Grammarians and Linguists’ Attitudes towards the Language of Quraish: A Study in the Concept Denotations

Abstract

The language of Quraish raised a lot of controversy in ancient and

modern linguistic studies. Debate did not only concern its eloquence and its

status among the languages of Arabs and its relationship to the Holy Qur›an

and its recitations, but also it claimed that the language of Quraish was the

most eloquent among other languages. It was reported that the Holy Qur›an

used it on the one hand, and on the other hand, it was argued that it was just

a spoken dialect which did not differ from other dialects. Hence the Holy

Qur›an used the language of poetry or the language shared by Arabs before

Islam. It was also claimed that this language was not aptly named and did

not exist. Early scholars used the terms «Tongue of Quraish», that is, the

language of Quraish and accent of Quraish interchangeably as if there were

no differences between them. They used them as synonyms sometimes and

as complementary terms on other times. Such discrepancies between the

concepts remained, which indicates the need to investigate denotations of the

concepts from historical perspective till it became a term.

Contemporary scholars on the language of Quraish did not reach

firm opinions. Contradictions among scholars sometimes reached dispute.

Therefore, the current study is an attempt to contribute to uncover ambiguity

pertaining to the term. The researcher is going to discuss it through reviewing

denotations of the term in different historical contexts. The researcher

adopted descriptive method, which suits the nature of the present study. The

researcher concluded that the language of Quraish is a Kofi term which was

not used by Basris, and that linguists almost quoted from Kofi and did not

adopt a particular method.