This book explores nearly 2000 years of the history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. Jonathan Owens advocates a multiple pathways approach to the development of Arabic, which he shows to be alinear in many respects but multilinear in others.

Jonathan Owens is Emeritus Professor of Arabic linguistics at Bayreuth University. He has published over a dozen books, including A Linguistic History of Arabic (OUP, 2006; paperback 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (OUP, 2013; paperback 2019). He has created two online oral, text-based databanks, one for the Arabic of the Lake Chad area, and one for Glavda. In 2018 he received the Muhammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Arabic Language Award for special services to the Arabic language.

• 1: Introduction


• Part I. Old Arabic


• 2: Arabic and Semitic


• 3: Arabs and Arabic


• 4: Three types of pre- and early Islamic sources: The pre-Sibawaihian setting


• Part II. Reconstruction


• 5: Punctuation and language history: I/I + D, inheritance/innovation and diffusion


• 6: Four issues in Arabic historical linguistics


• Part III. Contact


• 7: Arabic in contact: Aramaic


• 8: Morphosyntax as an adaptive mechanism I: Idioms


• 9: Morphosyntax as an adaptive mechanism II: The expansive demonstrative


• Part IV. Stability


• 10: Language stability I: Three case sketches


• 11: Language stability II: Watching paint dry, or, metrics for measuring language stability


• Part V. Taxonomy


• 12: Towards a typology for historical linguistics


• 13: Summing up


• 14: Why Arabic is special, and special for historical linguistics