Editor’s Note

The present volume of Al-‘Arabiyya includes five articles, four of which are quite timely. They contribute to ongoing debates in their respective subfields: Arabic foreign language pedagogy, Arabic sociolinguistics, Arabic historical linguistics and dialectology, translation and language change/development, and modern Arabic literature and criticism.

Through his review article, John Eisele problematizes advocating exclusive efficacy of one approach to teaching Arabic as a foreign language. He argues that the choice of implementing one approach, be it Munther Younes’s integrated approach or any other one, is not a simple one, as it must necessarily take into account other crucial factors, most prominent among which are linguistic reality, linguistic dissonance, and linguistic choice.

Similarly, through his study findings, Thomas Leddy-Cecere questions the prevalent paradigm of conflating variation in style with diglossic register. He calls for further replication studies and for the identification of diglossic shifting as a phenomenon involving switching between two distinct sets of phonetic norms rather than style shifting within the same norm.

The article by Peter Glanville deals with the grammaticalization of the construction consisting of the particle ši preceding a noun phrase. In particular, Glanville proposes a reanalysis where, starting from the lexical source, šay’ “thing,” the construction developed diachronically through the sequence: Partitive > Quantifier > Determiner > Approximator.

Maria Swanson examines Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Mikhail Nu‘ayma (or Naimy, as he used to spell his last name) and the moral concerns that both shared. She does so by focusing on two novels written by the two authors (Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Naimy’s Memoirs of a Vagrant Soul or The Pitted Face) and offering a literary and psychoanalysis of the two protagonists in both works.

Shehdeh Fareh discusses the impact of translation on the Arabic language. He provides a brief account with specific examples illustrating the role of translation (through its different forms) in changing or developing the language lexically, semantically, metaphorically, and syntactically.

The book review section contains six reviews. It includes Uri Horesh’s review of Youssef A. Haddad and Eric Potsdam’s Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVIII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics; Paul A. Sundberg’s review of Andreas Hallberg’s Case Endings in Spoken Standard Arabic: Statistics, Norms, and Diversity in Unscripted Formal Speech; Yahya Kharrat’s review of Mahdi Alosh and Allen Clark’s Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners, 2nd ed.; Janelle Moser’s review of Mahdi Alosh and Allen Clark’s Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Intermediate Learners, 2nd ed.; Maher Bahloul’s review of Nasser M. Isleem and Hajer Al Madhi’s Arabic Language in the Emirati Films: Linguistic and Cultural Window on Emirati Films; and Sawad Hussain’s review of Jonas M. Elbousty and Muhammad Ali Aziz’s Advanced Arabic Literary Reader: For Students of Modern Standard Arabic.

I am pleased to present the articles and book reviews contained in this volume of Al-‘Arabiyya. I hope readers will find them beneficial in many respects and that they will stimulate continued discussions and inspire more publications and further research.