On the development of conditional particles in the Arabic dialect of the Fezzān

The south-western province of Libya, Fezzan, is home to a particularly conservative variety of Bedouin Libyan Arabic, who started being studied after the publication of a collection of ethnographic texts collected by Ph. Marçais in 2001. The present paper discusses the development of conditional particles and sentences in Fezzani Arabic, showing that the nomadic and sedentary varieties spoken in the region represent two consecutive stages of evolution of the same syntactic structure.