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.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
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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
Chad Arabic
(5,078 words)
More than 850,000 Arabs live in the Sahelian zone of Chad. Chadian Arabic is a vehicular language spoken by about 60 percent of the population. It has its own characteristics, which come from the rural nomadic society in which it originated and the society of city-dwellers in which it developed. 1. A mosaic of peoples The population of Chad, estimated at 8 million persons, is a true ethnic mosaic of diverse peoples spread unequally over a territory of 1,284,000 square kilometers. Several groups of peoples can be distinguished in the three climatic regions of the country. i.The ‘ Sara’ group …
Date:
2018-04-01
Child Bilingualism
(5,144 words)
1. The many definitions of bilingualism Childhood bilingualism is the area of language acquisition concerned with the simultaneous or sequential acquisition of two languages. Simultaneous acquisition usually refers to children who receive input in both languages from birth or before their third birthday, while successive or sequential acquisition takes place where input from a second language (L2) is received after the third birthday (Lyon 1996:47). This, however, constitutes only one way of classifying young bilinguals; different researchers have used different terms…
Date:
2018-04-01
Child Language
(2,355 words)
The analysis of Arabic has yielded important insights into the study of language, particularly in the domains of phonology and morphology. Yet, the acquisition of Arabic as a native language by children has garnered remarkably little attention, although it could shed further light on the structure of Arabic and what it entails for the study of the language faculty more generally. This entry presents a summary of what is currently known about the Arabic spoken by such children – how it differs from that of adult Arabic speakers and what the differences might mean for linguistic theory. Much …
Date:
2018-04-01
China
(3,218 words)
Arabic in China has a long history, as a language for economic and cultural exchange and as the religious language of a small but deeply-rooted Chinese Muslim population. Exchanges with ‘Western regions’ have been attested in Chinese sources since 126 B.C.E. and were pursued during the Sassanid Empire. After the fall of the latter in 651 C.E., the Umayyads and Abbasids sent 88 envoys to China, mostly for trade purposes, under the Tribute system favored by the Chinese Empire. During the Tang (618…
Date:
2018-04-01
Christian Middle Arabic
(3,222 words)
1. Definition For methodological reasons, two forms of Christian Middle Arabic are distinguished here, according to the date of the texts written in it: Early Christian Middle Arabic and Late Christian Middle Arabic. Early Christian Middle Arabic refers to the form of Middle Arabic used in texts and/or manuscripts dating back to the 9th or the 10th century. Many of these texts were copied in monasteries of South Palestine, among which the famous monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai (Blau 1966:20). Late Christian Middle Arabic refers to Middle Arabic used in texts and…
Date:
2018-04-01
Cilician Arabic
(5,199 words)
1. General 1.1 Area and range The Arabic dialects of Cilicia (Southern Turkey) are spoken in the three large cities of the Cilician Plain (Çukurova), namely Adana, Tarsus, and Mersin, as well as in about 25 villages situated to the south of these towns (see map). The total number of an estimated 70,000 Arabic speakers comprises three communities who differ in both religion and dialect: 66,500 Nusayri-Alawis, 4,000 Sunnis and 1,000 Christians (the latter two groups found only in Mersin). Cilician Arabic is isolated both from the Arab countries themselves and from other Arabi…
Date:
2018-09-15
Circumstantial Clause
(5,850 words)
The term ‘circumstantial clause’ (German ‘Zustandssatz’) has been used extensively as a translation of the traditional Arabic term ḥāl, that is, the term has been used to describe a concept within Arabic grammatical theory (Reckendorf 1898, 1921; Brockelmann 1913; Addeweesh 1985; Wright 1996; Bernards 2007; etc.). The term, “circumstantial qualifier”, was introduced by Badawi
et al. (2004:156–159, 456, 579–587) to replace the traditional Arabic term
ḥāl. Though not explicitly stated, this change of terminology hinted at the need for a broader linguistic app…
Date:
2018-04-01
Classical Arabic
(5,531 words)
1. General definitions Classical Arabic designates that form of Arabic which was described by the Arab grammarians of the 8th century and called by them al-ʿarabiyya. They regarded this as the only correct Arabic language. Western scholars call it Classical Arabic to differentiate it from the Arabic vernaculars of the neo-Arabic type. It is the language in which the Arabic texts of pre-Islamic and early Islamic times were handed down, first of all the
Qurʾān and pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, but also the historical and legal traditions of that time. In the process …
Date:
2018-04-01
Classicism
(4,211 words)
1. Introduction The term
classicism refers here to the incorporation of an item of Classical Arabic into colloquial-based discourse. The term Classical Arabic is used here as the equivalent of
al-ʿarabiyya al-fuṣḥā ‘the pure classical Arabic language’. Following the sociolinguistically based stylistic classification of Badawī (1973:90–93), it can be divided into
fuṣḥā at-turāṯ ‘the pure Classical Arabic of the legacy’, i.e., traditional Classical Arabic, as defined by medieval grammarians, and
fuṣḥā al-ʿaṣr ‘contemporary Classical Arabic’, commonly called Modern St…
Date:
2018-04-01
Clitic
(1,461 words)
Clitics are elements that are affixed to another element, usually a head. This very general characterization encodes the fact that a multitude of elements can be affixes, hence clitics (see Kayne 1975). In this entry, the focus is on pronominal clitics in (Lebanese) Arabic that are non-nominative. Nominative affixes (or infixes) are usually viewed as agreement markers and analyzed as inflectional elements that are part of the verbal form. Nominative agreement markers are traditionally the purvie…
Date:
2018-09-15