Full Description
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.
Contents
List of maps and tables
Abbreviations
Transliteration and transcription conventions
About the contributors
1: Clive Holes: Introduction
2: Jordi Aguadé: The Maghrebi dialects of Arabic
3: Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich: The formation of the Egyptian Arabic dialect area
4: Ignacio Ferrando: The adnominal linker -an in Andalusi Arabic, with special reference to the poetry of Ibn Quzman
5: Clive Holes: The Arabic dialects of the Gulf: A sketch of their historical and sociolinguistic development
6: Geoffrey Khan: Judaeo-Arabic
7: Jérôme Lentin: The Levant
8: Jonathan Owens: Dialects (speech communities), the apparent past, and grammaticalization: Towards an understanding of the history of Arabic
9: Stephan Procházka: The Northern Fertile Crescent
10: Catherine Taine-Cheikh: Historical and typological approaches to Mauritanian and West Saharan Arabic
11: Janet Watson: South Arabian and Arabic dialects
Glossary
References
Index
