This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.

Much of the insight in the field of Arabic linguistics has for a long time remained unknown to linguists outside the field. Regrettably, Arabic data rarely feature in the formulation of theories and analytical tools in modern linguistics. This situation is unfavourable to both sides. The Arabist, once an outrider, has almost become a non-member of the mainstream linguistics community. Consequently, linguistics itself has been deprived of a wealth of data from one of the world's major languages. However, it is reassuring to witness advances being made to integrate into mainstream linguistics the visions and debates of specialists in Arabic. Building on this fruitful endeavour, this book presents thought-provoking, new articles, especially written for this collection by leading scholars from both sides. The authors discuss topics in historical, social and spatial dialectology focusing on Arabic data investigated within modern analytical frameworks.

This volume includes the reflections of leading researchers on Arabic and Semitic languages, also understood as systems and representations. The work first deals with Biblical Hebrew, Early Aramaic, Afroasiatic and Semitic. Its core focuses on morpho-syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, rhetoric and logic matters, showing Arabic grammar's place within the system of the sciences of language. In the second part, authors deal with lexical issues, before they explore dialectology. The last stop is a reflection on how Arabic linguistics may prevent the understanding of the Arabs' own grammatical theory and the teaching and learning of Arabic.

History and Development of the Arabic Language is a general introduction for students to the history of the Arabic language. It is divided into two parts; the pre-Islamic language up to the emergence of the first well-known works of Classical Arabic. Secondly, the transition from the pre-Islamic situation to the complex Arabic language forms after the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests, both in Arabia and in the diaspora. The book focuses on the pre-Islamic linguistic situation, where the linguistic geography and relevant demographic aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia will be introduced. In addition, the book will also discuss the communicative contexts and varieties of Modern Arabic. The book includes readings, discussion questions and data sets to provide a complete textbook and resource for teachers and students of the history of Arabic.

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. It challenges the traditional conceptualization of an old, Classical language evolving into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. Professor Owens combines established comparative linguistic methodology with a careful reading of the classical Arabic sources, such as the grammatical and exegetical traditions. He arrives at a richer and more complex picture of early Arabic language history than is current today and in doing so establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a concise, case by case basis, making it accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.

Examines how pre-modernist conceptions and social organizations of pleasure have impacted post-WWII film.

The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area. The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, providing the most current work available with an unusually broad scope of topics Provides a practical guide to the many methodological and statistical issues surrounding the collection and analysis of dialect data Offers summaries of dialect variation in the world's most widely spoken and commonly studied languages, including several non-European languages that have traditionally received less attention in general discussions of dialectology Reviews the intellectual development of the field, including its main theoretical schools of thought and research traditions, both academic and applied The editors are well known and highly respected, with a deep knowledge of this vast field of inquiry

The articles collected in this volume form a contribution to the study of Arabic linguistics. Most of them deal with Arabic medieval grammatical thought and terminology and are based on the oldest grammatical treatises known to us, especially Sibawayhi's al-Kitab. The study of these two topics is interrelated, since the understanding of Arabic grammatical thought depends on the understanding of its terminology and vice versa. During the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, some prominent scholars maintained that the linguistic data supplied by the early Arab grammarians are unreliable, and, as a result, their grammatical rules do not accord with the linguistic reality of Old Arabic. Professor Levin's studies concerning the history of Arabic language contribute to the refutation of this view, showing that Sibawayhi's linguistic method was mainly descriptive and that the linguistic information furnished by him is authentic and reliable. Professor Levin also shows that Sibawayhi's accurate description of Old Arabic is based primarily on the ordinary speech of certain Bedouin tribes who lived in Southern Iraq in the eighth century. The linguistic data found in the Ketab indicate that these Bedouins still spoke Old Arabic dialects. Aryeh Levin is Professor of Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also the author of "A Grammar of the Arabic Dialect of Jerusalem" (in Hebrew).

This study is the first attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of Arabic by examining lexical evidence of its symbiotic relationship with Ancient Egyptian already apparent from the Pyramid Texts (c. 2613–2181 BC). It documents the contention that Ancient Egypt was a strategic site in its early prehistory.