From Arabia to Persia and back
Code-switching among the Āl ʿAlī tribe in the UAE and Iran
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.
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
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
El Zarka, Dina & Sandra Ziagos
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.

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