This book contains twelve essays by leading linguists on the state of Arabic today. 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.