Colonial Vocabularies

Teaching and Learning Arabic, 1870-1970

Sarah Irving, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Rachel Mairs, Lucia Admiraal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040784112
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Lingüística histórica y comparativa

Language teaching and learning were crucial to Europeans' colonial, national, and individual enterprises in the Levant, and in these processes, "Oriental language teachers" – as they were termed prior to the Second World War – were fundamental. European state nationalisms influenced and increasingly competed with each other by promoting their languages and cultures abroad, by means of both private and governmental actors. At the same time, learning Arabic became more prominent around the Mediterranean. The first half of the twentieth century corresponded with the emergence of new media; language was thought of as a cultural product to be exported into new cultural spaces. However, many blind spots remain in the history of linguistic thought and practices, including the forgotten and neglected voices of those involved in learning and teaching Arabic. This volume aims to revisit aspects of this linguistic encounter, including its vision, profile, priorities, trajectories, and practices. A discussion of Arabic teaching across a wide geographical and temporal range - Engaging case studies which add intriguing detail and colour to historical study - Siting of language study within highly topical colonial and postcolonial contexts and debates.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Transliteration
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 For God and empire: Arabic at the University of Edinburgh: Its development, character and mission
• 3 Arab intellectuals in Russia (nineteenth–twentieth century): Teaching, research and politics
• 4 “I hope you will teach your daughters to read”: Dialogues in Arabic language guides from nineteenth-century Egypt
• 5 “Like the bleating of a goat”: Teaching learners to pronounce the ‘difficult’ Arabic consonants (1798–1945)
• 6 The Manual of Palestinean [sic] Arabic: Politics in a late-Ottoman language textbook
• 7 “Send my regards to those working on the al-Balādhurī manuscript”: The study of Arabic and Islam in interwar Jerusalem as intellectual common ground
• 8 “Our Greek dignity and our educational autonomy”: Arabic language teaching in Greek schools, 1950s to 1970s
• 9 Arabic language teaching as a battleground: Colonial and nationalist myths and discourses on Arabic in Morocco
• 10 When Tamazight was part of the world
• Index