THE LANGUAGE(S) OF THE ARABS IN AL-MAQRĪZĪ’S AL-ḪABAR ʿAN AL-BAŠAR

Al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442) conceived al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar as the history of humankind from the beginning of Creation until the appearance of the Arabs and their division into several tribes. The author copied the six volumes of al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar in his own hand; all of them, excepting the second, have been preserved. Linguistic issues are treated in different passages of al-Ḫabar ʿan albašar and in two of them ‘the language of the Arabs’ is dealt with in depth. In this article, based on the extant holograph, we give a synopsis of the contents of these passages and an identification of the sources. This aims at highlighting the peculiar slant this historian gave to the discussion on Arabic and at his ability to locate rare sources, whose many are in fact still unpublished, lost or little known.