A Linguistic History of Arabic challenges the traditional accounts of the progression of classical Arabic to contemporary dialects. It presents a rich and complex picture of early Arabic language history and establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a manner accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications.

It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other.

The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists,...

This volume contains the results of the Bayreuth SFB research program "Effects of globalisation processes on the vitality of languages in West African cities." Two towns with different historical and colonial background, Maiduguri in Nigeria and Banfora in Burkina Faso, were selected as research areas. The contrast between language and social institutions is most obvious in the colonial and post- colonial world in Africa. Colonization was characterized by the importation of European institutions which were of a qualitatively new nature linked to the globalising forces. This qualitative...

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. It challenges the traditional conceptualization of an old, Classical language evolving into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. Professor Owens combines established comparative linguistic methodology with a careful reading of the classical Arabic sources, such as the grammatical and exegetical traditions. He arrives at a richer and more complex picture of early Arabic language history than is current today and in doing so establishes the basis for a comprehensive,...