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Article: Arabic dialect history and historical linguistic mythology.
- Article from:
- The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Article date:
- October 1, 2003
- Author:
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INTRODUCTION
Studies of spoken Arabic have been dominated by descriptions of individual dialects, dialect atlases and corpus-based sociolinguistic studies. There have been few attempts to apply principles of historical linguistics systematically to this relatively rich data base. (1) Earlier studies such as Cowan (1960) or Kaye (1972) stand out as the exception. (2) Since these two studies appeared a great deal of progress has been made in Arabic dialectology (e.g., Behnstedt 1985, 1997, Behnstedt and Woidich 1985, many studies of individual dialects). However, the descriptive advances remain basically unintegrated into a larger study of Arabic linguistics. (3)
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