Superdiversity in the Gulf: Gulf Pidgin Arabic and Arabic Foreigner Talk
Superdiversity in the Gulf: Gulf Pidgin Arabic and Arabic Foreigner Talk

Summary/Abstract: The sociological concept of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007) has proved to be conducive to novel insights in the sociolinguistic study of the effects of globalization (see e.g. Blommaert 2010, Blommaert and Rampton 2011) in cities, which are a typical locus of linguistic superdiversity (Calvet 2011). A region exhibiting considerable superdiversity, triggered by both rapid urbanization and a huge inflow of immigrant workers from a variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, is the Arabian Gulf (Bassiouney 2009). The language situation is characterized, in addition to diglossia (Standard Arabic – local dialects), by processes such as koinéization and the rise of Arabic urban vernaculars (Miller 2007), the use of English, the emergence of Gulf Pidgin Arabic within the context of untutored adult second language acquisition, and the extensive use of the Foreigner Talk register of Arabic. This paper examines one manifestation of this linguistic superdiversity: the influence of the Foreigner Talk register of Arabic on Gulf Pidgin Arabic. The following structural features of Gulf Pidgin Arabic are considered: ‘two’ + singular noun; the omission of the definite article; the invariant masculine singular form of adjectives; the independent pronouns; the invariant masculine singular form of the demonstrative; the invariant forms of verbs; the light verb constructions with ‘make’; time adverbials to express tense and aspect; fi + adjective; fi + verb; variable word order; lexical items from English and from other languages; lexical polysemy; circumlocutions. It is shown that all these features are also attested in Arabic Foreigner Talk. This suggests that Arabic Foreigner Talk might be one of the sources of Gulf Pidgin Arabic structures.

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