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Part of
Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 313–330

From Arabia to Persia and back

Code-switching among the Āl ʿAlī tribe in the UAE and Iran

| The University of Iowa

This paper explores the discourse functions of Arabic-Persian code-switching and the phonological/lexical outcomes of language contact among members of the Āl ʿAlī tribe in the United Arab Emirates and Hurmuzgān Province in Iran. The linguistic environment among the Āl ʿAlī is characterized by bilingualism and multidialectalism. In the spoken and written code, they generate a tetra-glossic switching between Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Colloquial Arabic, Modern Standard Persian, Colloquial Persian and two Persian dialects: Bandarī and Ačumī. The study draws on recorded data with tribal members in the UAE and conversation threads of fellow Iranian tribesmen on social media sites. The main theoretical construct applied for the analysis is the Matrix Language-Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002). It will be argued that the nature of codeswitching among the Āl ʿAlī is situational and transactional, both inter- and intra-sentential. Language and dialect choice is determined by the topic of the conversation, the interlocutors’ identity and their relationship to each other.

Keywords: code-switching, bilingualism, multidialectalism, Persian Gulf, Gulf Arabic, Arabs in Iran, Matrix Language-Frame model, Persian dialects, Āl ʿAlī tribe
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Arabs on the Iranian Gulf Coast
  • 3.The Āl ʿAlī and their dominion
  • 4.Language use among the Āl ʿAlī
  • 5.Language data
    • 5.1Persian monolingual data
    • 5.2Arabic monolingual data
    • 5.3Arabic-Persian bilingual data
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.16gaz
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2020. The Beginnings of Word Order Change in the Arabic Dialects of Southern Iran in Contact with Persian: A Preliminary Study of Data from Four Villages in Bushehr and Hormozgan. Iranian Studies 53:3-4 ► pp. 465 ff. DOI logo

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