Pidgin Arabic

There have been a number of Arabic-based pidgins throughout history, including a number of new ones emerging today.

The major attested historical Arabic pidgins are:

  • Maridi Arabic, a pidgin of ca. 1000 CE of the Upper Nile
  • Bimbashi Arabic, a colonial-era pidgin of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which was ancestral to
  • Turku Arabic, a pidgin of colonial Chad.

In the modern era, pidgin Arabic is most notably used by the large number of non-Semitic migrants to Arab countries. Examples include,

  • Pidgin Gulf Arabic, used by mostly Asian immigrant laborers in the Persian Gulf region (and not necessarily a single language variety)[1]
  • Jordanian Bengali Pidgin Arabic, used by Bengali immigrants in Jordan[2]
  • Pidgin Madam, used by Sinhalese domestics in Lebanon[3][4]

This is not a complete list; indeed, pidgins are constantly developing due to language contact in the Arab world. An example is the so-called "Romanian Pidgin Arabic",[5] which was not an actual language but a smattering of Arabic (a "pre-pidgin") spoken for a few decades by Romanian oil-field workers.

See also

References

Manfredi, Stefano and Mauro Tosco (eds.) 2014. Arabic-based Pidgins and Creoles. Special Issue of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 29:2

  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Pidgin Gulf Arabic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Jordanian Bengali Pidgin Arabic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Pidgin Madam". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  4. Fida Bizri, 2005. Le Pidgin Madam: Un nouveau pidgin arabe, La Linguistique 41, p. 54–66
  5. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Romanian Pidgin Arabic". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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