A group for academics interested in vernacular Arabic varieties spoken in the Levant, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Turkey (historically in Adana, Mersin & Hatay), & in diaspora.

Files List

  • Contact-induced change in the Levantine: evidence from Lebanese and Palestinian Arabic  
    In category: Lebanese varieties, Palestinian varieties.
    Uploaded by on 19 January 2023.

    The present study aims to address existing lacunae in the research literature by investigating the outcomes of dialect contact in Beirut between Palestinian Arabic (PA), the minority variety, and Lebanese Arabic (LA), the majority variety. Drawing on the framework of comparative variationist sociolinguistics (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) as well as research on dialect contact (Britain and Trudgill 2005), this study combines synchronic and diachronic data sources to compare three variables in LA and PA: a phonological variable, involving the word-medial raising of /a:/ to [e:] (e.g., [ka:n] alternating with [ke:n] ‘he/it was’); and two morpho-syntactic variables: verbal negation and future temporal reference.

  • Verbal negation in the Lebanese dialect of Zeitoun, Keserwan. By Khairallah, Natalie Wilmsen, David  
    In category: Lebanese varieties.
    Uploaded by on 18 January 2023.

    The dialect of Zeitoun village in the northern Keserwan district of Lebanon exhibits both the split-morpheme negators mā…š of the southern and highland Levant and the pre-verbal negator mā without the post-positive -š of the northern Levant, with the -š of negation optionally appearing in identical contexts. It also exhibits the form a…š of southern and highland Levantine Arabic dialects. Some researchers propose that the negator a- can only appear before labial consonants, such as the b- prefix marking habitual action or imminent futurity. Others note that it may also occur with the prohibitive, usually marked by the 2nd-person prefix t-. Neither of these observations holds for the Zeitouni dialect, in which prohibitives negated with sole -š may be formed without the prefix, the initial consonant being whatever the radical might be. Sole post-positive -š also occurs in negation of an unmarked imperfective verb, there, too, sometimes without an overt proclitic person marker. Another feature that is occasionally noted in the literature is the negation of perfective verbs with sole post-positive -š.