Nigerian Arabic is spoken by some 400 000 Arabs in NE Nigeria their presence in Nigeria going
back at least 200 years though probably far longer. Their dialect however is relatively
unknown within Arabic dialectology. As a general reference grammar this book will thus be of
interest to Arabicists Africanists as well as to scholars of culture history particularly in
the light it sheds on the linguistic status of an Arabic dialect spoken by minority Arabic
group. While formalized linguistic statements generally are avoided in this grammar there is a
detailed coverage of phonology morphology and syntax as well as indications about where
dialectal and sociolectal variation is found. Beside the standard presentation of phonological
tables morphological paradigms and syntactic classes one of the data bases the grammar is
constructed from is some 20 hours of transcribed texts from which examples are freely drawn. A
rigorous structural summary is thus complemented by exemplification from natural speech.
