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