Christian Arabic of Baghdad.

• Author: Krotkoff, Georg

The ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, including ethnic and religious conflicts, external aggression, and internal oppression, has led to the displacement and dispersal of various minorities which had - over the centuries - formed stable communities with cultural and linguistic characteristics of their own.

The speech of such communities preserves much valuable information for historical and comparative linguistics. For this reason, their dialects have always aroused the interest of Western scholarship whenever they became accessible. In the present situation, there is a sense of urgency to preserve as much material as possible, before new historical circumstances force the inevitable contamination and eventual disappearance of such dialects.

It has long been known that in the two big cities of Iraq, Mosul and Baghdad, a dialectal division exists along religious lines, and that the Christian dialects in both locations shared important characteristics. With the publication of Haim Blanc's Communal Dialects in Baghdad (Harvard, 1964), however, the essential differences between the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim dialects of this city were presented to the public in an exemplary manner.

The author of the monograph under review, a native speaker of Christian Baghdadi (CB), used recordings made for her by friends and relatives in Baghdad and other places as the base for the description and grammatical analysis presented here. The organization of the material follows that of other volumes in this series: phonology (including intonation, pp. 7-41), morphology (pp. 42-83), syntax (pp. 84-142). A "Brief Sociolinguistic Survey" (pp. 143-50) describes the diglossic or triglossic situation in which most speakers of CB function. CB is reserved for use within the community, while Muslim Baghdadi (MB) serves for communication with others. Educated individuals are also able to speak literary Arabic on formal occasions. Certain salient features of CB are currently being avoided by the young generation as stigmatizing, which may soon lead to their obsolescence.

Pages 151-83 contain 20 of the...