The Shawi-type Arabic dialects

The term Shawi-Arabic refers to a bundle of closely related dialects which are spoken by Arab Bedouin tribes in various regions of the Fertile Crescent, from Lebanon to Iraq. Compared to the sedentary dialects of the region, the number of studies that provide linguistic data on Shawi dialects is still relatively small and there exists neither a comprehensive grammar nor a dictionary for any particular variety. The focus of the SHAWI-project is on the Arabic minority variety spoken in the Harran-Urfa region of Southeastern Turkey. The number of Arabic speakers in that region can be only roughly estimated between 200-300,000 people. Since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Arab minority in Turkey has been rather isolated from other Arabic speakers. This fact explains the many archaic traits in the dialects of that region. Of great importance for the linguistic development of the last century, is the more or less complete lack of any influence of Standard Arabic as Turkish is the only language of education and the media. The SHAWI-project aims to provide three main contributions: (1) A large text corpus based on audio recordings, (2) a comprehensive grammar, and (3) a digital dictionary. The basis of all three contributions is new data gathered from the field. For the sake of comparison, additional linguistic data for Syrian and Iraqi dialects will be collected from both existing studies and fieldwork. The project cooperates with the Austrian Centre of Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This guarantees that the project will apply up-to-date text technological methods and tools.