Arabic Influence

In 711, Muslim armies from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and, within a few years, conquered nearly the whole Iberian Peninsula, which came to be known as al-Andalus. In the territory of the future Portugal, the Islamic presence lasted from 711 until the Christian conquest of the Algarve in 1249 — some five centuries south of the Tagus. From that long contact came the second largest layer of the Portuguese vocabulary after Latin: words of Arabic origin are estimated in the thousands, several hundred of which remain in everyday use.

Two languages, one land

For centuries Arabic was the prestige language of al-Andalus: the language of government, religion, science and written culture. Alongside it, the Christian populations under Muslim rule went on speaking an Iberian Romance, Mozarabic, heavily steeped in Arabic words. Portuguese does not descend from Mozarabic — it took shape in the north, within the old Galician-Portuguese area, and moved southward with the Reconquista — but it absorbed Arabic chiefly through this frontier contact and through the reabsorption of Arabised populations.

For this reason, unlike Latin or Galician-Portuguese, Arabic shaped neither the grammar nor the phonology of Portuguese: its mark is almost exclusively lexical. It is, even so, a deep mark, concentrated in the everyday domains in which the Muslims were technically dominant — farming and irrigation, building, trade, administration, the sciences and the home.

The fused article al-

The most conspicuous feature of Iberian Arabisms is the initial al-. It is the Arabic definite article al- (“the”), which, at the moment of borrowing, fused with the noun and became an inseparable part of the word — something that did not happen in languages that received the same terms by other routes (compare Portuguese algodão with English cotton or Italian cotone).

When the following consonant is one of the so-called sun letters, the l of the article assimilates to it, which explains the forms in a- with an originally doubled consonant, as in açúcar “sugar” (from Arabic as-sukkar) or azeite “olive oil” (from az-zayt).

Portuguese	Arabic	Literal sense
açúcar “sugar”	as-sukkar	”the sugar”
azeite “olive oil”	az-zayt	”the oil”
alface “lettuce”	al-khass	”the lettuce”
alfândega “customs house”	al-funduq	”the inn, the warehouse”
armazém “warehouse”	al-makhzan	”the storehouse”
almofada “cushion”	al-mukhadda	”the cushion”
álgebra “algebra”	al-jabr	”the restoration, the reckoning”

Fields of vocabulary

The Arabisms fall into telling thematic families. In farming and water, we inherited the irrigation technology of al-Andalus: azenha (water wheel), nora (bucket wheel), açude (weir), alqueire (a dry measure), azeitona (olive), alfarroba (carob), cenoura (carrot), tremoço (lupin bean). In trade and administration: armazém, alfândega, aldeia “village” (from ad-dayʿa, “the farm, the hamlet”), alvará (a licence), quintal, arroba, tarifa. In the home and its materials: almofada, alcatifa (carpet), azulejo (glazed tile), almofariz (mortar), chávena (cup), garrafa (bottle), alcôva (alcove). And, thanks to Arabic’s role as a vehicle for Greek and Eastern learning, a whole scientific lexicon: álgebra, algarismo (digit), cifra (cipher), zénite, alquimia, álcool.

A few loans escape the al- mould. The interjection oxalá “let’s hope, God willing” [ɔʃɐˈla] comes from in šāʾ Allāh (“if God wills”); and even a word as ordinary as até “until” is commonly traced to Arabic ḥattā.

Place names

In no domain is the Arabic legacy as dense as in the place names of southern Portugal. The Algarve itself is Arabic al-gharb, “the west” — the western part of al-Andalus. Many river names begin with Ode- or Odi-, from Arabic wādī, “river, valley”: Odemira, Odeleite, Odiana (today the Guadiana, wādī Āna).

Place name	Arabic	Sense
Algarve	al-gharb	”the west”
Alcácer (do Sal)	al-qaṣr	”the castle”
Alcântara	al-qanṭara	”the bridge”
Alfama	al-ḥamma	”the hot spring”
Almada	al-maʿdan	”the mine”
Fátima	Fāṭima	a woman’s given name

A quiet, ever-present legacy

The Arabic influence is thus a happy paradox: invisible in the structure of the language, yet inscribed in hundreds of words that speakers use without suspecting their origin. Each time someone mentions açúcar, a aldeia in the Algarve, or a garrafa of azeite, the long Iberian coexistence with Arabic quietly echoes on.