Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2014

In rudimentary communication with foreigners, the most basic need is to express wishes and to give orders. Accordingly, verbal forms in foreigner-directed speech and pidgins often derive etymologically from imperatives or infinitives in the lexifier language. In more developed communication the need arises to refer to past events. In this paper, the development of past time reference from foreigner-directed speech to pidgin is investigated on the basis of data from Arabic-based pidgins, notably from Pidgin Madam, Gulf Pidgin Arabic, and Juba Arabic. These data are compared with the development of past tense reference in foreigner talk registers and pidgins based on other languages.

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.

Kinubi, as it is spoken today in Kenya and Uganda, is strongly influenced by Swahili, the two languages having been in contact with each other for more than one century. This influence does not occur in the lexicon alone, but also in the phonology and even the morphology and syntax of Kinubi. Though the analysis of the lexicon and the phonology appear to be rather easy, the possible influence of Swahili on Kinubi morphology and syntax may prove to be may be more problematic. However, this influence may be ‘measured’ through the comparison of Kinubi and Juba Arabic: many features shared by Kinubi and Swahili are not found in Juba Arabic, which tends to show that these expressions come from Swahili.This influence seems to be rather uniform, though Swahili does not occupy the same place in Uganda and Kenya. This fact may be explained by several factors, like the ‘Islamic’ culture of the Nubi, which makes Swahili a language of prestige, even in the community based in Uganda, as well as the permanence of the contact between Nubi communities across the border, including intermarriage and other social factors.

The article discusses the information structure of Juba Arabic, an Arabic-based pidgincreole of South Sudan, showing how the expression of topic and focus is the result of a complex interaction of morphosyntactic and prosodic means. While the lexical elements used in the expression of topic and focus are Arabic-derived, no such influence can be found in the prosody. Both topic- and focus-marked utterances can be opposed to neutral ones. Topics are marked syntactically through left dislocation as well as prosodically. Morphosyntactic means include the use of the ‘almost-dedicated’ marker zátu for marking contrastive focus and the two dedicated particles yáwu and yawú, both derived from the multifunctional element ya. The articles further explores the grammaticalization path leading to the dedicated focus particles of Juba Arabic.

This paper deals with the issue of Juba Arabic (JA) as a written language and investigates various written materials produced from early 20th century up to the early 21st century. The investigated writings are presented in their socio-historical context in order to determine in which ways genres and contexts impact writing practices, particularly regarding orthographic and grammatical choices. These choices are analyzed following the notions of sameness and distance used for evaluating literacy processes in non-standard languages. The paper highlights the key moments and key agents of the codification of JA as a written language and the new developments led by the use of the internet.

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.

The paper is a descriptive account of the various grammatical functions of the particle fii in the grammar of Gulf Pidgin Arabic, the contact system that has developed in the Arab countries of the Arabian Gulf for use between the Arabic-speaking native citizens and the expatriate workforce in these countries. It aims at discussing the grammatical multifunctionality of this element and the factors behind the expansion of its grammatical functions, when it was adopted from the lexifier Gulf Arabic.In Gulf Arabic, fii is used as a preposition and as an existential predicate. When it was adopted into GPA, fii also assumed the role of a possession marker and predication marker in non-verbal subject-predicate sentences and sentences with verbal predicates. A similar expansion in grammatical roles has affected its negative counterpart maafii, which is used as a negative of fii in its role as an existential predicate in Gulf Arabic. In GPA the use of maafii has also been expanded so that it is now used as a universal negator in the language, regardless of the predicate or sentence type. The paper investigates the factors that motivated this extension in the uses of fii/maafii and argues that it is not transfer-induced. Rather, language-internal motivation and universal tendencies are more legitimate candidates for the forces lying behind this process.