Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday.

• Author: Carter, Michael
• Position: Book review

Arabic Dialectology: In Honour of Clive Holes on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. Edited by ENAM AL-WER and RUDOLF DE JONG. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, vol. 53. Leiden: BRILL, 2009. Pp. xix + 298. $176.

As the editors point out, this volume is testimony to the wide range of subdisciplines that come together in the works of Clive Holes in particular and in variational sociolinguistics in general. They go on to say that Holes, as a "variationist to the core," has raised the Arabic of Bahrain to the same dialectological status as the English of Norwich (p. ix), and there is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that a paper has been contributed by Peter Trudgill, who put Norwich on the linguistic map.

The papers are grouped thematically into historical topics, descriptive dialectology, contact phenomena, social dialectology, and code mixing, and while this is perfectly coherent and practical, this review will look at them from other perspectives which will unite the papers across these categories.

Some are examples of the new linguistic genres that have evolved over the last few decades, such as the concise dialect descriptions that now proliferate and, notably through the Zeitschrift fur arabische Linguistik, have created a virtual template, of which the description of the Sawawi dialect of northern Oman by Domenyk Eades is a good specimen. These descriptions, usually accompanied by short texts, are extremely useful for comparative studies, as they often focus on distinctive features, or in Eades's case the lack of them, as he confirms in detail that the Sawawi dialect has all the characteristics of the type I Sedentary dialects set up by Holes for this region. Bruce Ingham's contribution is a postscript to his earlier work on Mesopotamian dialects. Another genre now prominent in linguistics is the statistical survey, which is seen in the contribution of Hanadi Ismail on the alternation of possessive suffix hlzero (reflexes of CA -hu) in Damascus. Here the bar charts quantify the sociolinguistic realities to provide a firm basis for a variationist interpretation of the data, establishing with some precision an isogloss that had hitherto only been recognised informally (e.g., by Cantineau, in BSLP [1938]: 89-97). Lexicography has a longer tradition in the secondary literature, where there is really little else to do but discuss individual words: Peter Behnstedt's contribution follows this path, choosing vocabulary items that reflect the variationist approach, as a kind of supplement to Holes's massive glossary of Gulf Arabic, Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia (2001).

A noticeable...