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 …

1. Arabic of Chad, Cameroon, and Nigeria The Arabic of Chad, Cameroon, and Nigeria forms a broadly homogeneous dialect region characterized by a number of features either unique to Arabic dialects or found only rarely outside of the region (see Sec. 7). Within this homogeneity, at least two clear subdialects are discernible. In the southern fringe of the area, beginning in eastern Nigeria near the Cameroonian border and stretching through Cameroon and on to an as-yet-unresearched border in Chad is what…

Northwest Arabian Arabic is a group of dialects spoken by the Bedouin population of the Sinai Peninsula, the Negev, southern Jordan, and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, an area virtually identical with Arabia Petraea with its eastern and southern extensions. Culturally, the area is relatively homogeneous, representing Bedouin culture of seminomadic, or at times semisedentary, type. The society is based on a tribal system, and the most important means of livelihood are the tending of she…

Arabic, Trans-Jordanian Jordan Arabic, Tripoli Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, Libya, Libya, Phonology, Political Discourse and Language, Tripoli Arabic Arabic, Tripoli Jewish Tripoli Arabic Arabic, Tripolitanian Libya Arabic, Tunis Bedouin Arabic, Communal Dialects, Communal Dialects, Dialect Koine, Dialects: Classification, Diphthongs, Judaeo-Arabic, Leveling, Locatives, Phonology, Pseudodual, Pseudoverb, Tunis Arabic, Variation Arabic, Tunis Jewish Dialects: Classification, Hypercorrection, Numerals, Tunis Arabic Arabic, Tunisian Cognitive Linguist…

  1. Introduction In an idealized Stammbaum Model, each language descends linearly from a single ancestor. Historical linguists argue that a process of general drift will cause a language to experience changes to all levels of its grammar over time. If Xa signifies the language of a single speech community, it will develop over time to Xb, then Xc, where Xc is simply a later, changed form of Xa. Monogenesis:                                      Xa → Xb → Xc If the original speech community (Xa) becomes fragmented, each fragment is then able to change independently of the ot…

Tonk India Topaloğlu, Ahmed Ottoman Empire Toparlı, Recep Turkish topic Agreement, Aktionsart, ʿAmal, ʿAmal, Argument, Case Theory, Cataphora, Cohesion, Collocation, Contrastive Grammar, Contrastive Grammar, Copula, Ḍamīr, Discourse Analysis, Focus, Fronting, Functional Grammar, Functional Grammar, Ibtidāʾ, ʾIlġāʾ, Implicational Scale, ʾInna wa-ʾaxawātuhā, Ism al-fiʿl, ʾIsnād, Jumla, Mafʿūl, Minimalism, Nisba, Nominal Clauses, Nominal Clauses, Passive, Passive (Syntax), Predicate, Specificity, Subject, S…

  Background The Arabic conquests and the concomitant spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries made the Arabic language known to peoples from Arabia to India in the east and Spain in the west. As a consequence there were contacts between the Arabic speaking world and the peoples outside. These contacts drew words for foreign concepts from the contact languages into Arabic, and conversely Arabic words, both native and borrowed, into the contact languages. Arabic thus influenced other lan…

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…

For many disciplines within the field of Arabic studies major reference tools exist. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, especially useful for historical matters, with an emphasis on persons and places, has now embarked on its third edition. The Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān covers the entire domain of Qurʾānic studies and has only one more volume to go to completion. For Arabic literature there is the Encyclopedia of Arabic literature, as well as the Cambridge history of Arabic literature. For written production in Classical Arabic Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur has been…

bilingualism, Romance/Arabic Ibero-Romance Loanwords, Sicily bilingualism, Sindhi/Arabic India, Language Contact bilingualism, South Arabian/Arabic Language Contact, Lingua Franca bilingualism, Uzbek/Tajik Uzbek bilinguals Code-switching, Diglossia biliteral → biradical Biliy Arabic Northwest Arabian Arabic, Northwest Arabian Arabic, Sinai Arabic, Vowel Harmony Biltine Chad Arabic Bimbashi Arabic Juba Arabic bimoraic Phonology bimorphemic question word Interrogative Pronoun Bin Laden → ʾUsāma bin Lādin bināʾ ʾAṣl, Bināʾ, ʾIʿrāb, Jazāʾ, Kalām, Noun Phra…

ʾAnas, Muḥammad Braille anʾAsǝr Arabic Educated Arabic Anatolia Anatolian Arabic, Aramaic/Syriac Loanwords, Iraq, Turkish, Turkish Anatolian Arabic Analytic Genitive, Anatolian Arabic, Cypriot Maronite Arabic, Dialect Geography, Dialects: Classification, Dialects: Classification, ʾImāla, Iraq, Iraq, Syria, Topic and Comment, Transitivity, Turkish Loanwords, Word Order, Word Order, Word Order ʿAnaze Najdi Arabic, Saudi Arabia, Syria ʿAnaze Arabic Bedouin Arabic, Dialects: Classification, Dialects: Classification, Gahawa-Syndrome, Najdi Arabic, Pro-drop ʿAnaze…

The Arabic alphabet is employed for a large number of languages other than Arabic, the Semitic language for which it was originally designed. After the use of the Latin script for the written manifestation of many of today's languages, the Arabic writing system has spread far and wide, chiefly due to Islam. Consequently, it is the second most widespread segmental script in the world rendering a variety of different languages from different language families. Among the most important languages to…

Tabrīzī, Mīrzā Jaʿfar Nastaʿlīq tabsīṭ ʿArabiyya, Culture and Language Tābūk Northwest Arabian Arabic, Northwest Arabian Arabic tabyīn Tamyīz Tachelhit → Berber, Tachelhit taḍāfur al-qarāʾin Qurʾān taḍāmm Qurʾān, Qurʾān taḍammun Majāz tadāwul Coherence tadāxul al-luġāt Muštarak, Semantic Extension taḍʿīf Causative, Pausal Forms, Verb taʿḏ̣īm Ḍamīr, Speech Acts taʿdiya Causative, Taʿaddin, Verb Tadjoura Djibouti/Eritrea taḏkīr Luġa, 651, Tanwīn taḍmīn Ḍidd, Poetic Koine Taeschner, Traute Child Bilingualism Taez → Taʿizz tafaʿʿala Middle Verbs tafāʿul Ḍidd tafḍīl ʿAma…

teaching of Arabic in Mali Mali teaching of Arabic in Malta Malta teaching of Arabic in Nigeria Nigeria, Nigeria teaching of Arabic in North America North America teaching of Arabic in Pakistan Pakistan, Pakistan teaching of Arabic in Senegal Sentence teaching of Arabic in Somalia Somalia teaching of Arabic in the Ottoman empire Ottoman Empire teaching of Arabic in the United States North America teaching of Arabic in Turkey Turkey, Turkey teaching of Berber Ethnicity and Language teaching of English Educated Arabic, English Loanwords, Gypsy Arabic, Language Policies and…

The EALL is a comprehensive encyclopedia covering all relevant aspects of the study of Arabic and dealing with all levels of the language (pre-Classical Arabic, Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic vernaculars, mixed varieties of Arabic), both synchronically and diachronically. It has been published in five volumes with a total of two million words, distributed over approximately 500 entries. The treatment includes both the external and the internal history of the language, as well as…

1. Diphthongs in Classical Arabic and its dialects In the Semitic linguistic domain a vowel + glide ( w or y) compound is called a diphthong. Its Arabic name has the same meaning: ṣawt murakkab ‘compound sound’. The hypothetical Proto-Semitic diphthongs, *aw/*ay, according to the generally accepted view, are conserved in Old Arabic (Cantineau 1960:102), but this conservation is not at all surprising, since Proto-Semitic phonology has been reconstructed mainly from Classical Arabic, as interpreted by comparatively late sources. Early papyri testify that aw/ay are preserved and …

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…

  1. Introduction New Persian, including its most recent phase, Modern Persian, the official language of Iran and the main or second language of huge surrounding territories, has absorbed a large number of foreign words. These loanwords were borrowed from various northwestern and eastern Iranian dialects or from Western languages in the modern period, but the most effective and influential source was Arabic. Arabic loanwords constitute more than 50 percent of the contemporary Persian vocabulary, and in elevated…

1. General observation A proverb is a common, pithy, and succinct statement which has been current in a language for generations and which sums up daily experiences as brief ‘words of wisdom’. As a Dutch proverb says, “Proverbs are the daughters of daily experience” ( Spreekwoorden zijn de dochters van de dagelijkse ondervinding). This genre is usually associated with the folklore and ethos of a certain society, although parallel proverbs are found in remote cultures. The dynamics of the proverb stems from the fact that it is easy to memorize and…

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…