The morphologization of an Arabic creole

East African Nubi has classic attributes of a creole — it was formed in a short period of time and its structure diverges dramatically from its lexical source, Egyptian and Sudanic Arabic — yet it differs from most creoles as well in that it has a fairly robust morphology (Owens 2001). One could call it a morphologically rich creole, even if its morphology is much simpler than that of Arabic. Understanding why this happened in Nubi presupposes having a solid descriptive historical linguistic account of how this came about. While concentrating on this latter issue, this paper lays the groundwork for understanding the ‘why’ by examining Nubi relative to current theories of creole genesis, including recent SLA models, and by showing that discourse embeddedness played an important role in guiding its development.