This book focuses on the lexical borrowing between English and Arabic, and offers historical background regarding the contact between these two languages. It sheds light on why and how both languages have come in contact, showing how the hegemony of the English language can be clearly seen in its impact on Arabic. Simultaneously, the text describes the role that Arabic played in shaping and enriching English in its early phase.

This volume provides a detailed analysis of language contact in North Africa and explores the historical presence of the languages used in the region, including the different varieties of Arabic and Berber as well as European languages. Using a wide range of data sets, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms of language contact under classical diglossia and societal bilingualism, examining multiple cases of oral and written code-switching. It also describes contact-induced lexical and structural change in such situations and discusses the possible appearance of new varieties within the context of diglossia. Examples from past diglossic situations are examined, including the situation in Muslim Spain and the Maltese Islands. An analysis of the current situation of Arabic vernaculars, not only in the Maghreb but also in other Arabic-speaking areas, is also presented. This book will appeal to anyone interested in language contact, the Arabic language, and North Africa.

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.

Although a major language in itself, Urdu has borrowed words from three major languages of the world, namely Persian, Arabic and English, with various loan morphological and phonological features. There have been very few studies on this phenomenon, and many features are still unexplored. This study focuses on loanword morphology, and looks at the nature of loanwords borrowed from these three languages. The book begins by examining the morphological adaptation of loanwords. Secondly, parallels and differences are explored between the relatively recent adaptation of English loans and the older adaptation of words from Arabic and Persian. The descriptive content of the book – covering as it does not only English loanwords, but those from Arabic and Persian as well, in addition to examining native Urdu structures – is refreshingly broad. The study itself is primarily descriptive, carefully teasing apart the sometimes complex interactions between syntax, semantics and linguistic function relative to loanword adaptation. However, even beyond the question of loanword adaptation, there is much to recommend itself descriptively here, with regard to the morphological structures of Urdu, including endocentric, exocentric, copulative, postpositional and verbal compounds. In addition to such derivational processes, this study also considers various inflectional issues, such as gender, number and case morphology, the pluralisation of English nominal loans, and the adaptation of English verbs through the use of Urdu dummy verbs. The book offers a good foundation for a more in-depth examination of the data against current morphological theory. Taken as a whole, it not only presents a large quantity of interesting data in pursuing the immediate question of loanword adaptation in Urdu, but also provides a fruitful starting point for a wealth of further investigations into Urdu and into loanword adaptation more generally.

What is the origin of the Romance languages and how did they evolve? When and how did they become different from Latin, and from each other? Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages offers fresh and original reflections on the principal questions and issues in the comparative external histories of the Romance languages. It is organised around the two key themes of influences and institutions, exploring the fundamental influence, of contact with and borrowing from, other languages (including Latin), and the cultural and institutional forces at work in the establishment of standard languages and norms of correctness. A perfect complement to the first volume, it offers an external history of the Romance languages combining data and theory to produce new and revealing perspectives on the shaping of the Romance languages.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.