Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics
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Subject: Language And Linguistics
Managing Editors Online Edition: Lutz Edzard and Rudolf de Jong
The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics. It is interdisciplinary in scope and represents different schools and approaches in order to be as objective and versatile as possible. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online is cross-searchable and cross-referenced, and is equipped with a browsable index. All relevant fields in Arabic linguistics, both general and language specific are covered and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online includes topics from interdisciplinary fields, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science.
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The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online comprehensively covers all aspects of Arabic languages and linguistics. It is interdisciplinary in scope and represents different schools and approaches in order to be as objective and versatile as possible. The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online is cross-searchable and cross-referenced, and is equipped with a browsable index. All relevant fields in Arabic linguistics, both general and language specific are covered and the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online includes topics from interdisciplinary fields, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Labiovelarization
(1,113 words)
Labiovelarization may be described as a rounding of the lips, accompanied by the raising of the back of the tongue; it may be analyzed as a case of secondary combined articulation or of co-articulation. This phenomenon is common to all Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) languages. Cantineau (1960:30) mentions what he calls “l'affrication des labiales b, m, f”, which can be uttered with “un w furtif, ‘spirante de passage’”. This appears mainly before vowels with “une ouverture maxima des lèvres”, whereas the labials need “une fermeture des lèv…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lafḏ̣
(3,783 words)
1. Preliminary remarks Etymologically, the term
lafḏ̣ is a
maṣdar, i.e. a verbal noun. Originally it meant ‘to spit, reject, vomit’ and, in the specific context of speech activities, ‘to emit words, to utter’. In practice, there has been a shift from action to result and hence from a verbal value of the
maṣdar to a nominal one. Taken substantively,
lafḏ̣ is not to be understood as a singular noun but rather as a collective one. This collective and consequently generic meaning implies a globalizing comprehension of the utterance perceived as a whole, as opposed to the words that mak…
Date:
2018-04-01
Laḥn
(4,683 words)
In Medieval Arabic texts
laḥn is the key term to refer to linguistic mistakes. According to Fück (1955:205), who studied the term in detail, it is first attested in this sense after the advent of Islam, at the end of the 1st century A.H., but the term itself is older. The common element in all archaic examples is ‘leaning over; deviating’ (
māla ʾilā in Classical Arabic dictionaries). Another element in its meaning is the connection between
laḥn and sound or voice. These two elements explain that in the earliest examples
laḥn is used for any manner of speaking that deviates from the u…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Academies
(5,005 words)
1. Academy precursors The first ‘academy’ in the Arab world was established by the French during the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt (1798–1801); it came to an end with the French exit from Egypt in 1801. There were several attempts in the 19th century, especially in Egypt and Lebanon, by enlightened scholars concerned with intellectual issues in general, and language matters in particular, to establish similar organizations. A serious effort was made in 1892/1893 when the first meeting of
al-Majmaʿ al-Luġawī al-ʿArabī ‘Arabic Language Academy’ was held at the home of Muḥamm…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Acquisition
(11 words)
see First Language Acquisition ; Second Language Acquisition
Date:
2018-04-01
Language and Gender
(5,909 words)
1. Introduction The Arabic
fuṣḥā has two gender-linked characteristics: it is not a mother tongue, and it entertains a diglossic (diglossia) relationship with the dialectal Arabic mother tongues with which it co-exists. Both characteristics make of Arabic a typically ‘public’ language in an overall patriarchal context where ‘public’ denotes ‘male power’, as opposed to ‘private’, which denotes ‘women's realm’ (El Saadawi 1980; Mernissi 1997; Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006). The study of Arabic from a gender perspecti…
Date:
2018-12-15
Language Attitudes
(10,178 words)
Social psychologists define ‘attitude’ as “a psychological tendency … expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor” (Eagly and Chaiken 1988:269). The entity, or attitude object, may be anything from the color of a car – purple – to a class of behaviors – encouraging democracy – to specific individuals or groups – Oum Kalthoum or immigrants. When the entity is or involves a specific language, language variety, or language practice, social psychologists speak o…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Contact
(7,061 words)
The study of contact situations involving Arabic permits a number of generalizations, most of which are unsurprising. More interesting, therefore, are the sometimes quite striking differences among the contact situations and their linguistic and sociolinguistic outcomes. In this entry, three sets of topics are surveyed, and some of their implications for general theories of contact-induced language change are discussed. Less attention is paid to the historical, political, and socioeconomic setti…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Impairment
(4,618 words)
The term ‘language impairment’ covers a wide array of language disorders that affect language abilities, including hearing, speaking, signing, reading, and writing across all levels of language structures and functions as well as processes of language comprehension and production. The field dedicated to the study of language impairments is called language pathology. 1. Classification and causes Language impairments can generally be classified into two main categories: acquired and developmental disorders. Acquired language impairments result from a variety of cause…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Loss
(4,370 words)
1. Introduction Language loss refers to a variety of phenomena relating to the loss of a whole language or a portion thereof by an individual or a speech community (Freed 1982:1; Jaspaert a.o. 1986:38; Lambert and Freed 1982:6). Different definitions converge onto an understanding of language loss as partial or complete disappearance of one or more linguistic features from the grammar of a speaker. This feature can be the meaning of a lexical item (reception skills), the item itself (production skills), or a language rule (phonological, morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic). A comm…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Pathology
(4,613 words)
Language pathology' (also known as ‘language disorder’ or ‘language impairment’) refers to deficiencies in language use (production or comprehension or both) due to a clear physical cause. Roman Jakobson (1971) was probably the first linguist to stress the insights that can be drawn from pathological deficits in linguistic performance. What he called ‘experiments in nature’, he argued, not only provide information on the nature of the deficit itself but also provide a testing ground for theoreti…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Policies and Language Planning
(9,384 words)
1. Introduction The place of Arabs in the modern world has been determined to a large extent by the fact that, beginning around the end of World War I and well into the post-World War II period, the majority of the countries of the Arab world were under British or French mandate, in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The development plans of these countries and their emergent political, economic, administrative, and educational systems were established during the colonial period and modeled largely after the French and British s…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Shift: Amazigh
(6,332 words)
1. Introduction The term ‘language shift’ refers to the change from the habitual use of one language to that of another. This implies that a community gives up a language in favor of another one. When shift has taken place, members of the community are said to have collectively chosen a new language instead of their native one (Fasold 1984). This is, in fact, a common result of extensive language contact, occurring typically where there is a sharp difference in prestige and levels of official support for the languages concerned. Language shift is not the only possible outcome of language cont…
Date:
2018-04-01
Language Teaching
(11 words)
see First Language Teaching ; Second Language Teaching
Date:
2018-04-01
Latin America
(3,388 words)
1. Introduction Arabic speakers have been part of Latin American society since the mid-17th century, when the Syrian Chaldean priest ʾIlyās al-Mawṣilī came to South America on a papal mission. The ties between Iberian and Arab culture date even further back, to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors, an event that left an indelible impression on Spanish and Portuguese culture, architecture, and language. So it should come as no surprise that Latin America, in particular the great economic powerhouses of Brazil and Argentina, formed one of the most important destinati…
Date:
2018-04-01
Latin Loanwords
(1,879 words)
Latin loanwords entered the Arabic language during the seven centuries or so which elapsed between the Roman conquest of Bilād aš-Šām in 63 B.C.E. and its subsequent conquest by the Arabs in the 630s C.E. The area extended from the Euphrates River or the Amanus Mountains in the north to the Sinai Peninsula in the south. Roman rule in this area was preceded by some three centuries of a Macedonian presence, initiated by the conquests of Alexander the Great. During that time the Greek language spre…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lebanon
(6,601 words)
Arabic is the language of Lebanon, spoken and official. This said, the linguistic landscape of Lebanon, historical and contemporary, presents the observer with a varied and changing picture. The region that today comprises the State of Lebanon has seen at least two language shifts. Records show that at any point in time the inhabitants of the region used several languages simultaneously, for different purposes. Geographically, Lebanon covers a rather small, mostly mountainous area (10,452 km2). The population is highly mobile, urbanized and relatively well educated. R…
Date:
2018-04-01
Leveling
(3,463 words)
1. Definition Leveling is defined by Blanc (1960:62) as a process that occurs in “inter-dialectal contact”. In such contacts, speakers may replace some features from their own dialect with those of another dialect that carries more prestige. The different dialect is not necessarily that of the listener. Blanc cites the example of villagers in central Palestine who may try to use the dialect of Jerusalem, or of non-Muslim Baghdadis who may try to move toward linguistic features of Muslim Baghdadis. Leveling does not necessarily mean that the speakers will abandon their own d…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lexical Variation: Modern Standard Arabic
(5,153 words)
1. Lexical variation in Arabic Lexical variation is an area of sociolinguistics which studies differences in certain lexical items used by various speech communities. This phenomenon can be attributed to many variables, such as the nature of the language itself, geography, social status, individual preferences, topic, hierarchy, language academies, media, etc. Modern Standard Arabic reflects the variability of one language still in use. It can be traced back centuries to the pre- and early-Islamic periods and found in the lexical variability among the numerous Arab tribes. Lexica…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lexicography: Bilingual Dictionaries
(5,883 words)
This entry deals with bilingual dictionaries which have Arabic as the source or target language. The first bilingual dictionaries developed within the Arabic lexicographical tradition from 11th-century monolingual dictionaries (lexicography: Classical Arabic). In the 17th century, European Orientalists started to take part in Arabic lexicography (Arabic studies in Europe). The earliest representatives of this European development followed the original Arabic tradition closely. Only at a later stage did they join the Western lexicographical tradition. 1. Historical ove…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lexicography: Classical Arabic
(5,350 words)
1. Range and importance Within Classical Arabic literature, lexicographical writings form an extensive and multifaceted branch, having produced remarkable results in the period from the late 2nd/8th century to the 12th/18th century and flourishing particularly in the 4th/10th century. Along with dictionaries proper – i.e. books arranging all the elements of the Classical Arabic vocabulary in alphabetical order and explaining them – there were many other types of books. The aim of covering the whole …
Date:
2018-04-01
Lexicography: Monolingual Dictionaries
(5,011 words)
1. Introduction In the first half of the 2nd century A.H. (8th century C.E.), speakers of Arabic encountered numerous communication problems due to the variability of their language at the time. Natural processes of language change, due primarily to the lack of standardization, were evident in the way people pronounced words, structured words morphologically, and structured sentences. This phenomenon spurred Sībawayhi (d. 168/784) to write the first comprehensive Arabic grammar,
al-Kitāb. This work set forth rules for all aspects of grammar, including phonology, m…
Date:
2018-04-01
Lexicon: Matrix and Etymon Model
(4,998 words)
1. Introduction The first comments by Arab grammarians on the relationship between sound and meaning (lafḍ; maʿnā) were related to the imitation of the sounds made by insects and birds. Their observations correspond to the theory that onomatopoeia is at the origin of human language. The idea that the shape of a word is the copy of the
perceptible form, and thus a way of grasping the
intelligible, is an idea that appears with considerable insistence in Ibn Jinnī's writings. He was one of the grammarians who paid the most attention to matters pertaining to the ph…
Date:
2018-04-01