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Hi, I suspect there will be a lot of familiar faces here. I'm not actually constructing a westasian lang at this time, nor do I have one planned for the forseeable future. But my Carrjena Romlang project is going to make heavy use of Arabic borrowings and has some Punic and Berber substrate. Additionally there is slight borrowing from Coptic and Hebrew. For his reason I decided to pop in and see if this group of folks might be helpful in answering some questions that I've ask on a couple of previous occasions at Romanceconlang with little or no response. My most pressing question involves the dialectalization of Arabic. I'm well aware that the modern Arabic "dialects" are wildly divergent from one another, but aproximately when did this dialectalization begin? For instance is there any accepted date for the emergence of a recognizably Algerian dialect? Darja is pretty wild, but how long has Darja been its own animal rather than Standard Arabic or a slight variation thereof? It seems pretty reasonable that the first Arabic speakers in Algeria/Tunisa spoke Classical Arabic since they were only a few decades removed from the Prophet, but my period of borrowing extends from about 700 to around 1300. That's a fairly long time. Do we know anything about the degree of divergence during that period? Adam the Evercurious