The Absence of Arabic Corpus Linguistics: A Call for Creating an Arabic National Corpus

Abstract

It is well-known that Arabic linguistic research in the Arabic countries is not based on corpora because Arab countries do not have Arabic corpus linguistics as compared to the existing English corpus linguistics. Corpora are very important in the advancement of different Arabic linguistics such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, geolinguistics, contrastive linguistics, grammar, lexicography, stylistics, language pedagogy, and translation. This concise research calls for creating an Arabic National Corpus (ANC) based on four-step design: planning the corpus, collecting the data, computerizing the corpus and analyzing the corpus. This is considered a huge project that needs the collaboration of different national institutions as well as the governments fund and support.