El-Said Badawi

Not to be confused with El-Sayyid el-Badawi.
El-Said Badawi
Born
El-Said Muhammad Badawi

1929
El-Nakhas, Zagazig, Sharqiyya Governorate, Egypt
DiedMarch 16, 2014(2014-03-16) (aged 84–85)
Alma materCairo University, University of London
Occupation(s)Linguist, scholar

El-Said Muhammad Badawi (Arabic: السعيد محمد بدوي, romanized: Al-Saʿīd Muḥammad Badawī; 1929 – March 16, 2014) was a scholar and linguist and author of many works, both in English and in Arabic, dealing with various aspects of the Arabic language.[1]

Having learned the Qur'an by the age of ten in his village, El-Nakhas, Sharqiyya Governorate, he attended Al-Azhar University for his secondary schooling. He received a B.A. in Arabic Language & Literature and Islamic Studies from Cairo University, an M.A. in General Linguistics and Phonetics from the University of London, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Phonetics from the University of London.[2]

After obtaining his Ph.D. Badawi briefly taught linguistics at the University of Cairo, then began teaching Arabic literature and linguistics at Omdurman University in Sudan,[3] and moved to the American University in Cairo in 1969, where he became the Curriculum Advisor for the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) in 1970.[4]

Badawi's wide-ranging interests included colloquial Egyptian Arabic, classical Arabic as found in the Qur'an, and the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language. In the field of sociolinguistics, perhaps Badawi's best known work is Mustawayāt al-ʻArabīyah al-muʻāṣirah fī Miṣr (Levels of Contemporary Arabic in Egypt) wherein he challenges the traditional simplistic dichotomy of Classical and Colloquial Arabic, proposing instead a more subtle analysis involving several levels of usage.[5][6]

  1. ^ فاروق شوشة (2014) السعيد بدوي: عالم من طراز نادر Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "Sign In". archive-edu.com. Retrieved 2017-10-27.
  3. ^ White, Lisa (2014) El-Said Badawi
  4. ^ Bellis, Jeffrey (2009). Appeal for Arabic AUCToday, Fall 2009.
  5. ^ Although this work has not yet been translated into English Badawi explains briefly his classification of levels in his article Educated spoken Arabic: A problem in teaching Arabic as a foreign language in Jankowsky, Kurt R. (Ed.). (1985) Scientific and Humanistic Dimensions of Language. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. ISBN 9027220131. Pages 15-22.
  6. ^ see also Sayahi, Lotfi (2014) Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139867078. Pages 59-60. and Paulson, Christina (1988) International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. New York: Greenwood Press. ISBN 9780313244841. Pages 52-53.