The Arabic Language

particular, the Arabian peninsula, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. The word 
atlas in course of publication by Behnstedt and Woidich (2011, 2012) is the first 
large-scale presentation of lexical data across the Arabic-speaking world; three 
volumes have appeared so far.
Spoken dialect texts are now available online in text repositories. The Depart
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ment of Semitic Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg hosts the Semitisches 
Tonarchiv, a website with more than 2,000 audio documents, containing texts from 
Egyptian, Bedouin, Ḥassāniyya, Yemeni, Lebanese, Libyan, Moroccan, Palestinian, 
Syrian, Sudanese and Central Asian Arabic; these can be consulted freely at www.
semarch.uni-hd.de. A second repository is the Corpus for Afroasiatic Languages, 
maintained by the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS); it 
is smaller in size, but contains fully transcribed and glossed texts in Moroccan, 
Tripolitanian and Juba Arabic, as well as the corresponding audio documents. 

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The Study of the Arabic Dialects 
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This site can be consulted after registering at http://corpafroas.tge-adonis.
fr/Archives/ListeFichiersELAN.php. The Corpus oral de variedades magrebíes 
(CORVAM), hosted by the University of Cadiz, is available at: www.unizar.es/
estudiosarabes/CORVAM.htm, and focuses on Arabic and Berber varieties from 
the Maghreb. Consultation is free.
On the older sources for Egyptian Arabic, see Doss (1996). The formation of the 
Cairene dialect is dealt with by Woidich (1995). On the development of ʿAmmānī 
speech, see Al Wer (2007b). For the Egyptian influence in the Yemenite dialect, 
see Diem (1973b: 15–19). On the problem of the /q/~/g/ reflexes in Bedouin 
dialects, see Behnstedt and Woidich (1982); for a general survey of the realisation 
of /q/, see Bahloul (2007). The transitional dialect between Western and Eastern 
dialects in the Egyptian Delta is discussed by Behnstedt (1978); for the contact 
phenomena in the western oases in Egypt, see Woidich (1993). On mutual influ-
ence between Hilālī and pre-Hīlālī dialects, see Lévy (1998) and Miller (2004). 
The relationship between urbanisation and dialect change is discussed by Holes 
(1995b). The problem of the representation of Bedouin and sedentary layers is 
discussed by Ingham (1982), from whom most of the remarks about the distinc
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tion between Bedouin and sedentary dialects in Arabia and Syro-Mesopotamia 
above have been derived. General data about the classification of Bedouin dialects 
and their features are given by Rosenhouse (1984). Cadora (1992) correlates the 
data of Arabic dialectology with the way of life of the speakers (his term for this 
approach being ‘ecolinguistics’).

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