Arabic in the City: Issues in Dialect Contact and Language Variation

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Arabic urban vernaculars : development and changes / Catherine Miller -- Migration, urbanization and language change. The (r)urbanisation of Mauritania : historical context and contemporary developments / Catherine Taine Cheikh -- The formation of the dialect of Amman : from chaos to order / Enam Al-Wer -- Urbanization and dialect change : the Arabic dialect of Tripoli (Libya) / Christophe Pereira -- Becoming Casablancan : Fessis in Casablanca as a case study / Atiqa Hachimi -- Two cases of Moroccan Arabic in the Diaspora / Angeles Vicente -- Urban vernaculars : convergence and divergence. Greetings in Beirut : social distribution and attitudes towards different formulae / Marie Aymee Germanos -- Linguistic levelling in San'ani Arabic as reflected in a popular radio serial / Janet Watson -- The urban and suburban modes : patterns of linguistic variation and change in Damascus / Hanadi Ismail -- Segmental and prosodic aspects of Ksar el Kebir's neo-urban variety / Mohamed Embarki -- The Use of Kashkasha/kaskasa and alternative means among educated urban Saudi speakers / Munira Al-Azraki -- Multilingualism, codeswitching and new urban cultures. Close encounters of a different kind : two types of insertion in Nigerian Arabic codeswitching / Jonathan Owens -- Development and linguistic change in Moroccan Arabic-French Codeswitching / Karima Ziamari -- The language of Cairos' young university students / Sherin Rizk -- Rap and rappers in Nouakchott, (Mauritania) / Aline Tauzin -- Uses and attitudes towards Hassaniyya language among Nouakchotts negro-Mauritanian population / Alassane Dia.

Filling a gap in the literature currently available on the topic, this edited collection is the first examination of the interplay between urbanization, language variation and language change in fifteen major Arab cities. The Arab world presents very different types and degrees of urbanization, from well established old capital-cities such as Cairo to new emerging capital-cities such as Amman or Nouakchott, these in turn embedded in different types of national construction. It is these urban settings which raise questions concerning the dynamics of homogenization/differentiation and the processes of standardization due to the coexistence of competing linguistic models.

In English with some Arabic text.