Migrant Workers’ Varieties of Arabic in Hijaz, Madinah: Pidgin or Interlanguage Varieties?

Abstract

This thesis investigates whether the Arabic L2 varieties spoken by 30 Madinah-based migrant workers, who have Bengali, Hindi-Urdu or Tagalog as their L1, are pidgin or interlanguage varieties. To answer this research question, I first examine the verbal and nominal agreements in the speech of three migrant workers. I then investigate in detail the impact of a series of internal and external factors on the use of the definite article /ʔal-/ ‘the’, the coordinating conjunction marker /wa/ ‘and’, the production of /f/ in the speech of all 30 migrant workers in the corpus. I hypothesise that the migrant workers’ Arabic L2 can be considered a pidgin variety if the following apply: they have reduced verbal and nominal systems; they typically delete the morphosyntactic features and substitute /f/ with other variants; contextual predictors negligibly impact their L2 production; and their Arabic L2 is simplified compared to Hijazi Arabic (HA), the local variety of Arabic. However, if their use of the morphological features follows the usage patterns of L1 HA speakers and their use of morphosyntactic and phological features is significantly conditioned by contextual factors, the migrant workers’ Arabic L2 can be considered interlanguage varieties. Data were collected by way of one-hour semi-structured Zoom interviews and questionnaires. The questionnaires included a series of demographic information, questions concerning the participants' use and acquisition of Arabic and attitudinal information. The qualitative analysis of targeted morphological features reveals that the Arabic speech of the three migrants lacks both subject-verb agreement and noun-adjective-agreement. This result possibly supports the pidgin hypothesis. The quantitative analysis shows that while the examined linguistic features are employed categorically in L1 HA, they are used variably in the migrants' L2 varieties. Mixedeffect logistic regression models show that the migrant workers in my sample overwhelmingly delete the morphosyntactic features, with most of the independent variables not significantly affecting their use. The variations across various linguistic variables and throughout various language groups suggest that the L2 Arabic spoken by the migrants represent an interlanguage. With the phonological feature /f/, the impact of migrants' L1 becomes apparent, and the use of this variable is significantly affected by the independent variables included in the modelling. Hence, these findings suggest that the migrants’ Arabic L2s are interlanguage varieties. The analysis of morphological features and the analysis of morphosyntactic and phonological features point towards opposite conclusions. I tentatively propose that the Arabic varieties of the migrant workers studied in this thesis are located on a continuum, where the higher end may be closer to an interlanguage.