
Other areas which the Caliphate
That is a huge and far-flung language family. It is somewhat like saying Germans would have it easy assimilating Greeks because both speak Indo-European languages.
You might have a point regarding the Semitic branch of that language family, though, since the languages in it are much more closely related.
Which also explains the large differences between Arabic spoken in the Maghreb and the varieties spoken in the Near East to the point that they are almost unintelligible - especially when one compares Moroccan Darija with the variety spoken in the Baghdad area - the latter of which sounding extremely close to Classical Arabic with what rudimentary understanding of the language I have.
As for assimilatory affects, one should take care not to view this factor in isolation. Dominating trade, displacing local ruling classes with Arabic speakers and making Arabic a mandatory requirement for reading the Quran (and thus the added pro bono of conversion with social advancement) also play a great if not greater part in Arabization.
Even then, speakers of a certain language generally have an easier time learning other languages from within the same language family compared to those from outside (take a Spanish-speaker learning Russian compared to one learning Mandarin). As such languages share enough features to form a "solid basis" from which to acquire an understanding of the other language.
That said, I ought to stress such a basis can in some cases be found in whatever language and not solely between those of the same language group or language family. Speakers of Tagalog or Cebuano for example have a much easier time learning English or Spanish compared to Cantonese which is geographically closer. This has partly to do with the shared vocabulary and past influence the former have had on Filipino languages as a byproduct of Colonialism but also due to the difficulty of adapting Cantonese to the existing languages of the archipelago due to the latter being a tonal language - and that inspite of centuries of trade even before European contact.
I can understand Abdul's thesis of the primacy of the rural language, but it doesn't seem to explain everything. If the language of the rural people is so intrinsically magnetic, why is it that what is now the majority of Iran doesn't speak a Turkic language? - taking into account the rather large nomadic Turkic element which was (and is) still present there, and which at various points in the last millennium has played kingmaker (as in the case of the Qizilbash).
Also, as Semper Victor has stated, a fair amount of important scholars in the so-called Islamic Golden Age were arabized Persians; I would also say that, despite the persistance of a Persian élite, it is only with the renaissance of Persian as a prestige language later on that Iran truly passes outside the window to becoming a part of the Arabic constellation.
I would thus say that there has to be more to this than just an urban/rural divide or the preexistence of settled, literate cultures - the amsar like al-Kufah in Iraq and Kairouan in Tunisia were magnets for the penetration of Arabic into the population; likewise, the existence of a literate culture and an imperial past in Mesopotamia did not save them from absorption.
I can provide no answers, but perhaps the reactions at this time against Arab(ic) domination embodied in the resurgence of Persian and more broadly in the Shu'ubiyya movement were themselves the cause for the continued survival of Persian? I can't delve too much into it, as it is not my area of expertise, but perhaps dissecting that particular movement (beyond it being a way for a native-born dynasty to assert itself) would be fruitful.
Swinging to the far West now, I can also appreciate the effort to insist on the Berber character of the various North African dynasties, but it does sideline their (often coated in Arabness) use of Islam (in various strands) as a tool of legitimacy, and the importance of Sayyids.
Also, as Semper Victor has stated, a fair amount of important scholars in the so-called Islamic Golden Age were arabized Persians; I would also say that, despite the persistance of a Persian élite, it is only with the renaissance of Persian as a prestige language later on that Iran truly passes outside the window to becoming a part of the Arabic constellation.
I would thus say that there has to be more to this than just an urban/rural divide or the preexistence of settled, literate cultures - the amsar like al-Kufah in Iraq and Kairouan in Tunisia were magnets for the penetration of Arabic into the population; likewise, the existence of a literate culture and an imperial past in Mesopotamia did not save them from absorption.
I can provide no answers, but perhaps the reactions at this time against Arab(ic) domination embodied in the resurgence of Persian and more broadly in the Shu'ubiyya movement were themselves the cause for the continued survival of Persian? I can't delve too much into it, as it is not my area of expertise, but perhaps dissecting that particular movement (beyond it being a way for a native-born dynasty to assert itself) would be fruitful.
Swinging to the far West now, I can also appreciate the effort to insist on the Berber character of the various North African dynasties, but it does sideline their (often coated in Arabness) use of Islam (in various strands) as a tool of legitimacy, and the importance of Sayyids.
I don't remember specific names right now (maybe Hamza al-Isfahani?? please, somebody correct me if I'm wrong), but the case of Iranians vs. Arabs in the VIII to X centuries CE is an interesting one, because as far as I know, it's the only case in which some of these Arabized Iranian scholars employed the Arabic language to write down apologetic texts defending the "superiority" of the 'ajam (the conquered Iranians) over the "pureblood" Arabs.
As far as I'm aware, this is an unique example of the conquered and Islamized and to some degree, Arabized elite, "fighting back" against Arabization. I don't know if this has been properly studied by real scholars, but in my opinion there has to be a link between these attitudes, already visible in the IX and early X centuries, and the "sudden" emergence of New Persian as a language of prestige in Eastern Iran in the second half of the X century.
As far as I'm aware, this is an unique example of the conquered and Islamized and to some degree, Arabized elite, "fighting back" against Arabization. I don't know if this has been properly studied by real scholars, but in my opinion there has to be a link between these attitudes, already visible in the IX and early X centuries, and the "sudden" emergence of New Persian as a language of prestige in Eastern Iran in the second half of the X century.
There's a lot of things going on, most of them pretty mundane.
1. If the people in charge speak one language, you'll learn than language so you can get army/civil-service jobs.
2. Arabic is important in Islam, so if you convert, you might want to learn it.
3. Ethnicity change as they integrate new people so what it meant to be "arab" changed as people from various places became "arab."
4. Ethnicities aren't monlithic, nor are languages, and what it means to speak arabic or be arab is different in Syria than it is in, say, Egypt.
5. The Arabic conquests were primarily the rich eastern provinces of the Eastern (byzantine) empire and the Sassanid persian empire (though they extended out to north africa, spain, southern italy, and elsewhere, but it started in the above). The former largely became "arab" and the latter remained persian, conquering always means you adopt the ways of who you conquer and they adopt your ways, the proportions are what determine the result in the end, which is up to many factors, including luck.
6. This has happened everywhere there is a wide identity. Being "French" "German" or "English is the result of the amalgamation of many smaller identities. Identities are fluid and changable, and all current national identities ,from England to China, are he result of subsuming previous other identities. "arabaization" is just one instance of it.
In the first century and a half after the initial wave of Islamic conquests, it's difficult to separate the processes of Islamization (conversion to the Muslim religion) and Arabization (adoption not only of the Arabic language but also of the Arabic identity as a whole, including tribal lineages) among the conquered populations.
In these initial times, conversion to Islam was usually accompanied by the formal "adoption" of the converted person into an Arab tribe, and the adoption by the new convert of the tribal identity of that tribal group. So, if (for the sake of giving an example, I'm inventing a case) a certain "Constantine" member of the powerful Egyptian family of the Apiones decided to convert to islam, he would seek the patronage of a powerful Arab Muslim, like the Arab governor of Egypt, and he would be adopted into the tribe of the governor, adopting as a whole the ethnic identity, language, religion and customs of that tribe. In a sense, such conversions "obliterated" to all intents the personal and familiar history of the converts.
It's telling that for example in al-Andalus there's only examples of Muslims (writing in Arabic and bearing Arabic names) claiming descendancy from the old Visigothic nobility and royal family in the X century CE, more than two centuries after the initial conquest, and such cases are thought by scholars to be frauds intended to push the interests of these Muslims in front of Islamic judges against the pretensions of the Caliphs of Córdoba. And it happened similarly in Iran: the Samanids claimed to be descendants from the House of Mihran, but they only appear in the historical record in the middle of the X century CE.But the difference between both cases is that the Samanids did it for prestige's sake, and not in order to protect their interests in front of a court of justice. Which means that culturally, in early Islamic Iran, it was deemed prestigious to link oneself, even if one was a Muslim descended from Muslims, to the old pre-Islamic families, at least in this second stage removed two-three centuries from the initial conquest.
In these initial times, conversion to Islam was usually accompanied by the formal "adoption" of the converted person into an Arab tribe, and the adoption by the new convert of the tribal identity of that tribal group. So, if (for the sake of giving an example, I'm inventing a case) a certain "Constantine" member of the powerful Egyptian family of the Apiones decided to convert to islam, he would seek the patronage of a powerful Arab Muslim, like the Arab governor of Egypt, and he would be adopted into the tribe of the governor, adopting as a whole the ethnic identity, language, religion and customs of that tribe. In a sense, such conversions "obliterated" to all intents the personal and familiar history of the converts.
It's telling that for example in al-Andalus there's only examples of Muslims (writing in Arabic and bearing Arabic names) claiming descendancy from the old Visigothic nobility and royal family in the X century CE, more than two centuries after the initial conquest, and such cases are thought by scholars to be frauds intended to push the interests of these Muslims in front of Islamic judges against the pretensions of the Caliphs of Córdoba. And it happened similarly in Iran: the Samanids claimed to be descendants from the House of Mihran, but they only appear in the historical record in the middle of the X century CE.But the difference between both cases is that the Samanids did it for prestige's sake, and not in order to protect their interests in front of a court of justice. Which means that culturally, in early Islamic Iran, it was deemed prestigious to link oneself, even if one was a Muslim descended from Muslims, to the old pre-Islamic families, at least in this second stage removed two-three centuries from the initial conquest.
Would you say that if the Koran was translated early on to an existing language of the conquerd region that we'd not have this Arabization to the extent that we have it now?
Earlier someone gave Russia as another example, but I think that was mostly a colonialism trait, where unlike the British and French, it was just an expansion of their direct borders.
With Arabic we have a conquered population that converted to a new identity altogether and once the Arabs were gone, this identity was still present to a large extent. Ruling elite being converted to Islam seems to be the catalyst for this situation.
Earlier someone gave Russia as another example, but I think that was mostly a colonialism trait, where unlike the British and French, it was just an expansion of their direct borders.
With Arabic we have a conquered population that converted to a new identity altogether and once the Arabs were gone, this identity was still present to a large extent. Ruling elite being converted to Islam seems to be the catalyst for this situation.