Immigrant workers and language formation: Gulf Pidgin Arabic

Abstract

Ever since the oil boom of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and the countries on the western coast of the Arab Gulf, i.e. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar, have been witnessing both a significant increase in their non-national labour force and considerable urbanization. Most of the immigrant workers come from South and South-East Asia, with smaller number of expatriates from other regions. The overwhelming majority of these foreign workers live and work in the cities, which have thus become not only a meeting place of speakers of a variety of languages, but also a linguistic laboratory in which a new means of inter-ethnic communication, generally known as Gulf Pidgin Arabic, has emerged in approximately the last 40 years. The present paper describes the main features of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of this still under researched pidgin. Also discussed are the various sources of these features: the speakers’ first languages, the Foreigner Talk register of Arabic, grammaticalization, Gulf Arabic, and English.

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