Arabic-based pidgins and creoles

There have been a number of Arabic-based pidgins and creoles throughout history, including a number of new ones emerging today. These may be broadly divided into pidgins and creoles, which share a common ancestry, and incipient immigrant pidgins. Additionally, Maridi Arabic may have been an 11th-century pidgin.

Arabic creoles and pidgins

The Arabic creoles and pidgins are:

• Bimbashi Arabic, a colonial-era pidgin of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the ancestor of the other Sudanic pidgins and creoles.
• Turku Arabic, a pidgin of colonial Chad
• Juba Arabic, spoken in South Sudan
• Nubi language, spoken in Uganda and Kenya
• Bongor Arabic, which could be a descendant of Turku Arabic, spoken in and around the town of Bongor, Chad.^[1]
  • There may be other Turku-like Arabic pidgins in Chad today, but they have not been described.^[1]

Immigrant pidgins in the Arabian Peninsula

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

• Gulf Pidgin Arabic, used by mostly immigrant laborers in the Arabian Peninsula (and not necessarily a single language variety).^[2][3]
• Jordanian Bengali Pidgin Arabic, used by Bengali immigrants in Jordan.^[4]
• Pidgin Madam, used by Sinhalese domestic workers in Lebanon.^[5][6]
• Romanian Pidgin Arabic, spoken by Romanian oil-field workers in Iraq from the 1970s to the 1990s.^[7][8]

Due to the nature of pidgins, this list is likely incomplete. New pidgins may continue to develop and emerge due to language contact in the Arab world.

Para-Arabic

Para-Arabic, also known as Pseudo-Arabic, is a descendant of the Arabic language that is no longer fully classified as Arabic. This is a mixed language that undergoes a process of code mixing or code switching where Arabic vocabulary and grammar or lexicon are mixed with other languages.

• Condet dialect, a dialect of Betawi language with a more pronounced influence of Arabic vocabulary than other dialects, as well as a slight influence of Malay language.^[9][10] Arabic-Malay script (Jawi) was also quite often used by the indigenous people of Condet in East Jakarta, especially during the Dutch colonial era.^[11]

Nubi language can also be considered a Para-Arabic language because its vocabulary is not entirely derived from Arabic but has absorbed a lot of Bantu languages. But it is excluded, because its lexicon is 90% derived from Arabic.^[12]

See also

• Varieties of Arabic