A Linguistic History of Arabic

• Scholarly but largely non-technical style
• Arguments can be followed by anyone with a basic background in Arabic and Linguistics
• Deploys statistical methods to solve historical linguistic problems
• Gives equal weight to classical sources and modern data
• Argument is framed from within the intellectual history of the discipline

Readership: Arabicists, Semiticists, and historical linguists; historians and scholars of Arab, Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures. Students at senior undergraduate and graduare level taking courses in the history of Arabic or Semitic languages or advanced general courses on Arabic and Islamic studies.

Jonathan Owens, University of Maryland and Bayreuth University, Germany

"...highly stimulating read for anyone with interest in the history of Arabic...It deserves a warm welcome." - Clive Holes SOAS

1: Introduction: A Language and its Secrets
2: Old Arabic, Neo-Arabic, and Comparative Linguistics
3: Case and Proto Arabic
4: Al-Idgham al-Kabiyr and Case Endings
5: Pre-Diasporic Arabic in the Diaspora: A Statistical Approach to Arabic Language History
6: Nigerian Arabic and Reconstruction of the Imperfect Verb
7: Imala
8: Suffix Pronouns and Reconstruction
9: Summary and Epilogue
Appendix
References
Index