Modern Arabic: Structures, functions, and varieties (review)

A revised edition included in the ‘Georgetown classics in Arabic language and linguistics’ series, this work consists of an introduction (1–7), nine chapters, and an appendix. The introduction delineates the extent of the spread of Arabic and its varieties, in addition to the aims of the book. Ch. 1 (9–55) presents a brief history of the language from pre-Islamic times to the present day. Ch. 2 (56–98) discusses the phonology of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and its dialects, and /q/, an example of dialectal phonological variation. Ch. 3 (99–144) presents verb morphology. Ch. 4 (145–76) discusses noun morphology. Ch. 5 (177–94) is a discussion of pronouns and deictics. Chs. 6 and 7 (195–304) are a discussion of syntax and semantics; Ch. 8 (305–40) treats the development of lexicon and style, and Ch. 9 (341–89) discusses levels of the language. And, finally, the appendix (391–96) briefly presents the Arabic script.

Holes’s contribution demonstrates solid scholarship and presents the material in a readable and informative fashion, though certain factual elements could stand to be corrected in a revised edition. For example, H estimates the number of native speakers of Kurdish ‘in the mountains of northern Iraq’ to be in the several hundred thousands (2). The Kurdish-speaking population in those regions exceeds this number by far. The Ottoman rule of the Middle East and North Africa did not last until the late nineteenth century (307); it lasted in the Greater Syria regions and Iraq until 1916. Arabic had many Ottoman Turkish lexical items, used in government administration and the army, some, admittedly, Turkified Arabic, and others Arabo-Persian composites. Many of these items persisted until they were displaced very recently, viz. Tabu, qa’im maqam, ma’mur ijra’. Others are still in use today, viz. kahiya ‘deputy’ in Tunis. The Ottoman Turkish borrowings that H lists (307) are not restricted to Cairene and Baghdadi Arabic as alleged; they are more widely used in many other dialects.

On occasion, H makes statements that need validation, for example, footnote 6 (8), and the claim of the ‘En Avdat inscription as evidence for ‘a distinct language identifiable as Arabic’ (10). H’s statement that ‘one or two words’ are written without a long vowel but pronounced with one (90) needs to be corrected. The list is larger than claimed and includes demonstrative pronouns, particles, and nouns. And, finally, H’s attribution of the linguistic change in sentential clause order in MSA to ‘the Arab way of thinking’ (265) reduces the approximately 250 million speakers to one way of thinking!

There is inconsistency in the citation of examples. H includes the case markers of nouns and adjectives (254, 263, passim); at other times this practice is not followed (196, 197, 253, passim). In discussing the conjunctive particle wa ‘and’, H positions this element inappropriately in a string of English sentences that are translations of the original Arabic (268 and 269 examples c and d). At other times, wa is placed appropriately in a string of Arabic examples (269, ex. a and b). As a final point, North African dialects are treated marginally in this work, perhaps due to space limitation, or perhaps because the author’s forte is the study of Gulf Arabic. These minor points aside, H provides a serious contribution, valuable to those interested in Arabic and linguistics in general.