The Arabic Language

fakkasna 
issayāra 
‘we fixed the car’, 
kalnīt il-bēt 
‘I cleaned the house’ and even 
lā yudarnik 
‘he doesn’t drink’. Such integrative loans suggest the existence of a community in 
which a code-switching mode leads to playful linguistic behaviour. 
The situation of the Arab migrants in Latin America is similar to that in the 
United States, yet the language loyalty is clearly different there. Most of the 
migrants work in the commercial sector, and all are fluent in Brazilian Portuguese 
or Spanish. Because their professional background was mostly in trading, they 
had to integrate quickly into society and worked in close contact with Brazilians 
and Argentineans. Most members of the immigrant community have retained 
the use of Arabic dialect, and there is even a small amount of literary activity in 
Standard Arabic. Newcomers from Lebanon are incorporated into the community. 
The close trade relations between the Lebanese and the local population may 
explain the fact that their language contains a large number of loanwords from 
Brazilian Portuguese or Spanish, mostly in the domains of work and occupation, 
but also in the domain of family relationships (cf. Nabhan 1994):
sàbàt
, pl. 
sàbàbīt
‘shoes’ (Port. 
sapato
)
ĩbrigadu 
‘employee’ (Port. 
empregado
)
v
ẽ
dedor
‘salesman’ (Port. 
vendedor
)
fàbraka
‘factory’ (Port. 
fábrica
)
bi-l-atakado
‘wholesale’ (Port. 
no atacado
)
brimu
, 
brima
‘cousin’ (Port. 
primo
, 
prima
)
and even a few verbs, such as:
nawmar
, 
bi-nawmir
‘to go on a date’ (Port. 
namorar
)
kawbar
, 
bi-kawbir
‘to charge’ (Port. 
cobrar
)
vayaž
, 
bi-vayež
‘to travel’ (Port. 
viajar
)
Since most migrants in Latin America and in the United States were literate 
and belonged to the educated part of the population, their present situation is 
radically different from that of the migrants in Western Europe, who usually 
derived from rural regions, had no education and worked as unskilled manual 
labourers. Earlier research on the linguistic situation of Arab migrants in Western 
Europe concentrated almost exclusively on their acquisition of the new language. 
Applied linguists tried to find out which problems the migrants faced in the acqui-
sition of their second language in order to help to improve the teaching methods 
for this special group of learners. This type of research is less relevant for the 
history of the Arabic language.

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Arabic as a Minority Language 
293
In more recent studies, the migrant languages themselves are the focus of 
interest. Two basic fields of study may be distinguished: that of language loss and 
that of language mixing or code-switching. Language loss or language attrition 
refers to a general reduction in the proficiency of the speakers of the language. 
Immigrants often complain about the quality of the language of their children who 
were raised in the new country and speak their new language more fluently than 
the language of their parents. Second-generation children tend to code-switch 
frequently in their daily conversation, so that it is quite unnatural for them to 
engage in pure Arabic speech. It is questionable whether they ever possessed 
the features that they are supposed to have lost. Because of the relatively limited 
amount of exposure to the language of their parents, it is more likely that they 
never acquired these features completely. One might say, therefore, that their 
language is undergoing a process of shift, because it has lost the traditional 
domains in which it used to be spoken. For most immigrants in the Netherlands, 
Moroccan Arabic has been reduced to the status of a home language, and for 
the children of the third generation Dutch is encroaching upon the domain of 
Moroccan even at home. At the receptive level, immigrant children continue to 
be able to communicate with their family in Moroccan Arabic. But at the produc
-
tive level there is a marked inability to produce the correct forms. In a study of 
language loss among Moroccan adolescents in the Netherlands, El Aissati (1996) 
reports that their phonology is affected to such a degree that informants say 
things like