Modernity, Migration and Minorities: Three Case Studies of Arabic in Contact

• Applicant: Professorin Valentina Serreli, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429257272

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

Over the past fifty years, the Arab-speaking world has experienced an enormous rural-urban and urban-urban migration which have brought dialects into contact which historically had little or no contact. This project used variationist sociolinguistic methodology to investigate three case studies exemplifying different situations and outcomes of migration. The studies are based on demographically stratified corpora. Oral interviews were recorded, transcribed, tagged, and subjected to standard quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. They document different scenarios of Arabic dialect contact. The Siwan study demonstrated the vitality of the local (Shahibi) Arabic and the large diffusion of supra-local (Cairene) Arabic features. In the NE Nigerian study the stability of a rural dialect even under the duress of forced migration is documented. The study of Syrian and Iraqi Arabic among refugees in Germany documents incipient contact-induced changes within the framework of a pre-koineization stage. Overall, the project shows that minority group contexts are characterized by a relative stability and maintenance of ancestral linguistic norms, despite supralocalization or pre-koineization phenomena being discernable. The empirical studies conducted contribute to an enhanced typologization of language change in the Arab-speaking world focusing on groups with a minority status, one factor that has not received much attention as a general independent variable in Arabic sociolinguistics.

Publications

• Arabic Language Contact. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, 382-424. Cambridge University Press.
  Owens, Jonathan
  
• Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Owens, Jonathan
  
• CorpusCompass: A tool for data extraction and dataset generation in corpus linguistics [computer program]. In: Proceedings of the Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics. CEUR-WS.org
  Adnan, M. & Brandizzi, N.
  
• Fieldwork Challenges in Diaspora Communities: Arabic Speakers in Germany and Pennsylvania-German Speakers in Canada. Linguistics in Amsterdam, Vol. 15
  Neuhausen, M. & Adnan, M.
  
• Multifunctional Markers in a Contact Situation. Journal of Language Contact, 17(4), 795-844.
  Schiattarella, Valentina & Serreli, Valentina
  
• User-Centered Design of Digital Tools for Sociolinguistic Studies in Under-Resourced Languages. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics (Field Matters 2024), 12-27. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  Adler, Jonas; Scholle, Carsten; Buschek, Daniel; Brandizzi, Nicolo’ & Adnan, Muhadj
  
• Imperfect verbal prefixes as discourse markers. Studies in Arabic Linguistics, 158-179. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  Adnan, Muhadj & Owens, Jonathan