World Canonical Texts
According to Dworkin, who wrote a history of the Spanish lexicon, claimed in an encyclopedic article published by Oxford in 2021, that “Corriente (1999, 2008) continues to be the most complete and reliable register of Spanish Arabisms.” The 1999 book was in Spanish, and the later 2008 book is in English, called Dictionary of Arabic and allied loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and kindred dialects. This book has a selective preview in Google books, and it has a 10+ page of “Index of Romance Lexical Items” which has about 1,000 words listed, and it acts sort of like the table of contents for the dictionary.
I want to see for a student learning Spanish, how much of Arabic vocabulary would one encounter. So I use the alphabetical index of the most frequently contemporarily used 5,000 Spanish words, from A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish, 2nd edition (2018, Routledge), which is available for download on archive.org. I manually compare the 5,000 words, and see if they have equivalents in Corriente’s index. And out of the 5,000 most frequently used Spanish words, I found it is related to Arabic on only 28 items, that is only a 0.56%.
So the conclusion is that while Arabic historically might have influenced the Spanish lexicon, but for the words commonly in use, Arabic has a really insignificant presence.
Let me give the words as shown in Routledge’s dictionary (as I don’t have Corriente’s full work, only the index). English gloss in quotes, the number at the end is the frequency rank. After colon is my comment.
1. abismo “abyss, large gap” 4069: this is clearly cognate with English, so let’s check etymonline.com, which says the word ultimately comes from Greek. So this word may come to Spanish somehow through Arabic, but this is also a word with Greek/Latin source.
2. aceite “oil” 2101
3. ademán “gesture, expression” 3598
4. adorar “to worship, adore” 3096: this again seems to be a Latin word, accordingly to https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=adore
5. afilar “to sharpen” 4768: this is not directly in Corriente’s index, which has “afilate” instead. I am not sure “afilate” is a Spanish word, but I haven’t learnt Spanish or its morphology, so maybe it is just not a dictionary head word.
6. ajedrez “chess” 4970
7. albergar “to lodge, harbor” 3658: Corriente’s index has “albergate”.
8. alcaide “mayor” 2011
9. alcohol “alcohol” 2296: clearly an Arabism.
10. aldea “small village” 4109
11. algodón “cotton” 3611: from Arabic “qutn”, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cotton
12. almacén “warehouse, store” 2980
13. almacenar “to store, keep” 3489: this is not in Corriente’s index, but if almacén is from Arabic, this clearly related verb also has to be.
14. almohada “pillow” 4267
15. alquiler “rent, rental” 4454
16. árabe “Arab” 2102: difficult to really count this as influence of the Arabic language.
17. arroz “rice” 2882
18. ataúd “coffin, casket” 4992
19. barrio “neighborhood, district” 940
20. cero “zero, naught, nil” 1731: for the English zero, etymonline.com says “from Arabic sifr "cipher," translation of Sanskrit sunya-m "empty place, desert, naught." You don’t need to know Arabic to know this though.
21. dado “d. que: given that” 1501: I take this to mean that it is only frequently used as part of the phrase dado que. On its own, the word seems to mean dice, according to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/spanish-english/dado
22. eje “axis, shaft, crux” 2588
23. guitarra “guitar” 2706: Etymonline says “Modern guitar also is directly from Spanish guitarra (14c.), which ultimately is from the Greek. The Arabic word is perhaps from Spanish or Greek, though often the relationship is said to be the reverse.” So this may be ultimately a Greek word instead.
24. jinete “rider, horseman” 4927
25. loco “crazy, insane” 846
26. musulmán “Moslem, Muslim” 2781: just like árabe, hard to say this counts.
27. ola “wave, billow” 2425
28./ paja “straw, thatching” 3875
Besides this, in Routledge, I saw ojalá “hopefully” 399 which many on the internet says comes from Arabic. The word is not in Corriente’s index though.
It is easy to see most of the Arabic words in Spanish starts with a-, related to the article al- in Arabic. And mostly nouns.
On a purist basis, and ordered by frequency of use, the list can look like:
1. loco “crazy, insane” 846
2. barrio “neighborhood, district” 940
3. dado “d. que: given that” 1501
4. alcaide “mayor” 2011
5. aceite “oil” 2101
6. alcohol “alcohol” 2296
7. ola “wave, billow” 2425
8. eje “axis, shaft, crux” 2588
9. arroz “rice” 2882
10. almacén “warehouse, store” 2980, also representing almacenar “to store, keep” 3489
11. ademán “gesture, expression” 3598
12. algodón “cotton” 3611
13. paja “straw, thatching” 3875
14. aldea “small village” 4109
15. almohada “pillow” 4267
16. alquiler “rent, rental” 4454
17. Jinete “rider, horseman” 4927
18. ajedrez “chess” 4970
19. ataúd “coffin, casket” 4992
To summarize, knowing Arabic does not really gives you a real vocab advantage in learning Spanish. Though our lives really should not be without algodón or alcohol, ojalá!
References:
1. Dworkin, S. N. (2012). A history of the Spanish lexicon: A linguistic perspective. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
2. History of the Spanish Lexicon
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.464
https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-464
3. Corriente, F. (1999). Diccionario de arabismos y voces afines en iberorromance. Madrid, Spain: Gredos.
4. Corriente, F. (2008). Dictionary of Arabic and allied loanwords: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and kindred dialects. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
6. https://www.etymonline.com/word/abyss