The Arabic Language

16.2 Arabic trade- and work-related jargons
The starting point for interlingual communication is constituted by the input 
of native speakers who address strangers in a simplified version of their own 
language. This is often called foreigner (or foreigner-directed) talk. Such registers 

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Arabic Pidgins and Creoles 
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or varieties are especially important in trade relations. When trade relations 
become a regular occurrence between two groups, this may even lead to a more 
or less conventional means of interaction, which is sometimes called a ‘(trade) 
jargon’.
Arab traders began to explore commercial possibilities in sub-Saharan Africa 
as early as the seventh century. At first they relied on Berber traders as inter-
mediaries, but by the eleventh century they already had their own quarters in 
the capital cities of Ghana and Gao, and took advantage of regular trade routes 
to cross the Sahara. It is very likely that in West and Central Africa Arabic trade 
jargons developed. In fact, Elgibali and Thomason found evidence of the existence 
of an eleventh-century trade jargon in the writings of the Arab geographer ʾAbū 
ʿUbayd al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094). He cites a man from Aswan who on his travels heard 
a ‘corrupted’ form of Arabic being spoken by ‘Blacks’ in a place called Marīdī, 
possibly situated in Mauritania. The short text he quotes looks like a pidginised 
form of Arabic. It contains phrases like 
bin mū rūḥ 
‘[his] son [should] not go’ and 
the verb form 
ʾūl 
‘he said’; both verbal forms suggest that their origin was in 
an Arabic imperative rather than an inflected verb. No doubt, trade jargons like 
this were spoken all along the trans-Saharan trade routes. They are still found 
in parts of Africa, for instance, in the Horn of Africa, especially in Eritrea. In this 
region, where many different languages are spoken, such a trade jargon can serve 
as a 
lingua franca
when it is the only common means of communication. The use 
of a reduced variety of Arabic as a trade language has also been reported about 
Ethiopia. 
In other parts of the world, especially in the Indian Ocean trade, the Arabs 
found pre-existing trade jargons. Since they were not the dominant partner in 
this region, they were forced to use these in their commercial relations. On the 
East African coast, Arab traders got in touch with speakers of different languages, 
who used Swahili as a trade jargon. More to the east, Malay had been in use for a 
long time as an interlingual means of communication. It is not surprising, then, 
that no Arabic trade jargons are known to have existed there. In Central Asia, the 
exploration and opening up of trade routes was undertaken mainly by Persian-
speaking traders, soon to be followed by Persian-speaking missionaries (
dāʿī
s), 
who brought Islam to these regions through the intermediary of the Persian 
language. We shall see below (Chapter 17) that Arabic loanwords in the languages 
of Asia often reached these languages through Persian.
Trade is not the only context in which reduced varieties of languages are used. 
A related context is that of communication with migrant labourers, for instance, 
the thousands of Asian workers, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, who come to 
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to work in the oil industry. They communicate in a 
reduced variety of Arabic with their employers and with those of their colleagues 
who speak a different language. This context is quite similar to what happened 
in Europe with migrants from the Arabic-speaking world (Chapter 15, pp. 290–6). 

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The Arabic Language
All along the eastern Arabian coast, from Kuwait to Oman, such reduced varieties, 
or pidgins, are known to exist. One of the first to describe this Gulf Pidgin Arabic, 
as he calls it, was Smart (1990). The material he used for his description derived 
from cartoons and humorous texts in newspapers, which purportedly describe 
the way foreign workers speak Arabic. Actually, his data represent the stereotypes 
native speakers have about the language of foreigners. Presumably, they use such 
stereotypes when addressing foreigners, so that, indirectly, the material tells us 
more about the foreigner-directed talk than about the pidginised variety of the 
language as it is used by the foreign workers themselves.
Later descriptions of reduced varieties of Arabic are based on fieldwork among 
foreign workers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states; this kind of variety is more 
likely to provide an accurate description of the actual language used by them. 
In Saudi Arabia the name for the variety used by foreign workers reflects the 
provenance of most of them, Urdu Pidgin Arabic (Al-Moaily 2008). Other terms 
to refer to these varieties include Gulf Pidgin Arabic (Naess 2008) and Gulf Asian 
Pidgin (Al-Azraqi 2010).
The main features that these jargons have in common correspond to what 
is known from pidgins elsewhere, which are based on European languages. The 
morphology of Standard Arabic has disappeared almost entirely and is replaced 
by a number of analytic devices. There is no definite article (although there seems 
to be an indefinite article), nouns have no plural, there is no gender distinction in 
adjectives, and prepositions are often left out, as in (1):
(1)