Arabs

Qaṭrāyīṯ is etymologically related to Qatar. It is interesting that during the early Islamic period, East Arabia still spoke a Semitic language distinct from Arabic with many Akkadian and Aramaic sourced words. Probably why dialects spoken in Eastern Arabia, specially Bahrani, can sometimes be unintelligible to me.

Indeed, a language like Qaṭrāyīṯ may be the medium through which the modern Arabic dialects of the Gulf acquired their Aramaic and Akkadian vocabulary. But what to make of the Arabic component? Should we consider it the result of contact and borrowing from the migrations of central and western Arabians in the late pre-Islamic period? In other words, should it be understood in the same way as the Aramaic and Persian components? The largest group of Qaṭrāyīṯ vocabulary is not clearly Arabic, but words derived from cognate, shared Semitic roots. This fact may support the interpretation of one-to-one Arabic correspondences as the result of borrowing. But most intriguing of all, perhaps, is the substantial lexical component of unknown origin. It is impossible to say if this material reflects the native lexicon of Qaṭrāyīṯ , which would then be quite distinct from all other known Semitic languages, or if these words were borrowed from another unattested ancient source. While we are unable, with this kind of evidence, to define in precise terms Qaṭrāyīṯ ’s place among the Semitic languages, it is clearly a discrete linguistic variety, distinct from all known varieties of Arabic.