A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic

The Arabic of the Ottoman Empire presents an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history.

This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses.

The project aimed to produce the first linguistic volume to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way.

Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of recently discovered yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs. The scholarship and material collected has the potential to lay the foundations of a new and transformative interdisciplinary field.

The book is Open Access and can be downloaded free of charge here:

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1168

Register for the webinar scheduled for 1 December 2021 which will launch the newest book of the series, A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic. The event will also introduce the Cambridge Semitic Languages and Culture Open Access Series and discuss the need for open access publishing in the field. Register here:

https://theofed-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4KlVCw4oQ3W4-JC2XjlyyQ