The Arabic Language

15.7 Arabic in migration
No survey of the role of Arabic in the world would be complete without at least a 
brief reference to the large numbers of speakers of Arabic who emigrated to other 
parts of the world. From the earliest times, speakers of Arabic left their home 
countries and migrated to other countries, where they settled down and found 
a new livelihood in an environment where a different language was spoken. In 

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Arabic as a Minority Language 
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the case of the historical Islamic conquests, they imposed their language on 
the population of their new countries, and these countries became part of the 
Arabic-speaking world. But in some cases Arabic became a minority language. 
A few instances of such a situation have already been mentioned above, namely, 
the linguistic enclaves in Cyprus, Uzbekistan, Nigeria and Anatolia. On a massive 
scale, this phenomenon has occurred in modern times in those Western countries 
to which a considerable number of speakers of Arabic have migrated, for instance, 
the migration of Lebanese (and Syrians) to the United States and to Latin America, 
and the migration of, chiefly, Moroccans and Algerians to the countries of Western 
Europe (France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany).
Obviously, the migration as such had a tremendous psychological and socio
-
logical effect on the people involved. Here, we shall confine ourselves to the 
linguistic effects on the language of the migrants, which may be divided into 
two categories. On the one hand, the migrants found themselves in a situation 
in which they had to learn the dominant language of their new country, which 
threatened the survival of their own home language. On the other hand, even if 
they continued to speak their language of origin, their speech habits could not 
escape the influence of the surrounding language.
The two groups mentioned above, the migrants from Lebanon and those from 
the Maghreb countries, went through a different development, because of the 
difference in environment and even more because of the difference in make-up of 
the groups involved: the Lebanese mostly belonged to a relatively well-educated, 
often Christian, layer of society and found new jobs in trading and middle-class 
occupations, whereas most migrants from the Maghreb countries were employed 
in menial jobs or in industry. Moreover, the two waves of migration belong to 
different periods. The high tide of Lebanese migration to America started in the 
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, whereas the migra-
tion from the Maghreb countries to Western Europe is a phenomenon of the 1960s 
and 1970s.
Arab migration to the United States took place in several waves: the first groups 
of mostly Lebanese Christians arrived at the turn of the twentieth century; a second 
group arrived in the 1960s; and the third group started to arrive after 1975, when 
the civil war in Lebanon had broken out. In their linguistic behaviour all three 
groups seem to have shared a strong ambition to integrate and acculturate in 
American society, including linguistically. Across all three groups, by the time the 
third generation is growing up, Arabic is either restricted to oral use or has disap
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peared almost completely. For these immigrants their identity as Arab Americans 
seems to be linked to their ethnic background, rather than language. A tendency 
towards language shift apparently characterises most contexts in which the 1.2 
million Arab Americans live: only 614,000 of them were reported to be speakers of 
Arabic in the 2000 census (Belnap 2008). Yet both Belnap and Sawaie (1992) point 
out that the growing number of Muslim immigrants might change this picture. 

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The Arabic Language
One of the remarkable linguistic phenomena in the Arabic-language interac-
tion in Dearborn, Michigan, where the largest community of Arab Americans 
live, is the relative ease with which English verbs are borrowed and integrated in 
Arabic morphological structure. Rouchdy (1992b) mentions examples like