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The purposes of this paper are threefold. The first and the most general purpose is to provide an update of Ingham's analysis of the southern lexical features that is based on data gathered more than forty years ago (Ingham 1973). On this basis, I will reconsider the lexical link postulated by Ingham (2009Ingham ( : 101, 2007 between the southern gilit-dialects continuum, on the one hand, and the dialects of the Gulf Coast, on the other hand. The second purpose is to reconsider the hitherto maintained lexical frontiers of the southern continuum suggested by Ingham (1994), discussing a range of items that so far have always been treated as 'southern', though they are widely spread in other gilit-and, to a less extent, in qeltu-dialects in the western and northern parts of Iraq. The third purpose involves proposing the dichotomy Šrūgi/non-Šrūgi as a new and efficient way of classification of the gilit-dialects. At the end of this paper, a list of Šrūgi lexical features is given.

The split of the gǝlǝt dialects into Šrūgi and non-Šrūgi types was first introduced by the author in three studies. Here a correlation was observed between the geographic distribution of the gǝlǝt dialects and the sectarian affiliation of their speakers (Hassan 2020: 167, 2021a: 52, 2021b: 195 n. 1). The term Šrūgi refers to all gǝlǝt dialects over-whelmingly spoken by the Shīʿa population in southern Iraq and the Middle Euphrates Area, whereas the term non-Šrūgi denotes the gǝlǝt dialects of the Sunna population in the northern and western parts of the country. Accordingly, the term Šrūgi appears to be broader in scope than the traditional ‘southern Iraq’, which refers to only the southern part of the Šrūgi area. Research on negation in Šrūgi Arabic in general and on the bipartite negative constructions ʿēb-(v/v:)š and mā-(v/v:)š in particular, has thus far been very scant. In the published literature, only the single negative particles ʿēb and mā- and the split morpheme mā-(v/v:)š have been discussed, but no mention has been made of the bipartite construction ʿēb-(v/v:)š. What is more, the single negator ʿēb and the bipartite construction mā-(v/v:)š have usually been considered, although in passing, exclusive marshland features, a view that has unnecessarily been adopted in subsequent related contributions on negation in Šrūgi Arabic. However, recent research conducted by the author has shown the wide distribution of these constructions, mā-(v/v:)š in particular, in the Šrūgi area, in fact establishing an isogloss between the Šrūgi and the non-Šrūgi dialectal areas. The goal of this paper is to add new information to our knowledge of negation with the bipartite constructions ʿēb-(v/v:)š and mā-(v/v:)š in Šrūgi Arabic, showing at the same time that both constructions are not recent innovations, but their distribution has not been reported until now.

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The aim of this paper is to explore, for the first time, the qǝltu dialect spoken in the western part of the town of Al-Dor. Still to this day, this dialect remains very poorly studied and has generally been mentioned only in passing in the literature on Iraqi Arabic dialectology. The data used here are from a fieldwork trip to the town in 2018 where I was able to interview locals about their own dialect.