This book is the third of a series of collected volumes on language and linguistics published by the AUC Press. The chapters this time are based on papers delivered at the second International AUC–Oxford University Conference on Language and Linguistics, held in 2006 at the American University in Cairo. The contributions reflect global concerns related to both the Arabic and the English languages and to linguistics in general and are the work of world-renowned scholars, whose concerns address diverse but related topics in language and information dissemination. The resulting collection presented here boasts a wide range of scholarship from the Arabic-speaking world as well as the United States, Canada, and western and eastern Europe. Twelve chapters grouped in four sections cover a wide variety of topics—phonetics, syntax, variation, computational linguistics, and globalization and its effects on linguistic discourse and language teaching—and reflect the latest research in the various fields, together giving a global perspective on Arabic linguistics. Contributors: Kirk Belnap, Robert Berman, Samira ElAtia, Mervat Mohamed Ahmed Fashal, Konrad Gunesch, Jacob Høigilt, Zeinab Ibrahim, Gunvor Mejdell, Mark Van Mol, Mustafa Mughazy, Dilworth Parkinson, Irena Vassileva, Diana Yankova.

ZEINAB IBRAHIM is an assistant professor in the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo. She specializes in sociolinguistics of Arabic and issues in the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language. She is the co-editor of Diversity in Language: Contrastive Studies in English and Arabic Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (AUC Press, 2000) and Contrastive Rhetoric: Issues, Insights, and Pedagogy (AUC Press, 2004). SANAA A.M. MAKHLOUF is an instructor of rhetoric and composition in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo.