The Arabic Language

Chapter 16
Arabic Pidgins and Creoles
16.1 Pidginisation and creolisation
In Chapter 8 we have seen that in the course of the Arab conquests large numbers 
of people in the conquered territories learned Arabic as a second language. 
Eventually, it became the first language for the majority of the inhabitants of 
the Islamic empire. Inevitably, the way these new learners spoke Arabic affected 
the structure of the language. Some Arabic historians ascribe the changes – or 
as they call it ‘the corruption of the language’ (
fasād al-luġa
) – explicitly to this 
second-language learning process. Ibn Ḫaldūn states that when the Arabs started 
to mingle with those who spoke broken Arabic, even their own children took 
on this way of speaking by being exposed to it (Chapter 8, p. 138). A modern 
rephrasing of this idea is Versteegh’s (1984) proposal to regard the shift from 
pre-Islamic Arabic to the new vernaculars as an instance of a process of pidgini-
sation, a radical restructuring of a language as part of massive second-language 
learning. The assumption here is that native speakers when addressing foreigners 
use a simplified form of their own language. In a short period of time, and without 
any formal teaching, the new learners acquire this reduced variety as a second 
language in order to communicate with the native speakers and with speakers of 
other languages. In doing so, they apply their own strategies of language learning 
to the input. The result is a reduced language variety or pidgin, which may 
remain in use for a long time as an auxiliary language. When speakers of different 
languages start intermarrying, they communicate in the reduced variety and 
transmit it to their children. These then acquire the pidgin language as their first 
language, and through expansion and grammaticalisation they creolise it, that is, 
transform it into a new natural language or creole. Most known cases of pidgi
-
nisation/creolisation involve Indo-European languages (English, French, Dutch, 
Portuguese, Spanish), which were learnt by the slaves exported from Africa to the 
New World. Children born to these slaves were exposed to the pidgin from birth 
and creolised the language.
This model for the emergence of the modern Arabic dialects has been criticised 
on several grounds. Most scholars reject a break in the transmission between 
pre-Islamic Arabic and the modern dialects, and prefer to see this development 

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The Arabic Language
as a continuous process in the sense that modern dialects exhibit changes that 
were already present in the period before Islam. Owens (1989, 2006) believes that 
the idea of a dichotomy between Old and New Arabic is fundamentally wrong, 
since in pre-Islamic Arabia both types of language coexisted. In his view, those 
features that are commonly assigned to New Arabic were already there in the 
period before Islam and have nothing to do with any acquisition process by the 
inhabitants of the conquered territories (Chapter 8, pp. 139f.).
A second point of criticism concerns the social context in the period after 
the conquests, which is not regarded as conducive to a process of creolisation. 
While most scholars accept that in the early stages of the Arabicisation process 
there were interlanguage varieties, they believe that this period was followed by 
complete language acquisition. In this view, eventually all speakers took over the 
native variety of the language and the interlanguage varieties disappeared before 
they had a chance of being adopted by the entire language community.
A third point concerns the influence of the Classical language. According to the 
model sketched above, after the initial stages of creolisation, the influence of the 
Classical standard began to make itself felt. The spoken language was subjected to 
a gradual process of approximation to the standard language and to the language 
continuum that is typical of the diglossia in the Arabic-speaking world. Some of 
the most basilectal features at the lowest end of the continuum disappeared. Such 
processes typically take place in creolised varieties all over the world and are 
known as decreolisation. We have seen above (Chapter 8, pp. 148f.) that many of 
the critics of this model deny that the influence of the standard language could 
have had such an impact, since for most people this language was out of reach 
because of the lack of a schooling system in which they could have learnt it.
Even when the model of pidginisation is not accepted for the early period of 
Islam, it is commonly accepted that in later linguistic contacts between speakers 
of Arabic and speakers of other languages, reduced varieties of the language were 
used as a means of communication, especially in Africa. Since most studies about 
pidginisation focus on pidginised varieties based on European colonial languages, 
such as English and French, the study of Arabic pidgins and creoles has a wider 
significance for comparative purposes. Only recently has awareness grown that 
knowledge of non-European-based pidgins and creoles is essential for a better 
understanding of the processes involved in pidginisation. In this chapter we 
shall look at contemporary examples of reduced varieties of Arabic, such as trade 
jargons and pidgins, and at the one example of an Arabic creole, Nubi.