Arabic Dialogues
Phrasebooks and the Learning of Colloquial Arabic, 1798–1945
Distributed for UCL Press
Arabic Dialogues
Phrasebooks and the Learning of Colloquial Arabic, 1798–1945
During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists, and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mold, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language.
Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and the effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analyzing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territories of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte, the book moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers, and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.
Table of Contents
List of figures
Note on research data set
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Cairo and Paris (1798-1869)
2 Faris al-Shidyaq, As‘ad Ya‘qub al-Khayya? and Protestant Missions (1819-1920)
3 Tourists’ Phrasebooks and Self-Instruction: The Business of Language Book Publishing (1830-1935)
4 Arabic in War and Occupation I: The Veiled Protectorate to the First World War (1882-1914)
5 Arabic in War and Occupation II: The First and Second World Wars and Mandate Palestine (1914-1945)
6 Arabic, Yiddish and Hebrew in Palestine (1839-1948)
7 Conclusion: Patterns and Networks
Bibliography
Index
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