The Arabs and Africa (RLE: The Arab Nation)

The Arabs and Africa (RLE: The Arab Nation)

Author: Khair El-Din Haseeb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-06-14

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 1136251928

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Concentrating on the past, present and future relations of the peoples of Africa and the Arab world this book examines interaction between Arab and African countries; Africa and the Arab-Israeli conflict; Dimensions of Afro-Arab Cooperation. The book concludes with an open discussion on the future of Afro-Arab relations.


Arabic as a Minority Language

Arabic as a Minority Language

Author: Jonathan Owens

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 3110805456

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CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.


Arabic and the Case Against Linearity in Historical Linguistics

Arabic and the Case Against Linearity in Historical Linguistics

Author: Jonathan Owens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-09-28

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0192867512

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This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of Arabic, this book instead advocates a multiple pathways approach to Arabic language history. Arabic has multifarious sources: its relations to other Semitic languages, an old epigraphic and papyrological tradition, a vibrant and linguistically original classical Arabic linguistic tradition, and a widely dispersed array of contemporary spoken varieties. These diverse sources present a challenge to and an opportunity for defining a holistic but not necessarily linear Arabic language history. The geographical breadth and chronological depth of Arabic make it a fertile ground for a critical appraisal and application of perspectives from a range of subdisciplines including sociolinguistics, typology, grammaticalization, and corpus linguistics. Jonathan Owens draws on these approaches to investigate more than 20 individual case studies that cover more than 1500 years of documented and reconstructed history: the results demonstrate that Arabic is a far more complex historical object than traditional accounts have assumed. This complexity is further explored in a comparison of the historical morphology of three languages that can be compared over roughly the same period (500 AD-2022 AD): Icelandic, English, and Arabic. Icelandic and English are diametrically opposed on a parameter of linearity. Icelandic is effectively alinear: the morphology of the earliest Icelandic writings is the morphology of today. English is linear, having undergone a drastic change in morphology from its Old English stage to the Middle English period. Arabic is shown to be alinear in many important respects, but multilinear in others, with different sorts of linguistic changes being spread across many individual historical speech communities.


Neighborhood and Ancestry

Neighborhood and Ancestry

Author: Jonathan Owens

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 902721834X

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Over the past 35 years urban sociolinguistics has developed upon the base of detailed case studies carried out mainly in western countries. A fundamental dichotomy informing the interpretation of variation has been carried out within what is termed the “standard-vernacular model”. Higher vs. lower social class, power vs. solidarity, open networks vs. closed networks are a few of the conceptual dyads which have been invoked to order linguistic variation operating with an input from a standard/vernacular source. The present study, based on the spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, focuses on a linguistic landscape where the notions of “standard” and “vernacular” are of little relevance in ordering urban linguistic variants. It is argued that linguistic variation is best conceptualized and ordered in terms of the twin variables of neighborhood and ancestral norms. A detailed analysis of 13 linguistic variables based on a corpus of about 500,000 words invokes an urban linguistic world different from that in the West. To integrate this landscape into current sociolinguistic thinking a typology of urban variation is outlined using familar, yet relatively unutilized sociolinguistic parameters: neighborhood, ancestry, minority status and institutionalization.


A Linguistic History of Arabic

A Linguistic History of Arabic

Author: Jonathan Owens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-05-11

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0199290822

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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 complexpicture 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 Islamicculture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.