Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"The shadda is the key difference between a pigeon ( hamam ) and a bathroom ( hammam ). Be careful, our professor advised, in the first moment of outright humor in class, that you don't ask a waiter, 'Excuse me, where is the pigeon?' -- or, conversely, order a roasted toilet."



If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As Zora O'Neill recalls, you feel like a magician . If that foreign language is Arabic, you just might feel like a wizard.



They say that Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. O'Neill had put in her time. Steeped in grammar tomes and outdated textbooks, she faced an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master Arabic, but also driving herself crazy. She took a decade-long hiatus, but couldn't shake her fascination with the language or the cultures it had opened up to her. So she decided to jump back in--this time with a new approach.



Join O'Neill for a grand tour through the Middle East. You will laugh with her in Egypt, delight in the stories she passes on from the United Arab Emirates, and find yourself transformed by her experiences in Lebanon and Morocco. She's packed her dictionaries, her unsinkable sense of humor, and her talent for making fast friends of strangers. From quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets to the lively buzz of crowded medinas, from families' homes to local hotspots, she brings a part of the world that is thousands of miles away right to your door.



A natural storyteller with an eye for the deeply absurd and the deeply human, O'Neill explores the indelible links between culture and communication. A powerful testament to the dynamism of language, All Strangers Are Kin reminds us that learning another tongue leaves you rich with so much more than words.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (p. xi)
• Egypt
• Empty Talk (p. 3)
• Inside the Word Factory (p. 10)
• A Prophecy (p. 20)
• Two Tongues (p. 29)
• See What We Did (p. 37)
• Where's Your Ear? (p. 44)
• Days of Rage (p. 52)
• Hidden Fingers (p. 60)
• Illuminating the House (p. 67)
• Graduation Day (p. 75)
• The Gulf
• Knowledge Village (p. 83)
• Practical, Fashion, Extreme (p. 92)
• When Your Ear Hears (p. 101)
• Eau de Facebook (p. 106)
• What He Did Not Know (p. 113)
• Heritage Club (p. 119)
• The Best People (p. 125)
• Supreme Poets (p. 135)
• Develop! (p. 142)
• Lebanon
• The New Beirut (p. 153)
• What Is the Rule? (p. 159)
• We Don't Talk About Politics Here (p. 165)
• Almost a Dead Language (p. 176)
• Your Mother (p. 184)
• Easy - but Not Good (p. 190)
• The Weird Uncle (p. 200)
• Pierre and His Friends (p. 207)
• We Have Not Taught the Prophet the Price (p. 214)
• Land of Thorns (p. 222)
• Morocco
• Daddy, Mommy, Gramps (p. 233)
• The Place Where the Sun Sets (p. 240)
• You Pour the Tea (p. 247)
• God Is Beautiful (p. 254)
• Speaking Mexican (p. 263)
• Let's Chat in Arabic (p. 269)
• Sweet Sensation (p. 274)
• Up in the Old Hotel (p. 281)
• What Is the Name of This? (p. 287)
• Crossing the Bridge (p. 297)
• Acknowledgments (p. 305)
• Notes (p. 309)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Everything in its time is sweet. --ARABIC PROVERB     Prologue   In America, in the era of the War on Terror, Arabic has taken on a certain air of menace and danger. There's a jihad, a holy war, going on, the newspapers report. In clips from the front lines of conflict, insurgents bellow, "Allahu akbar!" from behind grenade launchers. Hijabs are symbols of extremism or tools of misogynist oppression, depending on which television pundit is talking. Fatwas are synonymous with death sentences. Al-Qaeda has become a generic term for Islamic terrorists of any kind. But from daily life in Egypt, where I first studied Arabic, I gleaned entirely different meanings for these same words. A jihad is that extra effort you put in to achieve a personal goal. People exclaim "Allahu akbar!" in the same way I say "Oh. My. God!" Women wear hijabs as cute accessories that pull an outfit together. Fatwas are doled out by radio and TV personalities, combining entertainment and advice much as Judge Judy and Oprah do in America. Al-Qaeda, though? Fair enough. That word has always struck terror in me, not for its literal meaning, "the foundation," but because its plural is the term for grammar. This is a book about the Middle East, but it is not about holy wars or death sentences or oppression. Instead, it is about the Arabic language and how it's used every day: to tell stories, sing songs, and discuss personal troubles, aspirations, friendships, and fashion choices. It is about Arabic for its own beautiful sake, and as a key to a culture and the three hundred million people who speak the language. Few Americans have a clear image of daily life in the Arab world, which means they have no baseline against which to compare the latest shocking newspaper headlines. Without a sense of what's normal (the news is, by definition, the abnormal), all the riots, car bombs, and civil wars easily expand to fill the imagination. This book attempts to show what's not normally covered in the media, the familiar settings -- shoe shops, parking lots, chicken restaurants, living rooms -- that exist in even the most foreign-seeming countries. This is also a book about how I learned Arabic, or tried to, in my travels around the Arab world. At age thirty-nine, in pursuit of some kind of fluency, I embarked on a series of trips to Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arabic Emirates. If this were a story about French or Italian, I wouldn't have to explain further. European languages frequently inspire lifelong romances, and people decamp to Tuscany or Provence without a second thought. With Arabic, it's not so simple. In fact, you could say that with Arabic and me, it's complicated. We go way back, to the early 1990s, when the language was an obscure field in America, considered about as useful as Old Norse. (An acquaintance assumed she had misheard, and that I studied aerobics , because that made more sense.) I took it up as a college freshman, bent on reinvention. Arabic was interesting, I reasoned, and would make me seem interesting too. Arabic wasn't my first foreign language -- I had high school French and a bit of Spanish -- but it was the first I used in a foreign land. When I went to Egypt to study for the summer, at age twenty, I marveled at how I could utter a seemingly random collection of sounds to a waiter, and presto, there appeared a glass of fresh strawberry juice, garnished with a sprig of mint. I felt like a magician. In the classroom, Arabic had been hypothetical; in Cairo, it worked . The marvel of that summer drove me for years of classes in America. But by the time I returned to Cairo, for a full year of advanced Arabic, I was burned out. I don't think it's making excuses to mention that Arabic is hard. As a professor once told me, Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. Arabic grammar is a complex web of if-then statements. The vocabulary is deep enough to drown in -- the word for dictionary originally meant sea. Most confounding of all is that there is not one Arabic, but many. Written Arabic is relatively consistent across five million square miles, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Spoken Arabic, by contrast, takes dozens of forms, in twenty-five countries in Africa and Asia. For seven years, I studied primarily the written language. I could parse a poem composed in the sixth century, but barely chit-chat with my landlord in Cairo. When I left school, I had a master's degree, yet I had felt fluent only a few times. After school, I moved to New York City. At first, I maintained a little connection to my studies -- as a tourist, I visited Lebanon, Syria, and Morocco. But soon I built a career as a travel writer to other destinations; I got married and bought a house. Those years of Arabic, I thought, were an unfortunate diversion, a false start on adulthood. Yet the language continued to rattle around in my brain. I noticed it everywhere my work took me. In New Mexico, the irrigation ditches are called acequias, from as-saqiyah , the waterwheel. At a flamenco show in Spain, the audience cries "Ojalá!" ( Allah! ) I lectured my friends on the Arabic etymology of English words: "'Algebra,' sure, everyone knows that -- but did you know 'sugar,' and 'coffee,' and 'alcohol'?" In 2007, after nine years away from Egypt, I went back, to update a guidebook. I was surprised to find my Arabic not as rusty as I'd expected, despite so much neglect. I enjoyed speaking Arabic. I even missed it a little. Here is where I should mention that I am sometimes overly optimistic, or a bit greedy, or just delusional. My father, at age seventy-six, often jokes that he's still looking for a musical instrument that he can play without having to practice. I have the same hopeful attitude toward languages. I have tried a bit of Persian, a year of Dutch, a week of Thai; I dip into Spanish every few years. I imagine that if I could find the one language that clicks in every way -- the right teacher, the right culture, the right mix of fascinating quirks and charming yet logical idioms -- I might finally be fluent in something. Yes, Arabic is monumentally difficult, but my return to Egypt reminded me that the language is full of the quirks and idioms I loved. I wanted to plunge back into Arabic, to rekindle the thrill I'd felt on my first trip to Cairo at the age of twenty. The key was to find the right circumstances. When I started investigating classes in the Middle East, my husband, who had known me in graduate school, was skeptical. "Are you sure you want to study Arabic again?" he said. "You were so miserable then." Things would be different this time, I told him. I would focus on spoken Arabic, not on the written version and all its grammatical complications. I would interact with people, not books. Classes had improved since the 1990s, when only about five thousand students were studying Arabic in the United States. Some of my professors in those years had taught Arabic as if it were a dead language, reading the text aloud, line by line, then translating to English and analyzing the grammar. Now thirty-five thousand students were enrolled in Arabic classes, and they had more dynamic teachers, jazzier textbooks, and colorful flashcards to help. I had changed too, in ways that would make me a better, happier student of Arabic. Approaching middle age, I was less insecure than I had been in my twenties, better traveled, and -- key for language learning -- more comfortable making a complete idiot of myself. Excerpted from All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World by Zora O'Neill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Love of the Arabic language led O'Neill (Moon New Mexico; Rough Guide to Cancún and the Yucatán) to immerse herself in its many variations through study and life in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Morocco. Returning to language study after a hiatus, the author was determined to learn Arabic the way Arabs learned it, rather than the formal Fusha she had previously studied. She engages in Arabic with anyone she can, studies colloquial expressions, and chronicles vocabulary, usage, and contradictions. People she interacts with while picnicking, hitchhiking, even at the aftermath of a car accident are opportunities for an exchange. What emerges is the idea of language as a connection, passion, and a reflection of the lives and history of diverse Arab peoples, a view which is lacking in the general news coverage of Middle Eastern conflict. Glimpses of daily life, particularly of Arab women, are intriguing and sometimes unexpected, including the rich assortment of Lebanese cursing while driving. VERDICT A useful complement to Middle Eastern study and essential for Arabic learners as well as an enjoyable peek into contemporary lives in the region.-Melissa Stearns, Franklin Pierce Univ. Lib., Rindge, NH © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Travel writer O'Neill's full-length debut delves into the complex world of Arabic dialects and cultural differences in a tour through Egypt, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, and Morocco. Returning to Cairo, where she studied Arabic in graduate school, she chats with her former professor on the differences between Fusha ("the language of the books") and Ammiya ("the language of the street"). In Abu Dhabi she traces the history of the Qur'an as bedrock of the Arabic language and contemplates Jahiliya poetry, a sixth-century C.E. folkloric tradition of nomadic tribes, from which the book's title is taken. More immersive lessons come from the trash talk of Beirut's aggressive taxi drivers and the fast friendship of a young woman O'Neill meets on a train in Morocco, who provides cultural insight with grace and humor. The tour is not without tension-Egypt is in post-revolutionary tumult and a hiking trip in Lebanon is marred by intersectarian violence-but O'Neill is careful not to sensationalize events. For non-Arabic speakers, some of the digressions on linguistic details such as root systems, vowel marks, and the endless variations on thanking God may prove inscrutable, but these forays into the technical are few. O'Neill doesn't teach readers to be fluent in Arabic, but she imparts a more valuable lesson on how (and how not) to learn a language, and the journey is more fascinating than the result. Agent: Gillian MacKenzie, Gillian MacKenzie Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Returning to study Arabic less formally than as a college student led the author to travel through the Arab world. The saying goes that it takes seven years to learn Arabic and a lifetime to master it. In her engaging, colloquial account, freelance and travel writer O'Neill recounts how, at the age of 39, just after the events of the Arab Spring, she decided to return to Egypt and take up a more vernacular approach to studying Arabic rather than approaching it "as if it were a dead language." Instead of studying the eloquent Arabic of medieval poetry known as Fusha, the author sought to immerse herself in the way people really speak, the Ammiya, devoid of the "crushing" grammar rules and full of humor and an ingenious root system. Now she wanted to use Arabic "as a social connector." In addition to several weeks of language classes in Cairo and a stint of study in the Gulf states, Lebanon, and Morocco, she was determined to be open to meeting and conversing with anyone who seemed interested, to mostly comic effect. The problem was that each country used a different dialect, and the Arabic she learned in Egypt was considered somewhat pedestrian elsewhere. Traveling alone in Dubai, a rarity in itself, she had hoped to encounter a more "pure" form of Arabic in the Gulf, yet she found so few people who would actually speak to her since the United Arab Emirates is made up of enormous numbers of guest workers. After a literary festival in Dubai, she took language classes in Beirut, impressed by the elegant transformation of the once war-torn city. In Fes, Morocco, where she stayed with a host family, she understood very little of the swift-moving dialect Darija, peppered with much French. In the end, O'Neill, frequently overwhelmed by the "culture's little codes, the clues and symbols that exposed sect and allegiance," needed much more time to master this language. A valiant chronicle of the author's "Year of Speaking Arabic Badly." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.