Siculo-Arabic

Siculo-Arabic is a group of Arabic varieties, part of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family and descended from Pre-Hilalian Tunisian Arabic, that were spoken in the Emirate of Sicily from the ninth century following the Abbasid conquest and persisted under Norman rule until the thirteenth century. During the Norman period it held administrative status, with the royal chancery in Palermo operating in Arabic alongside Greek and Latin, and it was spoken in cities including Palermo, Agrigento and Enna. The dialect was gradually marginalized after the Norman conquest and its non-Maltese varieties are believed to have gone extinct by around the start of the nineteenth century. Maltese is its only surviving descendant, having developed through centuries of Latinization, while modern Sicilian retains only a limited Siculo-Arabic vocabulary of around 300 words.