Jonathan Owens

Owens works hard to free Arabic historical linguistics from the many assumptions that have plagued the field. He does this primarily by establishing a basis for variation within what he terms “pre-diasporic” Arabic based on data from contemporary dialects, especially geographically distant dialects that would not conceivably experience language contact. (Commonalities shared by these dialects but not by Classical Arabic may be reliably reconstructed into Old Arabic.) Owens gathered his show more own data on Nigerian Arabic and eastern Libyan Arabic especially, but he gains significant contributions from an isolated dialect (a “Sprachinsel”) in Uzbekistan.
Owens makes special use of Sibawaih’s records of synchronic variation to show that features that varied in Old Arabic (such as “imala,” a phonological rule) continued into present-day dialects.
In ch. 5, Owens uses quantitative methods to show a remarkable affinity between Arabic in the western Sudanic area (= Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and western Sudan) and Uzbekistan. He shows that historically this affinity must be related to migration patterns out of the Arabian Peninsula before Arabic grammar was codified. Some of the features shared between this distant dialects are not shared by Classical Arabic, which is important evidence of poorly documented variation in Old Arabic.
In ch. 8, Owens gives his own reconstructions of Old Arabic object pronouns suffixes. Significantly, there is no trace of a noun case system in these suffixes, and again, there are also discrepancies between the reconstructed paradigm and those typically given as “Classical Arabic.” show less