Capturing Nigerian Arabic language and culture in words and texts
Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
Final Report Abstract
The project had two main goals, the first the preparation of a final public-access website for the extensive collection of oral Nigerian Arabic (NA) texts in transcription and audio format, including a substantial number of translations, the second the completion of a Nigerian Arabic dictionary. In connection with the first, texts available on the website were also placed in a public-access morphological parser. By and large all of these goals have been met. Between 1989-2000 about 125 recordings of Nigerian Arabic were made in the context of variationist sociolinguistic research. Partly as a reaction to the tragic events precipitated by the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency which virtually depopulated NE Nigeria of its rural Nigerian Arab population, the sociolinguistic material was converted into a large-scale documentation project. Nearly 100 of the texts totaling over 50 hours of speech, spread across diverse dialectal, stylistic and sociolinguistics parameters were carefully checked and edited, and 37 of these were translated in full or in part. Besides being placed on a website in oral and in transcriptional format the same texts were fed into a morphological parser that enables searches for and concordizing of prefixes, stems and suffixes. In addition, supporting documentation summarizing background information about Nigerian Arabic, information about the individual texts (participants, place of recording, length in minutes and words etc.), as well as original research notes which give an overview of the content of each text are available on the site. Based to a large degree on material from the texts, "A dictionary of Nigerian Arabic: A speech community Approach", edited jointly with my Nigerian colleagues and collaborators Prof. Jidda Hassan, Ibrahim Adamu and Kellu Adamu with about 10,500 entries (lemmas) was also completed. After publication in print format, this will eventually (in collaboration with the publisher) be made available on an open access basis on the department website. The web-based version will be in MS-Access format which will facilitate searches along a number of classifying parameters. All in all the collection in its diverse parts will provide permanent comparative sociolinguistic and dialectological support for research on Nigerian Arabic, both in descriptive and in comparative perspective. While documentation was the paramount goal of the project, material from the collection supported a number of individual research papers, inter alia on idiomaticity and comparative historical linguistics. The most recent of these, for instance, will appear in 2020 in the journal "Anthropological Linguistics". The extensive annotations in the texts provide linguistic detail and socio-cultural background information. In detailing its many phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse nuances, the annotated texts furthermore implicitly argue against reductionist historical interpretations both of Nigerian Arabic in particular or spoken Arabic in general, which interpret the varieties in a pidgin-creole/imperfect language learning discourse.
Publications
- The Bayreuth morphological segmenter: A work in progress. In Muntasir Al-Hamd, Rizwan Ahman and Hafid Alaoui (eds.), Lisan al-Arab: Studies in Arabic dialects, Vol. 9, 11-25. Hamburg: Lit
Ackermann, Lars, Lutz Lukas, and Jonathan Owens
- Three idioms, three dialects, one history. Tunisian and Libyan Arabic Dialect Common Trends – Recent Developments – Diachronic Aspects (Colección Estudios de Dialectología Árabe), 43-84. Zaragoza: University of Zaragoza Press
Ritt-Benmimoun, Veronika, Smaranda Grigore, Jocelyne Owens and Jonathan Owens
- 2018. “Dialects (speech communities), the apparent past and grammaticalization: towards an understanding of the history of Arabic”, in Clive Holes (ed.), The historical dialectology of Arabic, Oxford, OUP
Owens, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198701378.003.0008)
