This volume is a collection of articles written by more than 40 scholars who work in the field of Arabic dialectology. All articles are revised versions of papers presented at the 9th Conference of the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA) held in Pescara in March 2011. The variety of dialects represented in the book engage various issues in Arabic dialectology - such as sedentary and Bedouin dialects, sociolinguistic phenomena, and the written dimension - investigated from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The broad range of meaningful subjects that are tackled in the book offer an important contribution to the current debates on general linguistics and sociolinguistics, Arabic linguistics, Arabic literature, as well as Semitic and Islamic studies. (Series: Neue Beihefte zur Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes - Vol. 8)

The written and spoken forms of Arabic have been traditionally viewed as separate forms of the language that rarely overlap in writing, but this book will examine the recently emerged concept of ‘mixed’ writing that combines both written and spoken forms. This book takes a close look at different examples of mixed Arabic writing in modern (twentieth to twenty-firstt century) print and online literature, offering an analysis of this type of mixing alongside a dynamic model for analysing mixed Arabic writing, and the motivations for producing this type of writing. This book further introduces the ground-breaking concept of the seven writing styles for Arabic, ranging from Classical Arabic to ChatSpeak, whilst also offering an overview of early Arabic literacy and children’s literature. Primarily aimed at Arabic researchers and teachers in linguistics, sociolinguistics, identity studies, politics and Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, this book would also be informative for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Arabic as foreign language, Arabic linguistics and dialectology.

The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World connects the fascinating field of contemporary written Arabic with the central sociolinguistic notions of language ideology and diglossia. Focusing on Egypt and Morocco, the authors combine large-scale survey data on language attitudes with in-depth analyses of actual language usage and explicit (and implicit) language ideology. They show that writing practices as well as language attitudes in Egypt and Morocco are far more receptive to vernacular forms than has been assumed. The individual chapters cover a wide variety of media, from books and magazines to blogs and Tweets. A central theme running through the contributions is the social and political function of “doing informality” in a changing public sphere steadily more permeated by written Arabic in a number of media.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics comprises 22 chapters encompassing various aspects in the study of Arabic dialects within their sociolinguistic context. This is a novel volume, which not only includes the traditional topics in variationist sociolinguistics, but also links the sociolinguistic enterprise to the history of Arabic and to applications of sociolinguistics beyond the theoretical treatment of variation. Newly formed trends, with an eye to future research, form the backbone of this volume. With contributions from an international pool of researchers, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Arabic sociolinguistics, as well as to linguists interested in a concise, rounded view of the field.

The necessity of studying Arabic dialects has attracted more attention in the recent years. Qatar University chose to support the growing academic interest and research in the field by hosting the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA) conference in 2013. The AIDA10 conference and the tenth volume of AIDA proceedings show that a good deal of change and development in the field is occurring. Fewer papers deal on hitherto unknown dialects as the white spots on the map of Arabic dialects have significantly shrunk. More papers focus on syntactical issues because we now possess more and larger text collections. Papers using "change" in their titles indicate that Arabic dialectology has a long history. The time has come to re-examine the studies of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s concerning the dialects of certain regions. This book includes twenty one essays with six written in French. (Series: New Supplements to the Vienna Magazine for the Customer of the East / Neue Beihefte zur Wiener Zeitschrift fÃ?Â1⁄4r die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vol. 9) [Subject: Linguistics, Arabic Studies]

This volume, organized alphabetically, comprises 37 presentations from the 14th AIDA conference. The authors have revised their work, which has been reviewed to ensure suitability for publication as chapters. This selection of papers covers the Arabic-speaking world from East to West, and from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives (E. Larbi, F.B. Francisco). Scholars have delved into both theoretical (S. Procházka) and empirical realms, exploring topics such as the analysis of linguistic traits within cultural expressions (E. De Blasio, N. Fottouh & B. Horvat, A.S. Ould Mohamed Baba). Additionally, they have contributed to the description of previously unidentified linguistic varieties (J. Aguadé & A. Salim, A. Bar-Moshe, L. Ben Salah, M. Benítez Fernández, A. Torzullo). Their investigations have spanned phonological (A. Avram, V. Bozkurt, I. Youssef), morphological (G. Biţună, A. Boucherit, M. Garaoun, D. Wilmsen & F. Al Muhairi), morphosyntactic (M. Afkir, G. Chikovani, G. Grigore, A. Iriarte Díez, E. Ravier, A. Sigourou), and semantic aspects (L. Lombezzi, C. Taine-Cheikh); The exploration of sociolinguistic phenomena (L. Cerqueglini, J. Falchetta, J. Guerrero, I. Moufid, A. Naddari, L. Zack, K. Ziamari, D. Caubet & C. Miller); Arabic in contact with other languages (H. El Shazli, V. Engler, E. Gutova); and innovative teaching methodologies (N. Ejibadze).

This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, English, Norwegian, Hindi), Hamito-Semitic (Berber, Zenaga Berber, Arabic varieties, Neo-Aramaic), African (Wolof, Langi), Asian (Badaga, Korean, Mongolian languages – Khalkha, Buriat, Kalmuck – Thaï, Tibetic languages), Amerindian (Yucatec Maya, Sikuani), Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics, especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality, on pragmatics, on areal linguistics and on typology.

Language Contact and the Development of Modern Hebrew is a first rigorous attempt by scholars of Hebrew to evaluate the syntactic impact of the various languages with which Modern Hebrew was in contact during its formative years. Twenty-four different innovative syntactic constructions of Modern Hebrew are analysed, and shown to originate in previous stages of Hebrew, which, since the third century CE, solely functioned as a scholarly and liturgical language. The syntactic changes in the constructions are traced to the native languages of the first Modern Hebrew learners, and later to further reanalysis by the first generation of native speakers. The contents of this volume was also published as a special double issue of Journal of Jewish Languages, 3: 1-2 (2015). Contributors are: Vera Agranovsky, Chanan Ariel, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Miri Bar-Ziv, Isaac Bleaman, Nora Boneh, Edit Doron, Keren Dubnov, Itamar Francez, Roey Gafter, Ophira Gamliel, Yehudit Henshke, Uri Horesh, Olga Kagan, Samir Khalaily, Irit Meir, Yishai Neuman, Abed al-Rahman Mar'i, Malka Rappaport Hovav, Yael Reshef, Aynat Rubinstein, Ora Schwarzwald, Nimrod Shatil, Sigal Shlomo, Ivy Sichel, Moshe Taube, Avigail Tsirkin-Sadan, Shira Wigderson, and Yael Ziv.

During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mould, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language. Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analysing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territory of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte (1798–1801), it moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic-learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.

Disagreements concerning the nature and extent of the universe constitute a focus of theological debate which permeates buddhism at every level. While there have been numerous attempts to catalogue the details of the Buddhist cosmologies, none has attempted a general interpretation of their underlying intention. This work attempts to begin the process of interpreting the major phases of Buddhist Cosmological speculation by seeing in them various dramas of salvation tailored to the philosophical and theological predilections of their respective traditions. To a large extent, this interpretation relies on an examination of continuities between the Buddhist cosmologies and those of the hellenistic world as a whole. In the course of this study, two major cosmological traditions emerge; those which rely on metaphors of time and those which rely on metaphors of time and those which rely on metaphors of space. The former are associated with the Hinayana and the latter with the Mahayana forms of Buddhism. Each draws on images of motion and light to articulate its vision of the drama of salvation.