After the long interval during which no Arabic documents seem to have been issued to Sicilian recipients, in March 1132, little more than a year after Roger's coronation, Arabic documents suddenly began to be issued again. This is surprising. More than a generation had passed since the completion of the conquest and, in that time, Greek had become firmly established as the primary administrative language of the Norman regime. Greek was used to register Arab villeins, and to describe estate boundaries which proceeded from one Arabic boundary-mark to the next and which had been established on the testimony of Arab witnesses. Greek decrees were issued to royal officials who included Arabic-speakers amongst their number. There is no evidence that such Greek documents had failed to fulfil their administrative function. Latin, too, had gained a toe-hold, although it was only after 1130, and especially after the death of Roger II in 1154, that it was seriously to challenge the pre-eminence of Greek, and eventually to surpass it. What, then, dictated the return to Arabic? We must begin to seek the answer in the documents themselves.

The Cefalù deperdita (Dīwānī 10–11)

The earliest products known to have been issued by King Roger's dīwān were two bilingual documents in favour of the new royal foundation of San Salvatore di Cefalù. Neither survives in its original form.