Read more
Arabic is one of the world's largest languages, spoken natively by nearly 300 million people. By strength of numbers alone Arabic is one of our most important languages, studied by scholars across many different academic fields and cultural settings. It is, however, a complex language rooted in its own tradition of scholarship, constituted of varieties each imbued with unique cultural values and characteristic linguistic properties. Understanding its linguistics holistically is therefore a challenge.
The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a comprehensive, one-volume guide that deals with all major research domains which have been developed within Arabic linguistics. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, who both present state-of-the-art overviews and develop their own critical perspectives. The Handbook begins with Arabic in its Semitic setting and ends with the modern dialects; it ranges across the traditional--the classical Arabic grammatical and lexicographical traditions--to the contemporary--Arabic sociolinguistics, Creole varieties and codeswitching, psycholinguistics, and Arabic as a second language - while situating Arabic within current phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexicological theory. An essential reference work for anyone working within Arabic linguistics, the book brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, and provides analysis of current trends and directions for future research.
List of contents
- 1. A house of sound structure, of marvelous form and proportion: An Introduction
- Jonathan Owens
- 2. Phonetics
- Mohamed Embarki
- 3. Phonology
- Sam Hellmuth
- 4. Morphology
- Robert Ratcliffe
- 5. Arabic Linguistic Tradition I: NaHw and Sarf
- Ramzi Baalbaki
- 6. The Syntax of Arabic from a Generative Perspective
- Elabbas Benmamoun and Lina Choueiri
- 7. The Philological Approach to Arabic Grammar
- Lutz Edzard
- 8. The Arabic Linguistic Tradition II: Beyond Grammar
- Pierre Larcher
- 9. Issues in Arabic Computational Linguistics
- Everhard Ditters
- 10. Sociolinguistics
- Enam Al-Wer
- 11. Arabic Folk Linguistics: Between Mother-tongue and Native Language
- Yasir Suleiman
- 12. Orality, Culture and Language
- Clive Holes
- 13. Dialects and Dialectology
- Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich,
- 14. Codeswitching and Codemixing Involving Arabic
- Abdelali Bentahila, Eirlys Davies, and Jonathan Owens
- 15. Borrowing
- Maarten Kossmann
- 16. Psycholinguistics
- Sami Boudelaa
- 17. Arabic Second Language Acquisition
- Karin Ryding
- 18. The Arabic Writing System
- Peter Daniels
- 19. What is Arabic?
- Jan Retsö
- 20. History
- Jonathan Owens
- 21. The Arabic Literary Language: The NahDa (and Beyond)
- Daniel Newman
- 22. Creoles and Pidgins
- Mauro Tosco and Stefano Manfredi
- 23. Lexicography in the Classical Era
- Solomon Sara, Georgetown University
- 24. Modern Lexicography
- Tim Buckwalter and Dilworth Parkinson
About the author
Jonathan Owens is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has experience in all aspects of Arabic linguistics, including the Classical linguistic tradition and contemporary spoken varieties, with extensive academic and research experience in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the USA. His many publications include The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory, 1988, Neighborhood and Ancestry: Variation in the Spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, 1998, and A Linguistic History of Arabic, 2009.
Summary
Gives critical expression to Arabic, a language which covers large populations and geographical areas, has a long written tradition, and has been the locus of major intellectual fervor and debate.
