Description

Nigerian Arabic is spoken by some 400,000 Arabs in NE Nigeria, their presence in Nigeria going back at least 200 years, though probably far longer. Their dialect, however, is relatively unknown within Arabic dialectology. As a general reference grammar this book will thus be of interest to Arabicists, Africanists as well as to scholars of culture history, particularly in the light it sheds on the linguistic status of an Arabic dialect spoken by minority Arabic group. While formalized linguistic statements generally are avoided in this grammar, there is a detailed coverage of phonology, morphology and syntax, as well as indications about where dialectal and sociolectal variation is found. Beside the standard presentation of phonological tables, morphological paradigms and syntactic classes, one of the data bases the grammar is constructed from is some 20 hours of transcribed texts, from which examples are freely drawn. A rigorous structural summary is thus complemented by exemplification from natural speech.