lingvo.wikisort.org - Language

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

• Arabic-based creole languages
• Varieties of Arabic

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

---