A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of Central and Southern Sinai

After publishing A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume. To facilitate direct comparison of all Sinai dialects, the dialect descriptions in both volumes run parallel and are thus structured in the same manner. Quoting from his own extensive material and using a total of 95 criteria for comparison, De Jong applies the method of 'multi-dimensional scaling' and his own 'step-method' to arrive at a subdivision into eight (of which seven are 'Bedouin') typological groups in Sinai. An appendix with 68 maps and dialectrometrical plots completes the picture.

Rudolf E. de Jong, Ph.D. (1999) in Humanities, University of Amsterdam, is currently Guest Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, teaches Arabic at Leiden University, is co-General Editor for the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Online and is Secretary of the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA). He has published A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill: 2000), as well as several articles.

“This meticulously researched volume fills a substantial gap in the dialect map of Egypt. […] … this
volume is an excellent contribution to the field of Arabic dialectology, and will be of particular interest to Arabists, Semiticists, dialectologists, and sociolinguists.”
Domenyk Eades in Journal of the American Oriental Society 133.4 (2013).

“Under any circumstances, de Jong’s book would be a major contribution to Arabic dialectology. Its value is enhanced by the present unhappy situation in the Sinai, where substantial further research is unlikely to be carried out in the foreseeable future. In all probability we shall never learn more about many of the Sinai dialects than what de Jong reports. The material that he gives us is, however, so rich that even without additional information from the peninsula, it will nourish much future scholarship.” Frank H. Stewart in: JSAI (2017)