Safaitic texts have been known since the nineteenth century. They were carved in stone before the fourth century ad by nomads living in the Ḥarrah region (southern Syria and northern Jordan) as well as in northern Saudi Arabia. Thus far 33,000 texts written in this Old Arabic dialect have been discovered. They consist mainly of short texts that can be classified in six main genres: 1) genealogy; 2) narrative; 3) signatures; 4) funerary inscriptions; 5) prayer; and 6) poetic texts. The book under review represents a pioneering study of the grammar of Safaitic texts, and it is the first since E. Littmann's seminal sketch Thamūd und Safā. Studien zur altnordarabischen Inschriften (Leipzig, 1940). The book is divided into 22 chapters and two appendices.

In Chapter 1, the author discusses the position of the Safaitic dialect among the Semitic languages, and linguistic variation in the Safaitic texts. He also addresses the problem of dating the texts and the identity of their authors. Chapter 2 is devoted to the script and orthography, and chapter 3 to phonology and phonetics. Chapter 4 is devoted to nominal morphology, while chapter 5 deals with verbal morphology. In chapters 6–11, al-Jallad studies adjectives and their agreement, prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions respectively. Chapters 12–21 address the syntax of Safaitic inscriptions: verbless and verbal clauses, the syntax of adverbs and infinitives, topicalization, relative and subordinate clauses, circumstantial and conditional clauses, co-ordination, and other rarely attested constructions. The last chapter of the book is devoted to stylistic matters: al-Jallad tries to isolate formulaic elements or recurrent words typical of the various genres. All the inscriptions referred to in his work have been revised and are given with full translation in appendix 1. Appendix 2 contains a lexicon of all the Safaitic words attested thus far with many parallels from Classical Arabic and other Semitic languages. Some reproductions of Safaitic inscriptions are given at the end of the book.

But this book is not a mere grammatical outline. It is an extensive overview of what is known up to now about Safaitic texts. This well-researched and structured book will be of interest to Semitists, who will find invaluable parallels and ideas, while comparatists will now have a reliable reference work with dozens of glossed examples when they construct linguistic models based on a large sample of world languages. The lexicon and the catalogue of inscriptions appended to the book will furthermore allow students studying Semitic languages to train themselves in this very specific field. I am happy to recommend such an excellent work.