Some modern scholars of Arabic believe that the Classical Arabic grammarians held their view, that the language of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran was identical with at least the spoken varieties of some Arab tribes in the peninsula (Rabin 1955:21-22; Sharkawi 2005:5-6). A first reading of the grammatical texts seems to confirm that grammarians were quite aware of the existence of different language varieties in the Arabic-speaking sphere. They distinguished terminologically between luġa ‘dialect' and lisān ‘language' (ˀAnīs 1952:16-17; Naṣṣār 1988:58). Among several meanings of the word luġa is the technical meaning of a linguistic variety (Rabin 1951:9).