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This book presents an empirically based examination of language patterns found among the Israeli Druze community, which is profiled against that of the Arabs in Israel. The results document the emergence of a mixed language previously undescribed and provides a socio-political analysis.
This study intends thus to make a contribution to the debate on "mixed languages", introducing a model that facilitates the analysis of the link bewteen codeswitching and sociopolitical identity. Special attention is paid to the assessment of language and identity issues of Golan Heights Druze and Israeli Druze, taking into exam two major political debates within these communities, regarding the Israeli Nation-state Law and the so-called ‘Syrian–Israeli secret Golan deal’ speculation.
In: Codeswitching as an Index and Construct of Sociopolitical Identity
In: Codeswitching as an Index and Construct of Sociopolitical Identity
This book offers a comprehensive survey of the agreement phenomena found in written and spoken Arabic. It focuses on both the synchronic description of these agreement systems, and the diachronic question of how they evolved. To answer these questions, large amounts of data have been collected and analysed, ranging from 6th century poetry and Quranic Arabic to the contemporary dialects. The results presented by the authors of this research greatly improve our understanding of Arabic syntax, and challenge some well-established views. Can Arabic be envisioned as possessing more than only two genders? Are some contemporary dialects more similar to the pre-Classical version of the language than MSA is? And is the Standard rule prescribing feminine singular agreement with nonhuman plurals a more recent development than previously thought?
A Description and Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Variation
This work focuses the social context of writing in ancient Western Arabia in the oasis of ancient Dadan, modern-day al-ʿUlā in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula between the sixth to first centuries BC. It offers a description and analysis of the language of the inscriptions and the variation attested within them. It is the first work to perform a systematic study of the linguistic variation of the Dadanitic inscriptions. It combines a thorough description of the language of the inscriptions with a statistical analysis of the distribution of variation across different textual genres and manners of inscribing. By considering correlations between language-internal and extralinguistic features this analysis aims to take a more holistic approach to the epigraphic object. Through this approach an image of a rich writing culture emerges, in which we can see innovation as well as the deliberate use of archaic linguistic features in more formal text types.
In: The Writing Culture of Ancient Dadān