Ebook: Bukhara Arabic: A Metatypized Dialect of Arabic in Central Asia

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2003. - 18 p.The obscure Arabic dialects spoken in Bukhara state of the Uzbek Republic are known to scholars primarily through the pioneering work of Vinnikov and Tsereteli, especially Vinnikov (1969), a collection of narrative texts collected in 1936, 1938, and 1943 in the two villages of Djogari and Arabkhane. The dialects have generated considerable interest among Arabic dialectologists, and have been investigated from the point of view of dialectology and classical historical (genetic) linguistics (Fischer 1961, Fischer and Jastrow 1980, Jastrow 1997a, 1998, Versteegh 1997). But the materials are of contemporary interest to a broader linguistic audience because of what they reveal about language contact and syntactic typology. While the dialects are conservative in their phonology and lexicon, they are radically different from other Arabic dialects (and correspondingly similar to the surrounding Persian and Turkic languages) in their syntax and to a lesser extent their morphology. They are so different indeed as to constitute a case of ‘metatypy’ in the sense of Ross (1996), that is, change of syntactic type. Furthermore they show a configuration of word order properties (specifically RelN alongside NG and NA) which is apparently quite rare (possibly otherwise non-existent) among world languages, to judge by its lack of attestation in the 149 language sample of Hawkins (1983).
The aim of this article is to delineate, on the basis of an analysis of Vinnikov’s texts, those morphological and syntactic features of the dialect which are of most interest from the point of view of typology and contact studies, in short to bring the data from this dialect to bear on such larger questions as the following:
— To what extent can specific structural patterns in or among languages be correlated with specific types of contact situations?
— Are there any limitations on what aspects of a language can change due to contact with another language?
— How are reversals of normal word order patterns implemented in the course of a change of type?
The analysis is based on the texts from Arabkhane. Reference numbers are the number of the text in Vinnikov’s collection, followed by the line number. Vinnikov’s transcription is maintained.