Margaret K. Omar

The Acquisition of Egyptian Arabic as a Native Language Margaret K. Omar

In 1968 Margaret K. Omar spent four months in a small Egyptian village called Sheikh Mubarak, where residents speak in a dialect closer to Sa'eedi, not the dialect spoken in Cairo. Based on her fieldwork, Omar describes the physical and social environment in which the native language was learned, the development of early communication and speech, and when and how children learn the phonology, vocabulary, morphology, and syntactical patterns of Egyptian Arabic. Omar makes comparisons with aspects of language acquisition of other languages, primarily English, and explores implications for the theory of language acquisition. Originally published in 1973, this book is the most thorough and complete analysis of the stages in which children learn Arabic as a first language. The Arabic in this book is presented in transcription, making the information accessible to all linguists interested in language acquisition.