The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics

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.

Jonathan Owens is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has experience in all aspects of Arabic linguistics, including the Classical linguistic tradition and contemporary spoken varieties, with extensive academic and research experience in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the USA. His many publications include The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory, 1988, Neighborhood and Ancestry: Variation in the Spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, 1998, and A Linguistic History of Arabic, 2009.