Language variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic

Abstract

works such as Smart 1990, Hobrom 1996, Wiswal 2002, Gomaa 2007, Almoaily 2008, Naess 2008, Bakir 2010, and Alshammari 2010. Importantly, since GPA is spoken by a non-indigenous workforce over a wide geographical area in a multi-ethnic speech community, language variation seems inevitable. However, to date, there is no account of variation in GPA conditioned by substrate language or length of stay. Therefore, in this thesis I analyse the impact of the first language of the speakers and the number of years of residency in their location in the Gulf as potential factors conditioning language variation in GPA. The data-base for the study consists of interviews with sixteen informants from three linguistic backgrounds: Malayalam, Bengali, and Punjabi. Interviews were conducted in two cities in Saudi Arabia: Riyadh and Alkharj. Half of the data is produced by informants who have spent five or less years in the Gulf while the other half has spent ten or more years in the Gulf by the time they were interviewed. The analysis is based on ten morpho-syntactic phenomena: free or bound object or possessive pronoun, presence or absence of the Arabic definiteness marker, presence or absence of Arabic conjunction markers, presence or absence of the GPA copula, and presence or absence of agreement in the verb phrase and the noun phrase. Given the fact that most of the current theories on contact languages have been made on the basis of Indo-European language based pidgins and creoles, analysing the above features in an Arabic-based pidgin promises to be a great addition to the literature of pidgins and creoles. Results of this thesis show that both first language and number of years of stay in the Gulf seem to have little effect on my informants’ choices as regards the studied morpho-syntactic features. There is a significant adaptation to the system of Gulf Arabic (the lexifier language) only with respect to one feature: conjunction markers. This finding could be taken to support Universalist theories of the emergence of contact languages. However, some substratal effect can still be noticed in the data.