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13 - Arabic Language Contact

from Part Three - Language Spread

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Jonathan Owens
Edited by
Salikoko S. Mufwene  and
Anna María Escobar
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna María Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.

Keywords

Arabiccontactmixed languageidiomaticityeducated spoken Arabicdifferential object marking (DOM)gutturalitysyllable structurecalquing
Type
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The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 1: Population Movement and Language Change
 , pp. 382 - 424
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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