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"Erwin, Wallace M"
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The Problem of Diglossia in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Classical and Iraqi Arabic
A review of a book which is not, as the main title might suggest, a general study of diglossia in Arabic-speaking countries and its effects on various aspects of Arab society; rather it is a work devoted almost entirely to a phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical comparison of Classical Arabic and the colloquial Arabic spoken by Muslims in Baghdad. As such, it makes a welcome contribution to Arabic dialect studies. The transcription used in the book is generally satisfactory, but a number of misprints might have been avoided by the use of symbols other than the apostrophe and reversed apostrophe for the glottal stop and voiced pharyngeal spirant. Although several aspects of Iraqi colloquial Arabic might have been treated somewhat more fully, the book provides useful information, conveniently arranged for comparative purposes, at each level of linguistic analysis. There are some good tables, including one showing the relative frequency of various broken plural forms in Classical and Iraqi Arabic, a long comparative wordlist, and an extensive bibliography including both Arabic and Western sources. AA
Book Review
