The Arabic Language

hna 
ka-ysǝknu
/ zowel 
marokkan-en 
als 
here 
CONT-stay.IMPERF.3p / both 
Moroccan-PL and

nederlander-s
Dutch-PL
‘There are living here / both Moroccans and Dutchmen’
Switches can also occur before prepositional phrases, as in (25):
(25) 
u-tǝḫruž 
mʿa-hŭm / 
naar 
de 
stad

and-go.out.IMPERF.2s
 
with-3p / 
to
ART 
town
‘and you go with them / to the city’
These switches may even be found within a noun phrase, as in 
bezzaf / moeilijkheden
‘many / difficulties’, 
f-/ zelfde tijd
‘at / the same time’, 
ši / informatie
‘some / infor-
mation’ (examples of Dutch–Moroccan code-switching from Nortier 1989: 124–40).
In recent models of code-switching, such as the one proposed by Myers-Scotton 
(1993), a distinction is made between the matrix language, which provides the 
function words of the message, and the embedded language, which provides 

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Arabic as a Minority Language 
295
the content words (see p. 246). The structure of the languages involved plays 
an important role in the solutions that speakers invent for the conflict between 
the two different grammars involved in the code-switching. French–Moroccan 
code-switching, for instance, differs in some respects from Dutch–Moroccan 
code-switching. When French items are used in a Moroccan matrix, either the 
French article is retained or an Arabic article is used, as in the examples noted 
by Nortier (1994) 
dak la chemise
‘that shirt’, 
waḥǝd l-paysage
‘a landscape’, in which 
the rules of Arabic grammar require the use of an article after the demonstra
-
tive 
dak
or the indefinite article 
waḥǝd
(cf. above, Chapter 14, p. 271). Likewise, 
Arabic articles are often retained when Arabic is used in another matrix (as in 
the case of Arabic loanwords in European languages, cf. below, Chapter 15). When 
Dutch and Moroccan are mixed in code-switching, however, the article is omitted, 
and one frequently hears combinations such as 
dak opleiding
‘that education’ or 
waḥǝd bedreiging
‘one threat’. The difference between French and Dutch in this 
respect suggests that the French article functions in a different way from the 
Dutch article, possibly because of its clitic nature.
Because of the complicated morphology of Moroccan Arabic verbal structure, 
not all loan verbs can be accommodated easily. We have seen above that Italian 
verbs were integrated completely into the structure of Maltese (cf. above, p. 278), 
and a similar ease of integration is reported about French loans in Moroccan 
and Algerian Arabic (cf. above, p. 270). Dutch verbs, on the other hand, are 
almost never integrated in this manner, most speakers preferring to use verbal 
compounds of the kind found in many languages to accommodate foreign loans. 
Such compounds combine a dummy verb from one language with a noun from 
another, in order to avoid the complicated problem of providing foreign verbs 
with inflection (cf. below, Chapter 16, pp. 323, 326, 328). In Dutch–Moroccan code-
switching, the verb 
dar
/
ydir
‘to do’ is combined with the Dutch infinitive, as in 
(26):
(26)
ka-tdir 
 
mʿa-hum 
voetballen
CONT-do.IMPERF.2s 
with-3p 
play.soccer.INF
‘Do you play soccer with them?’ (Boumans 1996: 60)
or with collocations of verb + noun, as in (27):
(27) 
ḫǝṣṣǝk 
tdir-hum 
kans 
geven
must-2s 
do.IMPERF2s-3p chance 
give.INF
‘You must give them a chance’ (Boumans 1996: 62)
With such a strategy, the code-switching process is facilitated considerably.
As in most language contact situations, it is impossible to foretell what the 
future of Arabic in the migration will be. It is certainly not a purely linguistic 
matter, since political, ideological, cultural and perhaps even religious factors will 

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296
The Arabic Language
determine the outcome. In the case of Latin America, a cultural community has 
been established that is proud of its Arabic heritage and cultivates the Arabic 
language and literature. In such a situation, one may expect the presence of 
numerous loanwords in the home language of the community, and at the same 
time a conscious effort to keep the two languages apart and prevent language loss 
of the home language. Most of the members of the community go to school and 
have a perfect command of the language of the host country. By contrast, in the 
United States migrants are highly motivated to integrate linguistically and do not 
seem to need a language of their own as an identity marker.
In most European countries, it would seem that the process of language shift 
cannot be stopped, and, although there will always be individuals striving to 
preserve as much as possible the language of the old country, eventually most 
immigrant children will probably shift to the dominant language of the new 
country, even when the pressure is countered by explicit government policies. 
Phenomena like the frequent use of code-switching are highly unstable and are 
likely to disappear within one generation. An issue that is still unresolved is 
whether their variety of the dominant language will become an ethnolect, that 
is, a variety of the standard language that is regarded as typical of a community 
with a shared ethnic background. Such an ethnolect typically functions as an 
in-group variety for youngsters or as a street language, and may even attract 
youngsters from different ethnic backgrounds. In the Netherlands, such features as 
a uvular–pharyngal realisation of Dutch /ɣ/ and a long realisation of Dutch /z/ are 
sometimes perceived as stereotypical for a Moroccan ethnolect (Hinskens 2011). 
In the case of the linguistic enclaves of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Anatolia, 
Cyprus and Nigeria, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, no policies of 
language preservation are available, and the minority language has little prestige, 
so that it must be regarded as endangered. In the case of Malta, the situation is, 
of course, completely different, since there the language has become the symbol 
of a recognisable national entity. Italian and more recently English have made 
some inroads into the domain of Maltese, but it seems that language loyalty is a 
sufficiently strong factor to counter this influence.