Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 g…

see First Language Acquisition ; Second Language Acquisition

1. Introduction …

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…

The stu…

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 …

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 …

see Language Shift: Amazigh

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…

1. Introduction …

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 contact; in some circumstances, communities or groups are motivated to maintain their language (see below, Sec. 4). This entry analyzes language shift and/or maintenance in three North African countries, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, with a focus on the Moroccan situation, where the largest Amazigh population is found. The reference to the North African context is motivated by the features that the three communities share, especially at the historical and linguistic levels. They are Muslim states and former French colonies that have resorted to the process of ‘…

see First Language Teaching ; Second Language Teaching

see Variation

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 cul…

Latin loanwords entered the Arabic language during the seven centuries or so which …

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…

1. Definition …