Lisan Al-Arab

The necessity of studying Arabic dialects has attracted more attention in the recent years. Qatar University chose to support the growing academic interest and research in the field by hosting the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA) conference on 11 - 13 November 2013. The AIDA10 conference and the tenth volume of AIDA proceedings show that a good deal of change and development in the field is occurring. Fewer papers deal on hitherto unknown dialects as the white spots on the map of Arabic dialects have significantly shrunk. More papers focus on syntactical issues because we now possess more and larger text collections. Papers using'change'in their titles indicate that Arabic dialectology has a long history. Perhaps the time has come to re-examine the studies of the 1940s, 50s and 60s concerning the dialects of certain regions.