The article presents the speakers’ perception of contact-induced linguistic change in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, based on data collected during the authors’ doctoral research (Serreli 2016). The research explored language attitudes and ideologies in Siwa with a qualitative approach built on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories. Linguistic change is presented by speakers as a generational variation; it is attributed to the increased contact between the Siwi and Arabic languages that followed the wider socioeconomic change in the community in recent decades. Moreover, Siwi speakers hold a variety of attitudes towards linguistic change, appreciating phenomena perceived as adjustments to the current times, while criticizing those perceived as a betrayal or corruption of their native language.

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.

In the course of this chapter we will discuss what is known about the effects that contact with Arabic has had on the Modern South Arabian languages of Oman and Yemen. Documentation concerning these languages is not abundant, and even more limited is our knowledge of the history of their interaction with Arabic. By integrating the existing bibliography with as yet unpublished fieldwork materials, we will try to provide as complete a picture of the situation as possible, also discussing the current linguistic and sociolinguistic landscape of Dhofar and eastern Yemen.

The highly archaic Classical Arabic language and its modern iteration Modern Standard Arabic must to a large extent be seen as highly artificial archaizing registers that are the High variety of a diglossic situation. The contact phenomena found in Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic are therefore often the result of imposition. Cases of borrowing are significantly rarer, and mainly found in the lexical sphere of the language.

This chapter provides an overview of Arabic in contact in the pre-Islamic period, from the early first millennium BCE to the rise of Islam. Contact languages include Akkadian, Aramaic, Ancient South Arabian, Canaanite, Dadanitic, and Greek. The chapter concludes with two case studies on contact-induced development: the emergence of the definite article and the realization of the feminine ending.

Cypriot Arabic (CyAr) is a severely endangered Semitic variety spoken by Cypriot Maronites. It belongs to the group of “peripheral varieties” of Arabic that were separated from the core Arabic-speaking area and came into contact with non-Semitic languages. Although there has been a renewed interest since the turn of the century for the study of CyAr, some aspects of its structure are still not well known. In this paper, we present and analyze a number of developments in CyAr induced by contact with Cypriot Greek. Our methodology for investigating such phenomena makes a novel contribution to the description of this underrepresented variety, as it was based not only on existing linguistic descriptions and text corpora in the literature, but mainly on a vast corpus of naturalistic oral speech data from the Archive of Oral Tradition of CyAr. Our analysis revealed the complexity of investigated contact phenomena and the differing degrees of integration of borrowings into the lexico-gramm...