Communal Dialects in Baghdad

Book excerpt: Haim Blanc’s Communal Dialects in Baghdad is one of the most influential works ever written on the on the linguistic diachrony of vernacular Arabic. Based on original fieldwork conducted during the years 1957–1962, this book portaits the extensive regional continuum of modern spoken Arabic stretching across parts of Mesopotamia and N. Syria, evinced by the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian speech communities in Baghdad. Typos and other mistakes have been corrected in this reprint, which is accompanied by an Editorial Preamble by Alexander Borg and a Foreword by Paul Wexler, and contains references to the original page numbers.