Book Description
This book complements and extends the author's Writing Arabic and Pronouncing Arabic 1, and completes an introductory trilogy on the Arabic language. The learner, faced with a seemingly boundless variety of living Arabic speech, stands in need of a generalized framework within which to listen and respond. Pronouncing Arabic 2 answers this need. Mitchell familiarizes the reader with regional and stylistic variation in colloquial speech outside the strict confines of Classical and so-called Modern Standard Arabic, and provides a uniquely comprehensive survey of the "accents" of various representative vernaculars. He gives authoritative guidance to consonants, vowels, accentuation, and intonation, paying special attention to Moroccan, Cyrenaican Bedouin, Egyptian, Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti Arabic. A special feature of the book is his analysis of the pervasive interweave of vernacular Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic known increasingly as Educated Spoken Arabic, by means of which the educated speaker avoids sounding, on the one hand, illiterate or outlandish, and, on the other, bookish and pedantic. Pronouncing Arabic 2 will be invaluable not only to students and teachers of Arabic but also to linguists and phoneticians with a special interest in the language.
