Modern Arabic

Clive Holes is Khalid bin Abdallah Al-Sa'ud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.

Thanks to Clive Holes we now have a book that examines in some depth the relationship between the spoken and written language, and which provides us with a lively and erudite account of the current state of the Arabic language in its many forms... It is really in the areas of phonology, morphology and syntax that Holes is at his best, drawing on his vast experience of field work and profound linguistic knowledge. His assessment of modern Arabic in all its forms is honest, contrastive and comparative, and presents impressions and analyses of many categories from a fresh angle. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in the Arabic language today. Bibliotheca Orientalis Clive Holes's book is written in a pleasantly informal manner. Matters are discussed throughout in a knowledgeable, objective and informative fashion and presented in a lively, readable style... The author has no theoretical axe to grind, he is bound to no one school of thought and has no interest in supporting the cause of any particular doctrine. His approach to the material and the problems it raises is refreshingly straightforward and characterized at all points by the simple application of common sense and the desire to see the truth for what it is. This is in welcome contrast to much recent work in Arabic linguistics, which suffers, as Holes observes in his preface, from a regrettable reluctance to see things as they are. His book is a deliberate, and very successful, attempt to redress the balance. It will be read with pleasure and benefit by all who are interested in the Arabic language... An excellent book and will surely become a standard work on the subject. It will be read with much profit by all interested in the Arabic language, to whom it is herewith heartily recommended. Zeitschrift fur Arabische Linguistik In a pleasant and extremely clear style on which he must be complimented, the author puts at the disposition of a large readership, from advanced students of Arabic to general linguists, an excellent synthesis of the relationships between written Arabic, spoken standard Arabic, the spoken dialects and relationships between the dialects. It was only natural that Clive Holes's work would benefit from our improved knowledge of dialectal Arabic, but these improvements would have been insufficient without the author's remarkable powers of synthesis and his ability to capture sociolinguistic phenomena. One can only warmly recommend a work which is agreeably accessible at the same time as rigorously scientific, and which opens paths for future research, which one hopes will be explored by the community of Arabists. [Translated from French] Journal of Semitic Studies

• List of Figures and TablesForeword to the Georgetown Classics editionPreface to the second editionPreface to the first editionTransliteration conventions, gloss lines, and abbreviations Introduction 0.1 Where is Arabic spoken?0.2 Varieties of Arabic0.3 Aims of this bookNotes1. A Brief History of Arabic 1.1 Arabic as a Semitic language1.2 Arabic at the dawn of Islam1.3 The spread of Arabic1.4 Middle Arabic, the modern dialects, and the evolution of Modern Standard Arabic1.5 The contemporary linguistic situationNotes 2. Phonology 2.1 The phonology of MSA2.2 The phonology of the dialects2.3 Phonological variation in the dialects2.4 Phonology and scriptNotes 3. Verb Morphology 3.1 General principles3.2 Root and morphosemantic patterns: MSA3.3 Morphosyntactic patterns of the finite verb: MSA3.4 Verbal affixes3.5 Morphophonological adjustments3.6 Dialectal verb morphologyNotes 4. Noun Morphology 4.1 The verbal noun4.2 Participles4.3 Other categories of the singular noun4.4 Number4.5 Case and definiteness4.6 Gender Notes 5. Beyond Root and Pattern: Pronouns and Deictics 5.1 Personal pronouns5.2 Demonstratives5.3 Interrogatives5.4 Temporal, locative and manner deicticsNotes 6. Syntax and Semantics I: Phrase Structure 6.1 The noun phrase6.2 The verb phrase6.3 NegationNotes 7. Syntax and Semantics II: Sentence Structure 7.1 Word order7.2 Clause order and typeNotes 8. Lexical and Stylistic Developments 8.1 Foreign borrowing into Arabic8.2 The language academies8.3 The language of the media8.4 Repitition and parallelismNotes 9. Language Level 9.1 Introduction9.2 Language levels in Cairo9.3 Level switching9.4 Co-occurrence phenomena and level9.5 Dialogue and dialect in literature and journalismNotes Appendix: The Arabic Script BibliographyIndex