Bahraini Gulf Arabic

Not to be confused with Bahrani Arabic.

Bahraini Gulf Arabic (Arabic: لهجة بحرينية, romanized: Lahjat Baḥraynīyah) is a Gulf Arabic dialect spoken in Bahrain. It is spoken by Bahraini Sunnis (Arabs and Ajams) and is a dialect which is most similar to the dialect spoken in Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE.

Bahraini Gulf Arabic
Bahraini Sunni Arabic
Native to	Bahrain
Native speakers	70,000 (2019)[1]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Peninsular Gulf Bahraini Gulf Arabic
Official status
Official language in	Not official in any country
Regulated by	Not recognised as a language
Language codes
ISO 639-1	none
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	bahr1247

An sociolinguistic feature of Bahrain is the existence of three distinct dialects: Bahrani Arabic (a dialect primarily spoken by Baharna in Shia villages and some parts of Manama), Sunni and Ajami Arabic.^[2]

In Bahrain, the Sunni muslims form a minority of the population, but the ruling family is Sunni. Therefore, the Arabic dialect represented on TV is almost invariably that of the Sunni population. Therefore, power, prestige and financial control are associated with the Sunni Arabs. This is having a major effect on the direction of language change in Bahrain.^[3]

As with all Bahraini dialects, it is heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, including Iranian Languages such as the Achomi Language,^[4] an example of this is "Dolagh" (دولاغ) instead of "Jorab" (جوراب) for socks,^[5][6] which is used more commonly in modern Persian and Arabic; the former having been influenced by the latter, in addition to Persian,^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]} and Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi and Urdu an example of this is that Bahrainis do not use the formal Arabic Heza'a (حذاء) to describe a "shoe" but they rather say "Jooti" (single) or "Jawati" (plural).^[12]: 134 English (itself an Indo-European language), has also had an influenced on Bahraini Arabic, for example Bahrainis say "Ambaloos" (عمبلوص) for Ambulance, and "esweech" (سویچ) for electronic keys,^[13] It is also influenced by Turkish.