Language Contact And Language Conflict In Arabic

This book contains 17 studies by leading international scholars working on a wide range of topics in Arabic socio-linguistics, divided into four parts. The studies in Part 1 address questions of national language planning in a diglossic situation, with a particular focus on North Africa. Part 2 explores the relationship of identity and language choice in different Arabic-speaking communities living both within and outside the Arab World. Part 3 examines language choice in such diverse contexts as popular preaching, humour and Arab women's writing. Part 4 contains 5 papers in which variation, code-switching and generational language shift in the Arabic-language diaspora in Europe and the USA are the focus. The collection as a whole provides wide-ranging introduction to key areas of current research, which will be of interest to the general sociolinguist as well as the Arabic language specialist.

Suleiman's book considers national identity in relation to language, the way in which language can be manipulated to signal political, cultural or historical difference. As a language with a long-recorded heritage and one spoken by the majority of those in the Middle East in various dialects, Arabic is a particularly appropriate vehicle for such an investigation. It is also a penetrating device for exploring the conflicts of the Middle East.'This is a well-crafted, well organized, and eloquent book. 'Karin Ryding, Georgetown University

Language and Identity in the Arab World explores the inextricable link between language and identity, referring particularly to the Arab world. Spanning Indonesia to the United States, the Arab world is here imagined as a continually changing one, with the Arab diaspora asserting its linguistic identity across the world. Crucial questions on transforming linguistic landscapes, the role and implications of migration, and the impact of technology on language use are explored by established and emerging scholars in the field of applied and socio-linguistics. The book asks such crucial questions as how language contact affects or transforms identity, how language reflects changing identities among migrant communities, and how language choices contribute to identity construction in social media. As well as appreciating the breadth and scope of the Arab world, this anthology focuses on the transformative role of language within indigenous and migrant communities as they negotiate between their heritage languages and those spoken by the wider society. Investigating the ways in which identity continues to be imagined and re-constructed in and among Arab communities, this book is indispensable to students, teachers, and anyone who is interested in language contact, linguistic landscapes, and minority language retention as well as the intersections of language and technology.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in language contact, the Arabic language, and North Africa. It uses sociohistorical information and a wide range of data sets, including electronic communication, to provide a comprehensive picture of the past and present language situation in the region.

Language contact phenomena have been researched throughout the history of the discipline, but the intensity of the research has undoubtedly risen during the last decades due to growing globalization. This peer-reviewed volume presents twelve papers from the Second Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (University of Groningen, June 2009) which deal with a wide range of topics, languages and contact situations. Five of them involve a Finno-Ugric language (Saami-Komi-Russian; Finnic-Baltic; Mordvin-Turkic; Estonian-German; Saami general), two a Slavic language (Slavic-Romance; Slavic general), two Germanic-Romance contact and three situations outside Europe (The Arabic World; Central Asia; South America). Methods range from field research and corpus analysis to historical linguistics, and both synchronic and diachronic approaches are used. The authors are Rogier Blokland and Michael Rießler, Martine Bruil, Louise-Amélie Cougnon, Anissa Daoudi, Santeri Junttila, Janneke Kalsbeek, Folke Müller and Susan Schlotthauer, Johanna Nichols, Pekka Sammallahti, Peter Schrijver, Remco van Pareren, and Willem Vermeer. Keywords / target groups: General linguistics, Contact linguistics, Finno-Ugric linguistics, Slavic linguistics.

The selected articles compiled in the present volume are based on contributions prepared for the 17th International L.A.U.D. (Linguistic Agency University of Duisburg) Symposium held at the University of Duisburg on 23-27 March 1992. The 13 papers in this book focus on problems and issues of intercultural communication. The first part is devoted to theoretical aspects related to the interaction of language and culture and deals with the issue from anthropological, cognitive, and linguistic points of view. Part II raises issues of language policy and language planning such as the manipulation of language in intercultural contact; it includes case studies pertaining to multilingual settings, for example in Africa, Australia, Melanesia, and Europe. The volume opens with a foreword by Dell H. Hymes.

Filling a gap in the literature currently available on the topic, this edited collection is the first examination of the interplay between urbanization, language variation and language change in fifteen major Arab cities. The Arab world presents very different types and degrees of urbanization, from well established old capital-cities such as Cairo to new emerging capital-cities such as Amman or Nouakchott, these in turn embedded in different types of national construction. It is these urban settings which raise questions concerning the dynamics of homogenization/differentiation and the processes of standardization due to the coexistence of competing linguistic models. Topics investigated include: History of settlement The linguistic impact of migration The emergence of new urban vernaculars Dialect convergence and divergence Code-switching, youth language and new urban culture Arabic in the Diaspora Arabic among non-Arab groups. Containing a broad selection of case studies from across the Arab world and featuring contributions from leading urban sociolinguistics and dialectologists, this book presents a fresh approach to our understanding of the interaction between language, society and space. As such, the book will appeal to the linguist as well as to the social scientist in general.