Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf

Clive Holes is Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the Arabic language and its dialects and has been teaching it since 1983. He lived and worked in the Gulf for ten years.

Praise for the first edition -'Unlike most books on colloquial Arabic, this one covers the subject in a really comprehensive fashion. The author's experience in E[nglish] L[anguage] T[eaching] enables him to understand the needs of the learner who wishes to communicate effectively in Arabic -- two notable features of the book are the pacing of the material and the usefulness of the exercises... The dialogues are inventive, realistic and often humorous, and by the last unit the learner should be in a position to tackle "real" Gulf Arabic.' - from a review by Peter Emery, University of Bath, in the Journal of Semitic Studies, 29 (1984), p344-345.

• Introduction: How To Use This Book Pronunciation Guide Unit 1 Expressions of Quantity; Orders and Requests; ‘Please’,’Thank you’, ‘Be so Kind’ Unit 2 The Arabic Equivalent of ‘The’; The ‘Dual’; The Plural Unit 3 ‘How Much/Many?’ Prices; Numbers 1–10; Greetings Unit 4 Simple Descriptive Sentences; Noun-adjective Phrases; Some Other Types of Adjective Unit 5 Numbers 11 to 1,000,000; Age; Telling the Time; Personal Pronouns; ‘Who?’ and ‘What?’ Unit 6 Expressions of Place; The Verb: Past Tense. Unit 7 Past-tense Verbs: Verbs Beginning with a Glottal Stop; Past-tense Verbs: ‘Hollow’ Verbs; ‘To Say That’; ‘To Ask Whether’; Li’ann: ‘Because’; Expressions of Manner; Further Expressions of Time Unit 8 Noun-phrases; The Elative Adjective; Word Order Unit 9 Past-tense Verbs: ‘Doubled’ Verbs; Past-tense Verbs: ‘Weak’ Verbs; Time Conjunctions; Ordinal Numbers; Months Unit 10 Relative Clauses; Demonstrative Pronouns; Demonstrative Adjectives; The Negative in Equational Sentences; ‘Somebody’ and ‘Nobody’ Unit 11 The Imperfect Verb: Basic Forms; The Imperfect Verb: Different Stem-types; Review of Verb Forms; The Uses of the Imperfect Unit 12 Verb Strings; The Imperative: Strong Verbs; The Imperative: Other Types of Verb; The Negative Imperative Unit 13 The Active Participle; The Passive Participle Unit 14 The Derived Themes of the Verb (I) Unit 15 The Verbal Noun; Co-ordinated Negatives; Compound Adjectives; ‘Self’ Unit 16 The Derived Themes of the Verb (II); Conditional Sentences Unit 17 Quadriliteral Verbs; ‘To Wish/Want’ and ‘To Prefer’; Verbs with Double Objects Unit 18 Diminutives; Uses of ábu and umm; ‘How Big!’ etc.; ‘So-and-so’; Forms of Personal Address; Exhortations Unit 19 Verb Strings Involving kaan/yikúun; More Conjunctions; ‘As if’; Expressions Meaning ‘I think’; ‘Some’ and ‘Each Other’; Adverbs in -an Unit 20 Texts Answer-Key Appendices 1. Variations in Pronunciation 2. The Arabic Script Glossaries Gulf Arabic-English English-Gulf Arabic