Jonathan Owens is Emeritus Professor of Arabic linguistics at Bayreuth University. He has published over a dozen books, including A Linguistic History of Arabic (OUP, 2006; paperback 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (OUP, 2013; paperback 2019). He has created two online oral, text-based databanks, one for the Arabic of the Lake Chad area, and one for Glavda. In 2018 he received the Muhammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Arabic Language Award for special services to the Arabic language.