Unity and diversity across Asian migrant Arabic pidgins in the Middle East

Several pidginized varieties of Arabic developed in the Middle East during the last 40 years between native Arabic-speaking employers and Asian migrants, who are mainly from the Indian subcontinent. This paper postulates the presence of a meta-category called Asian Migrant Arabic Pidgins (AMAP) under which would be grouped all the varieties attested from the Gulf area and from Lebanon, and it proposes to account for both unity and diversity between them in terms of a set of parameters where purely linguistic developments interact with contextual ones. The analysis of the social situation and of the available linguistic data shows that migrants’ mobility across the region is the major factor for homogenizing both native Arabic-speakers’ foreigner talk and migrants’ pidgin Arabic, thus validating the over-arching category of AMAP and proposing it as a useful framework for further studies of said data.