Morpho-syntactic features of Bedouin dialects of Northern Jordan

The present entry deals with the linguistic analysis of morpho-syntactic features of two varieties of Bedouin Arabic spoken in northern Jordan. It focuses on the existential clause, the negation, and the genitive. The data was collected in June 2020 during fieldwork in Samā, Muġayyir, and Zumlat al-Sirḥān (al-Mafraq Governorate), where we recorded members of the Sirḥān (a camel-breeder tribe), and in al-ʿIšša (Irbid Governorate), where we recorded members of the Nʿēm (a sheep-breeder tribe). This data is compared in a synchronic perspective with the corpus of texts we collected in 2018 in the historical region of the Jordanian Ḥōrān (rural northern Jordan). This paper intends to be a step forward in the study of Bedouin-type language varieties of northern Jordan, for which an updated and exhaustive grammatical description is currently lacking.