Jonathan Owens is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He has experience in all aspects of Arabic linguistics, including the Classical linguistic tradition and contemporary spoken varieties, with extensive academic and research experience in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the USA. His many publications include The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory, 1988, Neighborhood and Ancestry: Variation in the Spoken Arabic of Maiduguri, Nigeria, 1998, and A Linguistic History of Arabic, 2009.