Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter One. Introduction / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Two. General Methodology / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Three. Corpus / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Four. Phonology And Orthography / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Five. Morphology / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Six. Letter Style, Presentation, And Lexicon / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Seven. Syntax / E.-M. Wagner -- Chapter Eight. General Trends In The Judaeo-Arabic Letters From The Genizah / E.-M. Wagner -- Bibliography / E.-M. Wagner -- Index / E.-M. Wagner -- Classmarks / E.-M. Wagner -- Plates / E.-M. Wagner.

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The Cairo Genizah has preserved a vast number of medieval and post-medieval letters written in the Jewish variety of Arabic. The linguistic peculiarities of these letters provide an invaluable source for the understanding of the history of the Arabic language and the development of Arabic dialects. This work compares and contrasts various linguistic features of Judaeo-Arabic letters from different periods, and is one of the first studies to present a comprehensive linguistic investigation into non-literary Judaeo-Arabic. Its main focus is to provide an extensive diachronic linguistic description, while distinguishing between features of epistolary Arabic and vernacular phenomena. This study should be of interest to anyone working on the Arabic language, sociolinguistics, general historical linguistics and language typology. \'...in the extant volume she [Wagner] has clearly demonstrated that Judeo-Arabic letters are to be viewed as primary source material, capturing important aspects of language understanding of Jews and Judaism in the medieval and early modern Islamic world, and therefore providing essential insights into the linguistic function of a substandard language or ethnolect like Judeo-Arabic.\' Wout van Bekkum, BiOr numbers LXX 3/4