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SUMMARYThe history of speech errors is reviewed in the West and traced back to its origin in Medieval Arabic linguistics. It is claimed that Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), the Austrian linguist was not the first scholar to start speech error studies. Some western as well as many Arab linguists were interested in speech errors long before him. It is claimed that Meringer may have been under the influence of Arabic books on speech errors since he thaught at the Orientalische Akademie in Vienna and was in touch with Orientalists interested in speech-error studies. The paper also points out how the interest of Arab linguists in this area emanated from their fear that such errors may lead to the corruption of Arabic and misunderstandings of the Qur'an. Arab linguists collected speech errors made by educated and uneducated people from different parts of the Arabic-speaking world. Such errors were related to language use, social setting, and cultural factors. Linguistic explanations were also provided such as assimilation, substitution, nearness of point of articulation, anticipation, deletion, addition, and analogy as well as hypercorrection. This helped greatly in the development of empirical studies of phonetics, grammar, lexicography, dialects, the Arabic writing system, and scholarship concerning the Qur'an.RÉSUMÉApres un aperçu sur l'histoire des erreurs de langue dans le monde occidental, l'auteur remonte aux origines: la linguistique arabe du Moyen-Age. Le linguiste autrichien Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), avance-t-il, ne fut pas le premier erudit a entreprendre l'etude de telles erreurs. Plusieurs linguistes d'Occident et beaucoup de linguistes arabes s'y etaient interesses bien avant lui. Meringer, soutient l'auteur, a fort bien pu etre influence par des ouvrages arabes relatifs aux erreurs de langue a partir du moment ou il enseigna a l'academie viennoise d'etudes orientales et fut ainsi en contact avec des orien-talistes interesses par la lapsologie. L'article met en lumiere comment l'in-teret des linguistes arabes pour ce domaine decoulait de leur crainte que de telles erreurs ne menent a la corruption de la langue arabe et a de fausses interpretations du Qur'an. Les linguistes arabes relevaient les erreurs de langue commises par des personnes, cultivees ou non, originaires des differentes parties du monde arabophone. De telles erreurs, ils les mettaient en relation avec l'usage et matiere de langue, le cadre social et les facteurs culturels. Ils propo-saient aussi des explications linguistiques, telles que 1'assimilation, la substitution, le voisinage de point d'articulation, 1'anticipation, la suppression, l'addi-tion et l'analogie, ainsi que la surcorrection. Tout cela contribua beaucoup a developper les etudes empiriques en phonetique, grammaire, lexicographie, dialectologie, graphie arabe, ainsi que l'erudition coranique.