A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic.

• Author: Owens, Jonathan
• Position: Book review

A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic. Edited by INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC STUDIES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ZARAGOZA. Handbuch der Orientalistik 1, vol. 102. Leiden; BRILL, 2013. Pp. xxii + 274. 123 [euro], $171.

Though not identified as such until the foreword, and to the uninitiated even then cryptically, this is a reworking of a classic work, Federico Corriente's A Grammatical Sketch of the Spanish Arabic Dialect Bundle (1977). The stated aim of the re-edition is to "overhaul its [i.e., Grammatical Sketch, JO] contents on a large scale, by removing front it mistaken, redundant or simply weak statements and adding new pieces of evidence" (p. vii). Here I will evaluate the new edition against its stated aims of updating the material in the context of the thirty-five years of intervening scholarship on Arabic. I will first do this by concentrating on what generalizing themes and motifs derive from or are developed in this research. Note that this is not Corriente's main aim. However, much flows from understanding the work from this perspective.

As Corriente notes in his preface, one special interest of Andalusian Arabic is that it is the earliest corpus of non-Classical Arabic concentrated in one dialectal area. The corpus is not described in the book, though there are useful excerpts from various sources, some in Arabic script, some in Latin, in the appendix. Unfortunately, the Arabic original is not included along with the welcome transliteration. It is evident from these texts and those in the 1977 edition (e.g., 1977: 154, an excerpt from an Ibn Quzman zajal) that there are consistent elements marking a particularly Andalusian Arabic, for instance, the use of n- for the 1SG imperfect (ni-riid "I-want"), that set the variety apart from Classical Arabic and situate it among Arabic dialects. The 1SG n- is a classic hallmark of North African Arabic, as well as a few other dialects. By the same token, there are equally elements that Corriente terms "high register" items, for instance, weak verbs ending in -u, na-[??]zu "I attack" (2013: 95), verbal nouns said to be high register, infaaq "expenditure" (2013: 91), and many other elements.

It would have been helpful in this context to elaborate on the different terminology used, what is meant by high and low register and even "very low register" (p. 16) and "sub-standard" forms (p. 2). The issue is a tricky one because register differences, LI language variation, or different populations (dialects) using competing, but functionally equivalent forms, all can take a similar linguistic guise.

Implicitly it would appear that Corriente likens the Andalusian texts to contemporary spoken Arabic, Terence Mitchell's (1986) "educated spoken Arabic" for instance, wherein a dialectally based discourse is interpunctuated with loans from Standard Arabic. This may well be an appropriate model, but in the spirit of updating the 1977 work, one misses a general discussion of what is intended by the idea of register. This is particularly problematic, because among the large oeuvre of literary texts in Arabic there is another genre wherein dialectal elements and classical elements mix, namely, the so-called "Middle Arabic" variety (e.g., Blau 2002). Corriente makes no mention of this significant body of research at all, so one might assume that he would not situate his registers within this genre. However, if this is the case, why not?

For the historical linguist, Andalusian Arabic is potentially a treasure trove for early spoken Arabic. If--and this remains an if--the variety attested in the main body of texts, which only become plentiful after the eleventh century, reflects the variety brought to the country with the initial conquest (92/711), then one has a remarkable snapshot of what spoken...