Arabisms

An arabism is any word that Portuguese received, directly or indirectly, from Arabic. It is the second-largest layer of the Portuguese vocabulary after the inherited Latin core: terms of Arabic origin run into the several thousand, of which around a thousand belong to the body of the language and several hundred remain in everyday use. No other Western European language — Spanish excepted — inherited so dense a lexical legacy from Arabic.

Where they come from

Almost all arabisms entered during, and as a result of, the roughly five centuries of Islamic presence in what would become Portugal (711–1249). Two routes of entry must be told apart, however, with different chronologies and registers.

The first is the popular route: words absorbed through everyday contact along the frontier and through the reintegration of Arabised populations as the Reconquest moved south. These are words of the land, the household and the market — azeite (olive oil), alface (lettuce), aldeia (village), alfândega (customs house) — worn smooth by use and fully adapted to Portuguese sound patterns.

The second is the learned route: scientific terms that Arabic had transmitted from Greek and the East, and which medieval Europe took up — already in the 12th and 13th centuries — through Latin translations, above all in mathematics, astronomy, alchemy and medicine. From these come álgebra, algarismo (numeral), álcool, alquimia, alambique (still), zénite and azimute. These words arrived in writing, not from the mouths of the speakers of al-Andalus.

The article al- and the sun letters

The most recognisable mark of an arabism is the initial al-, the Arabic definite article al- (“the”), which fused onto the noun at the moment of borrowing. Where other languages took the word without the article (compare algodão with English cotton), Portuguese fixed it for good.

In Arabic, the pronunciation of that al- depends on the following consonant. Before the so-called sun letters (among them s, z, r, t, d, n), the l assimilates to the consonant, which doubles; before the moon letters (such as b, f, q, kh, m), the l remains. That is why some arabisms appear in al- and others in a- with a strengthened consonant.

Arabic	Following letter	Portuguese	Pronunciation
al-sukkar	sun (s)	*açúcar* (sugar)	[ɐˈsukɐɾ]
al-zayt	sun (z)	*azeite* (oil)	[ɐˈzɐjtɨ]
al-ruzz	sun (r)	*arroz* (rice)	[ɐˈʁoʃ]
al-khass	moon (kh)	*alface* (lettuce)	[aɫˈfasɨ]
al-funduq	moon (f)	*alfândega* (customs)	[aɫˈfɐ̃dɨɣɐ]
al-qutn	moon (q)	*algodão* (cotton)	[aɫɣuˈðɐ̃w̃]

The semantic fields

Arabisms are not scattered at random: they cluster in the domains where the civilisation of al-Andalus was technically dominant. To read them by field is almost to read an inventory of medieval material life.

The technology of irrigation is especially telling: the nora (water-wheel) and the azenha (mill) raise the water that fills the açude (weir), and grain is measured by the alqueire and the arroba. It was not only objects that came in, but a whole system of knowledge, named in its own right.

Arabisms without the al- disguise

Not every arabism wears al- at its head. Many came in without the article or lost it, and some of the most unexpected are tiny everyday words. The interjection oxalá [ɔʃɐˈla] (“hopefully”, “God willing”) comes from in šāʾ Allāh; fulano (“so-and-so”) from fulān; xarope (syrup) from šarāb (“drink, potion”); xadrez (chess) from šiṭranj; and enxaqueca (migraine) from aš-šaqīqa (“the half of the head”). Even the preposition até (“until”) is, on the prevailing etymology, traced to Arabic ḥattā — a rare case of an Arabic loan reaching the grammar itself.

Beware false arabisms

The initial al- is a clue, not a proof. Many words beginning in al- are in fact of Latin origin, their resemblance pure coincidence.

A shared and living legacy

The same layer marks Spanish, which often keeps the very same words (azúcar, aceituna, alcázar): there was no borrowing from one language to the other, but a legacy received in parallel across the whole Peninsula. Within the Portuguese- speaking world, a few arabisms have taken different paths from shore to shore.

Arabic influence on the lexicon is, in the end, a quiet paradox: it touched neither the grammar nor the phonology of Portuguese, yet it is inscribed in hundreds of words that speakers use every day without suspecting their origin. To ask for açúcar in your coffee or azeite for your salad is to repeat, unawares, formulas a thousand years old.