Tags: Language.
Maridi Arabic was a possible Arabic pidgin apparently spoken in the upper Nile valley around 1000 CE. If legitimate it would be the oldest record of a pidgin. It is known from just fifty words in an 11th-century text.In 1068 the Spanish geographer Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī published the words of a traveler from Aswan who had complained to the Caliph in Egypt that in the town of Maridi black Africans had mutilated the Arabic language.