The present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who address a variety of topics related to contact-induced change, the emergence of contact languages, codeswitching, as well as language ideologies in contact situations. It offers insights from different theoretical approaches in connection with research fields such as descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and language acquisition. It provides the general linguistic public with an updated, cutting edge overview and appreciation of themes and problems in Arabic linguistics and sociolinguists alike.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
The goal of this paper is to discuss the Arabic component in the northern dialects of Domari spoken in Lebanon, Syria and Southern Turkey and see to what extent it differs from the Arabic component found in southern Domari, spoken in Jordan and Palestine and already discussed by Matras (2007, 2012).
In this paper, we discuss a number of morphosyntactic properties of Sason Arabic, which could be strongly argued to be due to contact with the neighboring languages, some of which have head-final properties. We argue that Sason Arabic patterns with both its Arabic neighbors and the typologically different surrounding, and sociolinguistically dominant languages, particularly Kurdish and Turkish. We aim to show that syntactic constructions in contact contexts can provide important insights into the nature of the contact and the history of the language and its speakers.
The development of double negation in Arabic has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The striking parallels between negation in Berber and North African Arabic invite an explanation in contact terms, and such explanations have indeed been debated. However, in addition to their use in postverbal negation, reflexes of šayʔ have several functions not directly related to negation, notably indefinite quantification and polar question marking. The marking of these functions, too, shows striking Arabic-Berber parallels generally neglected in discussions of the phenomenon. Taking these into account produces a more complete picture of contact influence, and provides clues to the relative chronology of these developments. In some cases, non-Arabic varieties are found to preserve usages obsolete in present-day regional Arabic dialects.
Near the Berber-speaking town of Al Hoceima, there are a few hamlets and villages where people speak Arabic and find themselves in a situation where Berber is the dominant language. These dialects of Moroccan Arabic have seldom been described. What is taking place on the border between Berber and Arabic in this region? What types of contact? What influences? We visited one village on the Berber speaking side (Taounil) and one hamlet on the Arabic-speaking side. Our fieldwork was tentative transdisciplinary work by linguists and ethnobotanists, which allowed us to collect very spontaneous data, since the stress was put on the ethnobotanic questioning. We present here our results, analysing the specific traits of these dialects.
This paper is devoted to the Arabic dialect spoken on the Dahlak archipelago of Eritrea, a variety of Arabic poorly documented so far. There are few studies on the Arabic varieties spoken on the African coast of the Red sea (Simeone-Senelle 2000b, 2002, 2005a–b, 2009; Kassim Mohamed 2012) but none of them has been dedicated particularly to Arabic as spoken on the islands. By revising previously published data about the Arabic variety spoken by islanders, I will attempt to assess the specific features of Dahlaki Arabic. After an overview of the archipelago and its sociolinguistic situation on the three inhabited islands, the main features of Arabic spoken on the islands will be compared with Arabic spoken as lingua franca (ALF) on the African coast of the Red Sea. The issue is to determine to what extend a distinction can be drawn between both Arabic varieties: Dahlaki Arabic and ALF of the coast.
Generally speaking, it is at the edges of the Arabic speaking world that one finds the most borrowings and where the influence of contact on the internal development of Arabic is most visible. Although Mauritanian Ḥassāniyya is an exception to this general trend (Taine-Cheikh 1994, 2007), the dialect has nonetheless retained traces of the region’s past and namely of the very gradual disappearance of Zenaga Berber.
My goal here is to assess, based on the study of a particular lexical sub-category (verb forms with quadriliteral roots), the influence Berber may have had on lexical formation in Ḥassāniyya Arabic.
This paper will explain the strategies of loan verbs integration in Egyptian Arabic (EA). As a recipient language, EA adopts two strategies: (a) insertion with ‘Light Verb Strategy’; and (b) Direct Insertion either with or without ‘Reduction to Root.’
While direct insertion strategy without ‘reduction to root’ is used almost exclusively for imperative loan verbs, the same strategy with ‘reduction to root’ is open to any ‘input form’. To each loan verb EA assigns a root and the loan verb assumes one of the EA verbal forms.
An investigation of new loan verbs passed to EA through Social Media, while they are being integrated, gives us further insight, and therefore a better understanding, into the integration process of loan verbs in general.
The contact between Italian and Libyan Arabic, whose earliest traces date back to the first half of the XIX century, intensified in the decades immediately preceding the Italian occupation of Libya (1911). The number of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic can be estimated at about 700 lexical items, although for some of them the source might be another Romance language. The present study integrates the loanwords provided by Abdu (1988) with more lexical items collected from Yoda (2005), Pereira (2010) and the author’s personal fieldwork. The data obtained are subsequently analyzed from a phonetical and morphological perspective, contributing to the knowledge of the processes of adaptation of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic.
The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan). The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics) are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical system.
One of the more recent, and certainly one of the most empirically well-founded accounts of language change is Labov’s (2007) division between transmission and diffusion. The former results in gradual change via incrementation, the latter in larger and irregular change. This study examines the generality of this distinction, which was based on American vowel systems, against the rich history of Arabic. Five case studies are described in which it is shown that Arabic, like English, has striking instances of language stability across varieties as geo-diachronically separated as Emirati and Nigerian Arabic. By the same token, there are equally striking instances of widespread change due to contact. It is argued that in only one of these, Nubi (Creole Arabic), can diffusional changes be considered irregular, while in three others, Baghdadi Arabic (phonology), Uzbekistan or Central Asian Mixed Arabic (morphology and syntax) and Nigerian Arabic (semantics of idioms), the changes though of differing degrees of magnitude in their outcomes, cannot be said to be irregular. The study highlights two points: global criteria for defining the outcomes of transmission vs. diffusion are elusive, and Arabic, because of the ability to triangulate into different phases of its past, offers an unusually interesting insight into the workings of historical linguistic processes.
This paper applies the model of the Basic Variety developed by Klein & Perdue (1997) and elaborated by Benazzo (2003) to two basic forms of communication in Arabic, Pidgin Madame and Gulf Pidgin Arabic. Benazzo’s analysis of the development of temporal adverbs of contrast (resultative already; continuative still) in the Basic Variety of German, French and English leads to certain predictions about the sequentiality of their acquisition. In the Basic Variety of Arabic the acquisition of these adverbs develops in a different manner. Although their source language does not contain a resultative adverb, both varieties feature such an adverb (kalas). This contradicts Benazzo’s findings, as does the relatively frequent use of a continuative particle (bād) at a very early stage.
The paper compares morphosyntactic and lexical features of the Arabic Foreigner Talk register to those of four Arabic-lexifier pidgins, Pidgin Madame, Jordanian Pidgin Arabic, Romanian Pidgin Arabic, and Gulf Pidgin Arabic. The comparative overview identifies a relatively significant number of features which Arabic Foreigner Talk shares with all or with at least some of these Arabic-lexifier pidgins. The paper proposes an account in terms of a feedback relationship whereby Arabic Foreigner Talk and Pidgin Arabic reinforce one another in the occurrence of these features.
Linguists have long assumed that Juba Arabic and Nubi, the two Arabic creoles spoken in East Africa, have been cut off from each other since their “linguistic divergence” in the 1880s. This historical interpretation, however, overlooks sociocultural (including linguistic) interactions between the Nubi-speaking communities of Uganda and Kenya and a minor Juba Arabic-speaking community in South Sudan called Malakiyyans since the 1880s down to the present day. This paper aims at exploring their history and the way in which they have interacted with each other to redefine their identity, focusing on the musical tradition called dolúka and dirêr.
Nominal insertions in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching are very common. They typically appear as French maximal projections embedded in a larger constituent headed by the Arabic determiners wāḥəd and hād. However, the reasons behind the insertion of determiners have not been clarified. This study, which relies on the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993), seeks to elucidate the factors inducing the insertion of determiners in the morphosyntactic and semantic frame of Moroccan Arabic. Analyzing eleven hours of recorded data, we will show that on the morphosyntactic level, the mismatch between Moroccan Arabic and French definiteness, gender and number may explain the frequency of such insertions. Though, morphosyntactic structure is not the only factor at play in contexts where determination is complex in both languages, and we thus need to take into account other domains such as the semantic, pragmatic and enunciative ones.
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.
Ideologies, or ways of understanding one’s relation to the world, impede or encourage, and affect the form of, language contact practices such as borrowing and codeswitching. This is illustrated by the pragmatic functions – informative or humorous – of the Israeli Hebrew word menahēl ‘boss’ in Palestinian Arabic. By using ‘boss’ in an ironic sense, to refer to a self-important ‘big-head’, Palestinians are expressing their stance by means of a Hebrew loanword, to take a dig at the powers that be. The article provides examples of real usage and grounds the explanation for the different meanings in pragmatics, cultural theory, and Althusser’s conception of ideologies in ways that are useful to linguistic ethnography.
The article presents the speakers’ perception of contact-induced linguistic change in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, based on data collected during the authors’ doctoral research (Serreli 2016). The research explored language attitudes and ideologies in Siwa with a qualitative approach built on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories. Linguistic change is presented by speakers as a generational variation; it is attributed to the increased contact between the Siwi and Arabic languages that followed the wider socioeconomic change in the community in recent decades. Moreover, Siwi speakers hold a variety of attitudes towards linguistic change, appreciating phenomena perceived as adjustments to the current times, while criticizing those perceived as a betrayal or corruption of their native language.
The present volume provides an overview of current trends in the study of language contact involving Arabic. By drawing on the social factors that have converged to create different contact situations, it explores both contact-induced change in Arabic and language change through contact with Arabic. The volume brings together leading scholars who address a variety of topics related to contact-induced change, the emergence of contact languages, codeswitching, as well as language ideologies in contact situations. It offers insights from different theoretical approaches in connection with research fields such as descriptive and historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, and language acquisition. It provides the general linguistic public with an updated, cutting edge overview and appreciation of themes and problems in Arabic linguistics and sociolinguists alike.
As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
The goal of this paper is to discuss the Arabic component in the northern dialects of Domari spoken in Lebanon, Syria and Southern Turkey and see to what extent it differs from the Arabic component found in southern Domari, spoken in Jordan and Palestine and already discussed by Matras (2007, 2012).
In this paper, we discuss a number of morphosyntactic properties of Sason Arabic, which could be strongly argued to be due to contact with the neighboring languages, some of which have head-final properties. We argue that Sason Arabic patterns with both its Arabic neighbors and the typologically different surrounding, and sociolinguistically dominant languages, particularly Kurdish and Turkish. We aim to show that syntactic constructions in contact contexts can provide important insights into the nature of the contact and the history of the language and its speakers.
The development of double negation in Arabic has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The striking parallels between negation in Berber and North African Arabic invite an explanation in contact terms, and such explanations have indeed been debated. However, in addition to their use in postverbal negation, reflexes of šayʔ have several functions not directly related to negation, notably indefinite quantification and polar question marking. The marking of these functions, too, shows striking Arabic-Berber parallels generally neglected in discussions of the phenomenon. Taking these into account produces a more complete picture of contact influence, and provides clues to the relative chronology of these developments. In some cases, non-Arabic varieties are found to preserve usages obsolete in present-day regional Arabic dialects.
Near the Berber-speaking town of Al Hoceima, there are a few hamlets and villages where people speak Arabic and find themselves in a situation where Berber is the dominant language. These dialects of Moroccan Arabic have seldom been described. What is taking place on the border between Berber and Arabic in this region? What types of contact? What influences? We visited one village on the Berber speaking side (Taounil) and one hamlet on the Arabic-speaking side. Our fieldwork was tentative transdisciplinary work by linguists and ethnobotanists, which allowed us to collect very spontaneous data, since the stress was put on the ethnobotanic questioning. We present here our results, analysing the specific traits of these dialects.
This paper is devoted to the Arabic dialect spoken on the Dahlak archipelago of Eritrea, a variety of Arabic poorly documented so far. There are few studies on the Arabic varieties spoken on the African coast of the Red sea (Simeone-Senelle 2000b, 2002, 2005a–b, 2009; Kassim Mohamed 2012) but none of them has been dedicated particularly to Arabic as spoken on the islands. By revising previously published data about the Arabic variety spoken by islanders, I will attempt to assess the specific features of Dahlaki Arabic. After an overview of the archipelago and its sociolinguistic situation on the three inhabited islands, the main features of Arabic spoken on the islands will be compared with Arabic spoken as lingua franca (ALF) on the African coast of the Red Sea. The issue is to determine to what extend a distinction can be drawn between both Arabic varieties: Dahlaki Arabic and ALF of the coast.
Generally speaking, it is at the edges of the Arabic speaking world that one finds the most borrowings and where the influence of contact on the internal development of Arabic is most visible. Although Mauritanian Ḥassāniyya is an exception to this general trend (Taine-Cheikh 1994, 2007), the dialect has nonetheless retained traces of the region’s past and namely of the very gradual disappearance of Zenaga Berber.
My goal here is to assess, based on the study of a particular lexical sub-category (verb forms with quadriliteral roots), the influence Berber may have had on lexical formation in Ḥassāniyya Arabic.
This paper will explain the strategies of loan verbs integration in Egyptian Arabic (EA). As a recipient language, EA adopts two strategies: (a) insertion with ‘Light Verb Strategy’; and (b) Direct Insertion either with or without ‘Reduction to Root.’
While direct insertion strategy without ‘reduction to root’ is used almost exclusively for imperative loan verbs, the same strategy with ‘reduction to root’ is open to any ‘input form’. To each loan verb EA assigns a root and the loan verb assumes one of the EA verbal forms.
An investigation of new loan verbs passed to EA through Social Media, while they are being integrated, gives us further insight, and therefore a better understanding, into the integration process of loan verbs in general.
The contact between Italian and Libyan Arabic, whose earliest traces date back to the first half of the XIX century, intensified in the decades immediately preceding the Italian occupation of Libya (1911). The number of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic can be estimated at about 700 lexical items, although for some of them the source might be another Romance language. The present study integrates the loanwords provided by Abdu (1988) with more lexical items collected from Yoda (2005), Pereira (2010) and the author’s personal fieldwork. The data obtained are subsequently analyzed from a phonetical and morphological perspective, contributing to the knowledge of the processes of adaptation of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic.
The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan). The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics) are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical system.
One of the more recent, and certainly one of the most empirically well-founded accounts of language change is Labov’s (2007) division between transmission and diffusion. The former results in gradual change via incrementation, the latter in larger and irregular change. This study examines the generality of this distinction, which was based on American vowel systems, against the rich history of Arabic. Five case studies are described in which it is shown that Arabic, like English, has striking instances of language stability across varieties as geo-diachronically separated as Emirati and Nigerian Arabic. By the same token, there are equally striking instances of widespread change due to contact. It is argued that in only one of these, Nubi (Creole Arabic), can diffusional changes be considered irregular, while in three others, Baghdadi Arabic (phonology), Uzbekistan or Central Asian Mixed Arabic (morphology and syntax) and Nigerian Arabic (semantics of idioms), the changes though of differing degrees of magnitude in their outcomes, cannot be said to be irregular. The study highlights two points: global criteria for defining the outcomes of transmission vs. diffusion are elusive, and Arabic, because of the ability to triangulate into different phases of its past, offers an unusually interesting insight into the workings of historical linguistic processes.
This paper applies the model of the Basic Variety developed by Klein & Perdue (1997) and elaborated by Benazzo (2003) to two basic forms of communication in Arabic, Pidgin Madame and Gulf Pidgin Arabic. Benazzo’s analysis of the development of temporal adverbs of contrast (resultative already; continuative still) in the Basic Variety of German, French and English leads to certain predictions about the sequentiality of their acquisition. In the Basic Variety of Arabic the acquisition of these adverbs develops in a different manner. Although their source language does not contain a resultative adverb, both varieties feature such an adverb (kalas). This contradicts Benazzo’s findings, as does the relatively frequent use of a continuative particle (bād) at a very early stage.
The paper compares morphosyntactic and lexical features of the Arabic Foreigner Talk register to those of four Arabic-lexifier pidgins, Pidgin Madame, Jordanian Pidgin Arabic, Romanian Pidgin Arabic, and Gulf Pidgin Arabic. The comparative overview identifies a relatively significant number of features which Arabic Foreigner Talk shares with all or with at least some of these Arabic-lexifier pidgins. The paper proposes an account in terms of a feedback relationship whereby Arabic Foreigner Talk and Pidgin Arabic reinforce one another in the occurrence of these features.
Linguists have long assumed that Juba Arabic and Nubi, the two Arabic creoles spoken in East Africa, have been cut off from each other since their “linguistic divergence” in the 1880s. This historical interpretation, however, overlooks sociocultural (including linguistic) interactions between the Nubi-speaking communities of Uganda and Kenya and a minor Juba Arabic-speaking community in South Sudan called Malakiyyans since the 1880s down to the present day. This paper aims at exploring their history and the way in which they have interacted with each other to redefine their identity, focusing on the musical tradition called dolúka and dirêr.
Nominal insertions in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching are very common. They typically appear as French maximal projections embedded in a larger constituent headed by the Arabic determiners wāḥəd and hād. However, the reasons behind the insertion of determiners have not been clarified. This study, which relies on the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993), seeks to elucidate the factors inducing the insertion of determiners in the morphosyntactic and semantic frame of Moroccan Arabic. Analyzing eleven hours of recorded data, we will show that on the morphosyntactic level, the mismatch between Moroccan Arabic and French definiteness, gender and number may explain the frequency of such insertions. Though, morphosyntactic structure is not the only factor at play in contexts where determination is complex in both languages, and we thus need to take into account other domains such as the semantic, pragmatic and enunciative ones.
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.
Ideologies, or ways of understanding one’s relation to the world, impede or encourage, and affect the form of, language contact practices such as borrowing and codeswitching. This is illustrated by the pragmatic functions – informative or humorous – of the Israeli Hebrew word menahēl ‘boss’ in Palestinian Arabic. By using ‘boss’ in an ironic sense, to refer to a self-important ‘big-head’, Palestinians are expressing their stance by means of a Hebrew loanword, to take a dig at the powers that be. The article provides examples of real usage and grounds the explanation for the different meanings in pragmatics, cultural theory, and Althusser’s conception of ideologies in ways that are useful to linguistic ethnography.
The article presents the speakers’ perception of contact-induced linguistic change in the Egyptian oasis of Siwa, based on data collected during the authors’ doctoral research (Serreli 2016). The research explored language attitudes and ideologies in Siwa with a qualitative approach built on sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories. Linguistic change is presented by speakers as a generational variation; it is attributed to the increased contact between the Siwi and Arabic languages that followed the wider socioeconomic change in the community in recent decades. Moreover, Siwi speakers hold a variety of attitudes towards linguistic change, appreciating phenomena perceived as adjustments to the current times, while criticizing those perceived as a betrayal or corruption of their native language.