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Dr Adam Schembri, Professor of Linguistics, explains the importance of studying the science of language to mark World Linguistics Day.

Everyone in Israel says sababa — “cool,” “great,” “no problem.” But where did this word really come from — Hebrew or Arabic? A new academic article by Ruti Bardenstein and Faten Ben-Barry, published in The International Journal of Bilingualism, tries to answer that. They argue that sababa began as a classical Arabic word meaning yearning or love. Arabic-speaking Jews in Jaffa supposedly used it in their storytelling; the journalist Menachem Talmi recorded those tales in Maariv in the 1960s; and from there, sababa entered Hebrew in the 1970s — before Israeli Arabs and Palestinians later borrowed it back from Hebrew. Now, I actually agree with parts of that. Sababa clearly originated in classical Arabic, and it likely returned to Palestinian Arabic through Hebrew use. But here’s where I disagree. It’s unlikely those Jaffa storytellers — most of them poor and uneducated — were quoting medieval Arabic poetry. Much more plausible is that sababa already had a positive meaning — “pleasant,” “excellent” — in some spoken Arabic dialect, maybe Moroccan or a Judeo-Arabic variety, long before it reached Hebrew. Talmi didn’t invent these words; he simply wrote down how Arabic-speaking Israelis already talked. Those words spread naturally — through daily contact between Mizrahi Israelis and others in the 1970s and ’80s — just like basa, another case I’ve written about, which also traveled from Hebrew back into Arabic. So sababa’s real journey wasn’t Classical Arabic → Hebrew → Arabic. It was Classical Arabic → Spoken Arabic → Hebrew → Arabic again — a perfect linguistic ping-pong. And now, a question for Arabic speakers: Have you ever heard sababa — meaning “excellent,” “cool,” or “no problem” — in any dialect outside Israel or Palestine? Moroccan? Egyptian? Tunisian? Judeo-Arabic? If so, please share it in the comments — because finding even one such older, pre-1970s example could rewrite the story of sababa.