Munther Younes is the Reis Senior Lecturer in Arabic Language and Linguistics and Director of the Arabic program in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Concurrently, he also holds the role of Academic Director of Akadimiyyat Arabiyyat al-Naas in Jordan.
In addition to directing the Arabic program, he teaches different levels of specialized Arabic courses in Arabic linguistics and the language of the Quran. Before joining the Cornell faculty in 1990, he taught Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and prior to that, he taught English and linguistics in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Younes has published a number of articles in Arabic linguistics, teaching Arabic as a foreign language, and the language of the Qur’an. He has developed an Arabic program at Cornell that is radically different from Arabic programs elsewhere in its integration of spoken Arabic with Modern Standard Arabic, reflecting the language's use by native speakers.
He earned a B.A. in English and a diploma in education from the University of Jordan (1974), and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin (1982).
Younes’s research interests include Arabic linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics, and comparative/historical dialectology), teaching Arabic as a foreign language, the language of the Qur’an and comparative Semitic linguistics.