T. F. Mitchell: Pronouncing Arabic, 2. xv, 307 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. £37.50.

This is the work of a master linguist who has devoted his entire academic career to dealing with the intricacies of the Arabic language. Those who are familiar with
Professor Mitchell's work will recognize in this book those scholarly attributes that have made its author the respected figure he is in the field of Arabic linguistics: his breathtaking know- ledge of the Arabic language in its geographic- ally and stylistically determined forms, his meticulous attention to detail in describing the phonetic-cum-phonological facts of the language, his ability to generalize over a wide terrain in a manner which takes into account the various particularities of the language, and his awareness of the ' sheer hard work' which the learners of Arabic have to endure to acquire the seemingly bewildering variations in the language adequately. To the untrained eye the author of this book may therefore be seen to be totally immersed in linguistic description, but this is not so simply because the descriptions he offers are rooted in a wide-ranging theoretical framework in which phonetics, phonology, morphology and sociolinguistics all play an important interpretative role.