Preface to the Second Edition

The invitation by Edinburgh University Press to consider a thorough revision of the book came at a propitious moment, when I was just going to retire from the university and was looking around for interesting things to do.They proposed a new lease of life for the book, which gave me a chance to give it a general overhaul and bring it up-to-date.In this revised edition of this book a number of changes have been implemented.In the first place the number of chapter has been increased.The chapter on the linguistic structure of Arabic has been split into two: one dealing with the modern linguistic approaches to Arabic (Chapter 6); and the other with the Arabic linguistic tradition (Chapter 7).The chapter on the sociolinguistics of the Arab world has likewise been split into two chapters: one dealing with diglossia (Chapter 13); and the other with the linguistic situation in the former French colonies (Chapter 14).A new chapter has been added on the Arabic pidgins and creoles.On this topic a host of new mat erial has become known, including Fida Bizri's description of a new pidgin, Pidgin Madame, which represents a real breakthrough in the study of Arabic pidgins and foreigner talk.Another addition to the book is a lengthy note on transcription; this was one of the omissions of the first edition that was rightly criticised in some of the reviews.In this note both the conventional Arabist transcription and the use of IPA characters are explained.Updating the bibliography was one of the major tasks in the revision.The amount of literature that has appeared between 1997 and 2013 is staggering.The five volumes of the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics contain more than five hundred articles on topics connected with the history and structure of Arabic in all its varieties.In the field of dialect geography, the various dialect atlases should be mentioned, which are in different stages of completion, and of course the large-scale Wortatlas der arabischen Dialekte by Peter Behnstedt and Manfred Woidich, of which two volumes have appeared.I have refrained from giving doi identification numbers for articles quoted in the list of references.Many of these are available at sites like Jstor, but unfortunately only for researchers affiliated to a university with a subscription to such x the arabic language