Teach Yourself Gulf Arabic - Book and 2 Audio CDs
Brand New 2 CDs and Book
all-round confidence category
language
This book will teach you how to speak and understand the spoken Arabic of the Gulf region. It is not a manual of standard, or literary, Arabic, which is not a spoken language -. However, so that you will be able to read road signs, shop names etc, there is a simple guide to the Arabic alphabet.
In the first ten units of the book you will find all the important information that you will need for good communication in Gulf Arabic. The last four units refer to specific situations in which you might find yourself if you are visiting or living in the region, and build on the words and grammar you have already learned.
Each unit contains several dialogues which introduce the new language in a realistic context. The new words and phrases are given in both Arabic script and English transliteration. There are plenty of exercises to check your progress and the answers for these are at the back of the book or on the recording. The final section of each unit contains the Arabic script which gradually takes you through the Arabic alphabet so that by the end you will be able to recognise simple road signs and so on.
About the Authors
Jack Smart, co-author, was Lecturer in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter before retirement.
Frances Altorfer, co-author, was a modern languages teacher in secondary education.
About Gulf Arabic Language
Gulf Arabic is a variety of the Arabic language spoken around both shores of the Persian Gulf, mainly in Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and parts of Oman. Some notable characteristics that set it apart from other Bedouin dialects is the small number of Persian loanwords, and a pronunciation of k as ch ("kalb" dog, read as "chalb"); and, in some instances, the pronunciation j as y (jannah "paradise", read as "yennah").
About the Arabic Language
Arabic rabī) is the largest living member of the Semitic language family in terms of speakers. Classified as Central Semitic, it is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and has its roots in a Proto-Semitic common ancestor. Modern Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage with 27 sub-languages in ISO 639-3. These varieties are spoken throughout the Arab world, and Standard Arabic is widely studied and known throughout the Islamic world.
Modern Standard Arabic derives from Classical Arabic, the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group, attested epigraphically since the 6th century, which has been a literary language and the liturgical language of Islam since the 7th century.
Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, as Latin has contributed to most European languages. And in turn, it has also borrowed from those languages, as well as Persian and Sanskrit from early contacts with their affiliated regions. During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy, with the result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words from it especially Spanish and Portuguese, countries it ruled for 700 years (see Al-Andalus).
"Colloquial Arabic" is a collective term for the spoken varieties of Arabic used throughout the Arab world, which, as mentioned, differ radically from the literary language. The main dialectal division is between the North African dialects and those of the Middle East, followed by that between sedentary dialects and the much more conservative Bedouin dialects. Speakers of some of these dialects are unable to converse with speakers of another dialect of Arabic; in particular, while Middle Easterners can generally understand one another, they often have trouble understanding North Africans (although the converse is not true, due to the popularity of Middle Eastern—especially Egyptian—films and other media).
One factor in the differentiation of the dialects is influence from the languages previously spoken in the areas, which have typically provided a significant number of new words, and have sometimes also influenced pronunciation or word order; however, a much more significant factor for most dialects is, as among Romance languages, retention (or change of meaning) of different classical forms. Thus Iraqi aku, Levantine fīh, and North African kayən all mean "there is", and all come from classical Arabic forms (yakūn, fīhi, kā'in respectively), but now sound very different. |
