Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik section one The Near and Middle East Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (Princeton) Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) Kees Versteegh (Nijmegen) VOLUME 51-3 Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1 Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia Volume Three: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style By Clive Holes LEIDEN | BOSTON Library of Congress control number: 00051896 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. 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Contents General Introduction vii Acknowledgements xi Volume III: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style xiii Map 1 and Key xiv Map 2 and Key xv Abbreviations and Conventions xvi References xviii 1 Communities, Histories, and Dialects in Bahrain and the Wider Gulf 1 1.1 Communities 1 1.2 Historical Memory, Real and Imagined 6 1.3 Language History 10 1.4 Core and Periphery 32 1.5 Eastern Arabia and Central Asia 41 1.6 Summary and Conclusions 48 2 Phonology 50 2.1 Phoneme Inventory: Consonants 50 2.2 Phoneme Inventory: Vowels 65 2.3 The Syllable 69 2.4 Consonant Clusters 71 2.5 Stress 76 2.6 Phonotactics 76 3 Morphology (I) 81 3.1 Pronouns 81 3.2 Adverbs 100 3.3 Particles 103 3.4 Nouns 116 3.5 Adjectives 128 3.6 The Construct State 130 3.7 Nunation (tanwīn) 131 3.8 Numerals 134 vi contents 4 Morphology (II) 138 4.1 Verb Patterns and Stems: Active Voice 138 4.2 The Internal (‘Apophonic’) Passive 166 4.3 Quadriliterals 168 4.4 Inflectional Morphology 184 4.5 The Strong Verb: Imperative 201 4.6 The Strong Verb: Participles 202 4.7 The Verbal Noun 204 4.8 The Geminate Verb 209 4.9 The Weak Verb 209 4.10 Irregular Verbs 211 5 Syntax 213 5.1 The Noun Phrase (NP) 213 5.2 The Verb Phrase (VP) 227 5.3 Agreement 326 5.4 Word Order 354 5.5 Clause Co-ordination 369 5.6 Subordinate Noun Clauses 374 5.7 Relative Clauses 387 5.8 Clauses of Reason 391 5.9 Clauses of Purpose and Result 393 5.10 Clauses of Comparison and Degree 397 5.11 Conditional and Time Clauses 402 6 Style in Spoken Discourse 434 6.1 Involving the Listener/ Interlocutor 435 6.2 Narrative Techniques 447 6.3 Dramatization 458 6.4 Affect 463 7 Some Trends in Dialectal Change Since the Mid-1970s 467 7.1 Sociolinguistic Studies of Bahrain of the 1970s 467 7.2 The Work of al-Qouz (2009) 469 7.3 Further Observations Post-1970s 474 Further addenda and corrigenda to Volume 1 479 General Introduction The aim of Dialect, Culture and Society in Eastern Arabia is to give a detailed description of the Arabic dialects and culture of the island state of Bahrain of the pre-oil era, as spoken and remembered by uneducated Bahrainis who were aged forty or over in the mid-1970s. The linguistic description contained in Volume 1: Glossary, (2001) and the present Volume 3: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style, is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest. Topics covered in Volume 2: Ethnographic Texts (2005) include local Bahraini history, marriage customs, family life, traditional beliefs and practices, popular culture, chil- dren’s games, building techniques, agriculture, fishing, pearling-diving and employment in the pre-oil era more generally. The original project out of which this study grew was a sociolinguistic enquiry into generational language change in Bahrain, the results of which were extensively reported in the 1980s and 1990s in book- and article-length publications. The present three-volume study is devoted exclusively to the lan- guage and culture of the least educated half of the original population sample1: a linguistic and cultural patrimony which, with the death of many of the gen- eration which I recorded, has, almost overnight, been wiped from the collec- tive memory and literally consigned to the museum as a curiosity. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the preservation of this culture for posterity, not as a wax- work but vividly described by those who actually lived it, is one of the main reasons for publishing this study. Approximately 90% of the textual material on which it is based has not been published before. Evidence, if it were needed, of the rapidity of social change in the Gulf is that the way of life described in my material is now, at the beginning of the 21st century, a favourite subject— albeit with the dialect bowdlerized and modernized to make it intelligible to the younger generation—for television docu-soaps with nostalgic titles like Firǧān L-Awwal (‘The Neighborhoods of the Old Days’) and il-Bēt il-ˁŌd (‘The Big (i.e. extended-family) House’). Despite all the material progress, somehow there seems to be a feeling in Bahrain that, as one of my illiterate informants aptly and directly put it forty years ago, zād il-xēr u qallat il-anāsa ‘we’re better off these days, but life isn’t so much fun’. 1 It is thus radically different from my earlier books Gulf Arabic, Routledge, 1990, and Colloquial Arabic of the Gulf, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2010 (1st edition 1984). These two books were both based solely on the Gulf Arabic spoken by educated speakers. viii general introduction The speaker sample for this study consists of approximately one hun- dred uneducated native speakers, divided approximately equally by sex and sectarian allegiance into ˁArab (= indigenous Bahraini Sunnīs) and Baḥārna (= indigenous Bahraini Shīˁa), and drawn from virtually every village and neigh- bourhood in Bahrain. Interviews lasting between fifteen minutes and an hour were recorded with each speaker. The vast majority of the interviews were con- ducted by other Bahrainis known to the interlocutors—usually relatives (often children or grandchildren), friends, or work colleagues, and in many cases the speakers were unaware they were being recorded (though this fact was subse- quently revealed to them). All the tape-recordings were transcribed in situ with the help of native speakers and extensive field-notes made on detailed points of linguistic structure and local practices. The women in the sample were exclusively housewives (often recorded in specially arranged sessions at illit- eracy eradication centres by their teachers), and the men either still active or retired fishermen, pearl-divers, stone-cutters, potters, allotment farmers, odd- job men, cleaners, messengers, small shop-keepers and market traders, usually interviewed at their places of work. Most of the conversations revolved around the customs, culture and society of the pre-oil Bahrain in which the speak- ers had grown up, personal experiences, technical descriptions of crafts and activities which were disappearing or had disappeared, and quite a lot of local gossip. Some elderly women spontaneously produced examples of xurāfāt (‘old wives’ stories’) and ḥazāwi (‘folk tales’), and some of the ˁArab men told jokes, riddles, and anecdotes which they claimed had some historical basis and which were often studded with verses of dialect poetry and adages whose con- nection with the story, on prompting, they explained. In addition, two other types of material were included in the data base: late 1970s recordings provided by Bahrain radio, and selections from two well-known collections of Bahraini dialect poetry. The radio material consists of four fifteen-minute radio plays in the ˁArab dialect in the series Tamṯīliyyat il-Usbūˁ (‘the Weekly Play’), and two half-hour comedies in the Manāma Baḥārna dialect performed by the well- known Shīˁī comedians Jāsim Khalaf and Ṣāliḥ al-Madanī in the series Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad wa l-Ḥaǧǧī ibn il-Ḥaǧǧī ibn il-Ḥaǧǧī (‘Ahmad son of Ahmad son of Ahmad, and the Pilgrim son of the Pilgrim son of the Pilgrim’), plus two interviews of personal reminiscences, one with the comedian Jāsim Khalaf, and the other with an illiterate Sunnī former stone-cutter and singer on a pearling boat. Both of these interviews were in the series ˁAla Ṭarīq al-Fann (‘In the Way of Art’), dedicated to local forms of popular culture. The plays and comedies, though fully- or (in the case of Khalaf and Madanī) semi-scripted, provided excellent examples of certain types of data—particularly arguments between family members and friends, albeit fictitious ones—which occurred general introduction ix relatively rarely in the main data bank, and which it would have been difficult to obtain by any other means. The same was true of the radio interviews. In my judgment, these plays and interviews tapped into the same levels of ‘core’ dialect found in the natural conversational material.