ABSTRACT
The obscure Arabic dialects spoken in Bukhara state of the Uzbek Republic are known to scholars primarily through the pioneering work of Vinnikov and Tsereteli, especially Vinnikov (1969), a collection of narrative texts collected in 1936, 1938, and 1943 in the two villages of Jogari and Arabkhane. The dialects have generated considerable interest among Arabic dialectologists, and have been investigated from the point of view of dialectology and classical historical (genetic) linguistics (Fischer 1961, Fischer and Jastrow 1980, Jastrow 1997a, 1998, Versteegh 1997). But the materials are of contemporary interest to a broader linguistic audience because of what they reveal about language contact and syntactic typology. While the dialects are conservative in their phonology and lexicon, they are radically different from other Arabic dialects (and correspondingly similar to the surrounding Persian and Turkic languages) in their syntax and to a lesser extent their morphology. They are so different indeed as to constitute a case of ‘metatypy’ in the sense of Ross (1996), that is, change of syntactic type. Furthermore they show a configuration of word order properties (specifically RelN alongside NG and NA) which is apparently quite rare (possibly otherwise non-existent) among world languages, to judge by its lack of attestation in the 149 language sample of Hawkins (1983).
