Diversity across the Arabian Peninsula: Language, Culture, Nature - cover image

Book Series

Copyright

Fabio Gasparini; Kamala Russell; Janet C.E. Watson; Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).

Published On

2024-10-17

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-337-9
Hardback978-1-80511-338-6
PDF978-1-80511-339-3

Language

  • English

Print Length

302 pages (xxiv+278)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 17 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.67" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 18 x 234 mm(6.14" x 0.71" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback431g (15.20oz)
Hardback604g (21.31oz)

THEMA

  • 2CSR
  • 5PB-AA-A
  • CFB
  • CFF
  • NHTB

BISAC

  • FOR002000
  • HIS026010
  • LAN009010

Keywords

  • Arabian Peninsula
  • Diversity
  • Linguistic endangerment
  • Cultural studies
  • Interdisciplinary approaches
  • Community-based collaboration

Diversity across the Arabian Peninsula

Language, Culture, Nature

This edited volume brings together a diverse and rich set of contributions on the Arabian Peninsula. Ranging from history, field linguistics, and cultural studies these essays address the diversity of languages, ways of life, and natural environments that have marked the region throughout its history.

The book stems from the intellectual exchange and collaboration fostered by a virtual workshop that met regularly in 2020-21 and which drew participants from within and beyond the academy. The contributions gathered in this volume highlight the need for a better understanding of a region that hosts a vast amount of culturally and linguistically diverse material, often in a precarious state of conservation.

Diversity Across the Arabian Peninsula argues for the importance of holistic, community-based, and interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic endangerment and deep social and cultural changes: there is no documentation of language without attention to language use, the material lifeworld and its ecology, and social and cultural setting. Such research is enriched and made more impactful through collaboration with communities and scholars from the Global South. The essays in this volume thus spearhead a contextualized study of South Arabian linguistic varieties and their connection with the natural and cultural world they inhabit.

Contributors

Fabio Gasparini

(editor)
Postdoctoral Researcher at Freie Universität Berlin
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9196-8695

Fabio Gasparini received his PhD in African, Asian, and Mediterranean Studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale.” He currently holds a postdoc position at the Free University of Berlin. Together with Miranda J. Morris, he is author of the first descriptive grammar of Bəṭaḥrēt. His research focuses on the Modern South Arabian languages and Semitic in general from a comparative and typological perspective and on the relationship between language, identity and landscape.

Kamala Russell

(editor)
Assistant Professor at University of Chicago
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0907-1580

Kamala Russell is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021. Her research investigates the relationships between everyday interaction, space and infrastructure, and Islamic ethics through fieldwork projects with speakers of Shehret Modern South Arabian.

Janet C.E. Watson

(editor)
Leadership Chair for Language at University of Leeds
Honorary Professor at University of St Andrews
Visiting Professor at Sultan Qaboos University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2922-2964

Janet Watson studied at the University of Exeter and at SOAS, London. She has worked at the Universities of Edinburgh, Durham, and Salford and has held visiting posts at the Universi ties of Heidelberg (2003–2004) and Oslo (2004–2005). She took up the Leadership Chair for Language at Leeds at the University of Leeds in 2013, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2013. Since 2019, she has directed the Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems (CELCE). She is currently an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews and a Visiting Professor at Sultan Qaboos University. Her current research areas are on Modern South Arabian and the language–nature relationship.