"Gulf Pidgin Arabic" : individual strategies or a structured variety? : a study of some features of the linguistic behaviour of Asian migrants in the Gulf countries

Abstract

Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is a scarcely documented contact language in the Arabic-speaking Persian Gulf countries, which has been used as a communication tool between local citizens and the large Asian immigrant population in the area for at least 30 years. Based on a corpus made up of transcripts of my interviews with Asian immigrants in the Omani border town of Buraimi, I have attempted to verify its status as a separate language variety rather than as a collection of individual attempts of mastering Gulf Arabic. In this paper, I use the corpus to look at three grammatical features of this variety, possession, negation and the verbal system. By doing this, it has been possible to document systematic reductions and greater regularity in the grammar of GPA compared to that of Gulf Arabic, as well as the development of a light verb system unparalleled in Arabic, but similar to several of the main substrate languages of GPA such as Urdu. GPA grammar and phonology also display several of the characteristic features of other well-documented Arabic-based pidgins and creoles such as Juba Arabic, Nubi and Turku in Arabic-speaking Africa, something which opens up for further comparative studies on these contact varieties.