# Studying the History of the Arabic Language: Language Technology and a Large-Scale Historical Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03891/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [MOLE: Metadata Extraction and Validation in Scientific Papers Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19800/) (2025)
- [Arabic Text Diacritization In The Age Of Transfer Learning: Token Classification Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04848/) (2024)
- [Studying Illustrations in Manuscripts: An Efficient Deep-Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05269/) (2025)
- [A Large and Diverse Arabic Corpus for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09227/) (2022)
- [Automatic Classification of Arabic Literature into Historical Eras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16138/) (2026)
- [BARRAC: Adaptation of an English Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Classification Tasks in Arabic Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38820/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a long and rich history, but existing corpora and language technology focus mostly on modern Arabic and its varieties. Therefore, studying the history of the language has so far been mostly limited to manual analyses on a small scale. In this work, we present a large-scale historical corpus of the written Arabic language, spanning 1400 years. We describe our efforts to clean and process this corpus using Arabic NLP tools, including the identification of reused text. We study the history of the Arabic language using a novel automatic periodization algorithm, as well as other techniques. Our findings confirm the established division of written Arabic into Modern Standard and Classical Arabic, and confirm other established periodizations, while suggesting that written Arabic may be divisible into still further periods of development.