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.

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 complex picture 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 Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

This book explores speakers' intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic - which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure. The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

This book explores speakers' intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic - which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic.

This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure.

The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

Until about 60 years ago, linguistic research on the Arabic language in the West was restricted to inquiries on Classical Arabic and the Classical tradition, and spoken Arabic dialects, with historical studies embedded within the broader field of Semitic languages. This situation is changing quickly, not only through the continuation of older research traditions, but also with the integration of new research fields and perspectives. With this expansion comes the danger of specialists in Arabic losing an overview of the field, and of leaving non-specialists without basic resources for evaluating domains of research which they may be interested in for comparative purposes. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics will confront this problem by combining state-of-the-art overviews with essays on issues of perspective, controversy, and point of view. In twenty-four chapters, leading experts from around the world will lay out their own stances on controversial issues. The book not only evaluates ways in which questions and theories established in general linguistics and its sub-fields elucidate Arabic, but also challenges approaches which might result in accommodating Arabic to "non-Arabic" interpretations, and brings out the Arabic specificity of individual problems. The Handbook, in one compact volume, gives critical expression to a language which covers large populations and geographical areas, has a long written tradition, and has been the locus of major intellectual fervor and debate.

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.

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 complex picture 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 Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

Arabic is one of the world's largest languages, spoken natively by nearly 300 million people. By strength of numbers alone Arabic is one of our most important languages, studied by scholars across many different academic fields and cultural settings. It is, however, a complex language rooted in its own tradition of scholarship, constituted of varieties each imbued with unique cultural values and characteristic linguistic properties. Understanding its linguistics holistically is therefore a challenge. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics is a comprehensive, one-volume guide that deals with all major research domains which have been developed within Arabic linguistics. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field, who both present state-of-the-art overviews and develop their own critical perspectives. The Handbook begins with Arabic in its Semitic setting and ends with the modern dialects; it ranges across the traditional-the classical Arabic grammatical and lexicographical traditions-to the contemporary-Arabic sociolinguistics, Creole varieties and codeswitching, psycholinguistics, and Arabic as a second language - while situating Arabic within current phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexicological theory. An essential reference work for anyone working within Arabic linguistics, the book brings together different approaches and scholarly traditions, and provides analysis of current trends and directions for future research.

This volume contains the results of the Bayreuth SFB research program "Effects of globalisation processes on the vitality of languages in West African cities." Two towns with different historical and colonial background, Maiduguri in Nigeria and Banfora in Burkina Faso, were selected as research areas. The contrast between language and social institutions is most obvious in the colonial and post- colonial world in Africa. Colonization was characterized by the importation of European institutions which were of a qualitatively new nature linked to the globalising forces. This qualitative newness is captured in our term "direct globalisation." A basic observation is that the globalising forces led to a hierarchicalisation of languages in Africa which is not obviously attested in the institutions of direct globalisation. Our term "indirect globalisation" describes the alignment of local practices to the external forces and institutions introduced during a globalising colonial and post-colonial experience.