Wallah (Arabic)

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Wallah ( listen ? / I ) ( ArabicAudio file / audio sample  والله, DMG wa-llāh ) is an Arabic oath formula (Arabic qasam , ḥilf or yamīn ) meaning “with God” (lit. “and God”). Fully vocalized the form is wallahi . A variant is bi-llāhi ( billahi , literally "with God"). The oath is used to make a promise or to emphasize the credibility of a statement.

Use in the Muslim context

Vows with the form wallahi are documented in the hadiths .

The abuse of an oath is considered a sin in Islam . If an oath is not kept, an expiation payment must be made according to Islamic tradition (Arabic kaffāra , Turkish kefāret ).

German translation

Galland manuscript of Arabic fairy tales with the frequent phrase Wallah (Arabic manuscript of the 18th century, Bibliothèque nationale de France )

The first general dissemination of the exclamation “By Allah, I swear!” Translated into German , or comparable syntactic variants thereof, came about through the publication of fairy tales from the Arab cultural area , primarily through the anthology One Thousand and One Nights in the 19th Century. This is a collection of originally brutal and erotic stories for adults that were first translated and defused by the French orientalist Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1708 . August Ernst Zinserling translated the text into German from 1823 to 1824 after Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall had translated it into French . Another defused version was published in 1839 - alienated as "fairy tales for children".

Ethnic or sociolect

The exclamation “Wallah!” As well as the German translation “I swear!” Was adopted by the sociolect of German-speaking Muslim youth . Both are used as an appendage to reinforce a sentence such as “The film is really good, wallah!” , “I'll call you tomorrow, wallah!” Or “I didn't know, I swear!” .

Influence on other languages

The word can also be found in the Serbian language ( вала [vala]), probably as a loan word from Ottoman .

The Spanish applause ¡olé! could, according to the American historian Saul S. Friedman, go back to the Andalusian Arabic.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader: Issues in the Structure of Arabic Clauses and Words. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Springer, 1993. Page 70 f.
  2. ↑ Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi sv Yemin
  3. ↑ Ott, Claudia : A thousand and one nights. Based on the oldest Arabic manuscript in the edition by Muhsin Mahdi, first translated into German by Claudia Ott. 11th edition. CH Beck, 2011. ISBN 978-3-406-51680-1 . Pages 665 and 667.
  4. ↑ The Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Complete German edition in six volumes. Based on the Arabic original text of the Calcutta edition from 1839. Transferred by Enno Littmann. Insel, Wiesbaden / Frankfurt M 1953, 1976, Komet, Frechen 2000. ISBN 3-89836-308-2 .
  5. ↑ Araghi, Verena: Let's talk a lot! The effects of “Kiez language” on standard German . The mirror . Edition 42/2007, p. 196 f.
  6. ↑ Hinrichs, Uwe: “I saw my buddy”. How migration changed the German language . Essay. The mirror . Edition 7/2012, p. 104 f.
  7. ^ Saul S. Friedman: A History of the Middle East . Jefferson , 2006. page 149. ISBN 0-7864-5134-3 .