This paper provides preliminary evidence that relative pronouns in Central Faifi Arabic can possibly denote distality and proximity. First, the paper contextualises relative pronouns in Central Faifi Arabic by providing a general overview of relative pronouns, with a focus on relative pronouns in Modern Written Arabic and some Arabic dialects. Central Faifi Arabic has three pairs of relative pronouns: ḏī and ḏā, tī and tā, and ʾawḏī and ʾawḏā. The members of each pair, which only differ in the quality of the final vowel, have been previously regarded as free variants.
Through a series of tasks performed by 15 Central Faifi Arabic native speakers, this paper shows that relative pronouns in Central Faifi Arabic are not always in free variation and that they can indicate distality and proximity when an adverb of place, ḥawla ‘there’, ṯamma ‘there’, or hnī ‘here’, is present in the clause. In other words, adverbs of place in the dialect draw out a possible historical distinction between the relative pronouns which have the high vowel /ī/ and relative pronouns which have the low vowel /ā/, where relative pronouns with /ā/ indicate distality and relative pronouns with /ī/ indicate proximity. Thus, while the distal/proximal distinction may not be categorical at present, the results of the tasks performed by native speakers strongly imply that the dialect had this distinction at some point.