Sixteenth-century Valencian Arabic produced deliberate written vernacular spellings, not mere errors

Evidence

Bib, we know, was how the word was often actually pronounced in Valencia (as a consequence of a process of vowel closure, termed imala in Arabic treatises of phonetics, that was a characteristic of the Andalusi dialects). Bib was what people actually said, there is no doubt about that, but nobody before the sixteenth century would consistently write the word that way. (A useful parallel might be that in North America the English word “water” is pronounced with some kind of voiced or attenuated dental medial consonant, but nobody there would ever dream of actually writing that word with a d: “wader.”) In some regions where Hispano-Arabic vernaculars existed (in Valencia above all) we witness the emergence of what we may perhaps call “written vernacular texts” in which divergences from the old norms are not occasional slips and errors but are apparently intentional. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 610

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘imala’ (vowel closure) as a phonetic process characteristic of Andalusi Arabic dialects.
• XREF: Connects to debates about orthographic reform, intentional nonstandard spelling, and how vernacular writing signals identity — parallels modern moves like ‘nite’/‘lite’ or eye dialect.
• QUESTION: Why would communities preserving Arabic orthographic tradition suddenly start writing phonetically? The author himself finds the motivation puzzling.