T. F. Mitchell

Shāhir Ḥasan

This is the first full-length monograph derived from the Leeds University investigation into the structure of Educated Spoken Arabic which has so far been published. It would be difficult to underestimate the value of this corpus for the study of variation in modern Educated Spoken Arabic, since it is unique in its size, comprehensiveness and geographical representativeness, covering educated spoken usage in all the major population centres of the eastern Arab world, and drawing from a wide variety of contexts of use. The major contributions such studies can make to Arabic linguistics are two: synchronically, in showing just how much of the syntactic structure of modern Educated Spoken Arabic - however much morphological and lexical variation may divide one region from another - is in fact shared property; and, diachronically, if the degree of sharing of syntactic phenomena which cannot be plausibly derived from Classical Arabic turns out to be high (as from the present study it seems to be), is providing more evidence that ESA in fact represents a contemporary pan-Arab continuation of age-old shared spoken forms which were never identical with what we now call Classical Arabic, and which, through centuries of trade and constant contacts throughout the eastern Arab area, have continued to develop independently of it.

Shāhir Ḥasan

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