Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume I
- Figures Volume I
- Tables Volume I
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics
- Part Two Linguistic Areas
- Part Three Language Spread
- 11 The Geographic and Demographic Expansion of Malay
- 12 Geographic and Demographic Spread of Swahili
- 13 Arabic Language Contact
- Part Four Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages
- Part Five Language Diasporas
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
13 - Arabic Language Contact
from Part Three - Language Spread
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2022
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
- The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Maps Volume I
- Figures Volume I
- Tables Volume I
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One Language Contact and Genetic Linguistics
- Part Two Linguistic Areas
- Part Three Language Spread
- 11 The Geographic and Demographic Expansion of Malay
- 12 Geographic and Demographic Spread of Swahili
- 13 Arabic Language Contact
- Part Four Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages
- Part Five Language Diasporas
- Author Index
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
It is hardly surprising that contact-based influence on Arabic, with over 300 million native speakers spoken from Uzbekistan to Morocco to northeast Nigeria, has been important. This article walks through eight different historical and cultural stages of contact, beginning with the under-reported story of pre- and early Islamic Aramaic–Arabic contact. Emerging from the shadow of Aramaic to become the dominant language of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean, Arabic left behind interesting minorities in Andalusia (Spain), Malta, and Cyprus, each marked by special sources of influence from Romance languages and Greek, and in the case of Uzbekistan Arabic, pushed to the point of mixed language status by co-territorial Dari and Uzbek. In the Sudanic region, native varieties have undergone profound influence from co-territorial African languages – Kanuri influence is illustrated here – but only in specific domains of grammar. Elsewhere in Africa, contact has been so intense and so compressed that entirely new pidgin-creole varieties (Nubi/Juba Arabic) have emerged. Arabic-internal contact – inter-dialectal and Standard Arabic – constitutes a continuing dynamic within Arabic societies. Arabic represents an open challenge to general theories of contact – Dixon, van Coetsam, Labov – as important to the study of Arabic as to the study of linguistics.
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- The Cambridge Handbook of Language ContactVolume 1: Population Movement and Language Change, pp. 382 - 424Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022