Clive Holes

Dialect, Culture & Society in Eastern Arabia, Vol. Ii: Ethnographic Texts Clive Holes

Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is a three-volume study of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bahrain by its older generation in the mid 1970s, and the socio-cultural factors that produced them.

Volume II: Ethnographic Texts presents a selection of these texts, transcribed, annotated and translated, and with detailed background essays, covering major aspects of the pre-oil culture of the Gulf and the initial stages of the transition to the modern era: pearl diving, agriculture, communal relations, marriage, childhood, domestic life, work. Excerpts from local dialect poems concerned with these subjects are also included.