NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY Language Variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic Mohammad Almoaily 069087387 Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, November 2012 Abstract Abstract Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) is a contact variety spoken in the Gulf States which has received a relatively little attention in the literature apart from a few descriptive 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. i Acknowledgements Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation to my thesis supervisors: Professor Anders Holmberg and Professor Isabelle Buchstaller for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this thesis. Without their advice and guidance this thesis would not have been produced. I also deeply thank: - The participants in this study, who volunteered to take part in it in spite of their full schedules… - Noah Alqurain, Chairman of Albat’ha Community Centre in Riyadh, for arranging interviews with some of the subjects whom I recorded in this study… I extend my gratitude to my parents and my wife for their consistent support and encouragement throughout the time it took me to complete this thesis. ii List of Abbreviations List of Abbreviations 1 First person 2 Second person 3 Third person ACC Accusative ADJ Adjective ADJP Adjective phrase ADV Adverb(ial) AGR Agreement ART Article COP Copula DAT Dative DEF Definite DEM Demonstrative DIST Distal F Feminine FUT Future IMP Imperative INDF Indefinite M Masculine NEG Negation, negative NP Noun Phrase OBJ Object PASS Passive PL Plural POSS Possessive PROX Proximate PRS Present PST Past SBJ Subject SG Singular In glosses: - separates morphemes = marks for clitic boundaries . separates metalanguage elements represented by one word in the source language. iii Table of Contents Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... ii List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................iv List of Tables and Figures ........................................................................................................ vii 1. List of Tables ................................................................................................................... vii 2. List of Figures ....................................................................................................................ix Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Review of Related Literature .................................................................................... 9 1.1 Contact Languages, History and Definitions .................................................................... 9 1.1.1 The genesis of contact languages............................................................................. 10 1.1.2 Defining contact languages ..................................................................................... 13 1.1.3 Gradual vs. abrupt emergence ................................................................................. 17 1.1.4 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................. 18 1.2 Contact Languages as a Field of Research ..................................................................... 19 1.3 General Features of Pidgin and Creole Languages ......................................................... 23 1.3.1 Reduced inflection .................................................................................................... 25 1.3.2 Reduced word formation .......................................................................................... 28 1.3.3 Reduced inventory of function words ....................................................................... 30 1.4 Limitations in the Literature of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Causes and Possible Solutions ............................................................................................................................... 34 1.4.1 European-centric view ............................................................................................. 34 1.4.2 Shortage of data on pidgins and creoles .................................................................. 37 1.4.3 Is it a pidgin or a creole? ......................................................................................... 41 1.5 Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles .................................................................................. 45 1.5.1 A report on Arabic-lexified contact languages ........................................................ 46 1.5.2 A comparative account of Arabic-lexified pidgins and creoles ............................... 51 1.6 Previous Research on GPA ............................................................................................. 56 1.7 Linguistic Variation ........................................................................................................ 64 1.7.1 Analysing linguistic variation .................................................................................. 64 1.7.2 Linguistic variation in contact languages ................................................................ 65 Chapter 2: GA and GPA, Definition and Description .............................................................. 69 2.1 Description of GA and GPA ........................................................................................... 69 2.1.1 Linguistic description of selected features of Gulf Arabic ....................................... 69 iv Table of Contents 2.1.2 Gulf Pidgin Arabic ................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 3: Substrate Languages, Definition and Description ................................................... 95 3.1 Substrate Languages of GPA .......................................................................................... 95 3.1.1 Determining the three substrate languages with the largest number of speakers in Saudi Arabia .................................................................................................. 96 3.2 Description of the Substrate Languages of GPA ............................................................ 97 3.2.1 Bengali ..................................................................................................................... 97 3.2.2 Punjabi ................................................................................................................... 100 3.2.3 Malayalam ............................................................................................................. 103 3.2.4 Urdu ....................................................................................................................... 106 Chapter 4: Data and Methodology .......................................................................................... 111 4.1 Description of the Current Study .................................................................................