The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber provides an overview of the effects of language contact on a wide array of Berber languages spoken in the Maghrib. These languages have undergone important changes in their lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax as a result of over a thousand years of Arabic influence. The social situation of Berber-Arabic language contact is similar all over the region: Berber speakers introducing Arabic features into their language, with only little language shift going on. Moreover, the typological profile of the different Berber varieties is relatively homogenous. The comparison of contact-induced change in Berber therefore adds up to a study in typological variation of contact influence under very similar linguistic and social conditions.

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 volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.

The present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who address a variety of topics related to contact-induced change, the emergence of contact languages, codeswitching, as well as language ideologies in contact situations. It offers insights from different theoretical approaches in connection with research fields such as descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and language acquisition. It provides the general linguistic public with an updated, cutting edge overview and appreciation of themes and problems in Arabic linguistics and sociolinguists alike. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

Interdisciplinary research study of political systems and social structures in North Africa, illustrating the social adjustment of tribal peoples to the social change and modernization processes spurred by nationalism - gives historical background, and covers the role of France, interethnic relations, political problems, political leadership, social stratification, social and cultural anthropology, etc. Maps, references and statistical tables.

Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home. Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities throughout Europe and North Africa.