Owens, Jonathan: A Grammar of Nigerian Arabic

As a general reference grammar this book describes the dialect spoken by some 400,000 Arabs in NE Nigeria, their presence in Nigeria going back at least 200 years. While formalized linguistic statements generally are avoided in this grammar, there is a detailed coverage of phonology, morphology and syntax, as well as indications about where dialectal and sociolectal variation is found. Beside the standard presentation of phonological tables, morphological paradigms and syntactic classes, one of the data bases the grammar is constructed from is some 20 hours of transcribed texts, from which examples are freely drawn. A rigorous structural summary is thus complemented by exemplification from natural speech. 276 Seiten mit zwei Karten, broschiert (Semitica Viva; Band 10/Harrassowitz Verlag 1993)