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Description:
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This sketch describes a rural (fellahi) dialect of colloquial Palestinian Arabic, that of the pre-1948 Palestine village of Abu Shusha. It is used by a dwindling number of speakers on the West Bank and Gaza strip, and in locations around the Arab world and elsewhere. Abu Shusha Palestinian is endangered. This is due to the original dispersion of its speakers and resulting interdialect contact, the increasing age of its speakers, and pressure from Standard Arabic (as, in general, on all non-urban varieties of the language) for speakers to conform to more urban and educated speech. Like all Arabic colloquials, it is unwritten. The phonemic, morphological, and syntactic systems are described. A sample text is presented with interlinear gloss and translation. Two features are highlighted. The first is the vowel system, which has many more important systematic distinctions than traditionally assumed for Arabic. The second is the discourse, specifically, structures and strategies as found in the sample text. The documentation of the sketch will help in furthering work on comparative Arabic dialectology. This second edition improves on the first in documentation and analysis. New material includes verb types (strong vs. weak) and bibliographic update.
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