The Arabic Language

16.3 Arabic pidgins
Trade jargons and work jargons are a special case of the general process of inter
-
action between native speakers and new learners; they are sometimes referred to 
as proto-pidgins. At any rate, they are ephemeral in the sense that they exist just 
as long as the situation in which they are used exists. There is no speech commu
-
nity using the pidgin as a more or less conventional means of communication, 
and there is a large amount of variation because of the circumstances in which 
they live and because there is a constant stream of newcomers.
We have seen above that as early as the eleventh century a trade jargon based 
on Arabic may have been in use in Africa. Full-blown Arabic pidgins in Africa 
date from a later period. At the end of the nineteenth century an Arab trader 
called Rabeh was probably responsible for bringing a pidginised variety of Arabic 
to southern Chad, which became known under the name of Turku (Tosco and 
Owens 1993). Chad must have been an area where several trade languages were 
in use in the so-called 
Baggara
belt (Chapter 15, p. 288), which stretches across 
the savannah to Lake Chad and northern Nigeria. Some of these varieties may 
have become established means of communication in the region. In modern Chad, 
pidginised varieties of Arabic are employed as vehicular language chiefly in urban 
centres such as N’Djamena and Abbéché. Along with these pidginised varieties 
there are also native varieties of Chadian Arabic, which are related to the Western 
Sudanic Arabic of Cameroon and Nigeria (Chapter 15, p. 288).
A modern offshoot of Turku is the variety called 
Arab aná Bongor
or Bongor 
Arabic, which is used in south-west Chad, in the city of Bongor (Luffin 2008). In its 
phonemic inventory a number of mergers may be noted. Apart from the expected 
changes, such as /ḥ/ > /h/, for example, 
lahása 
‘up to now’ (Arabic 
ḥattā
) and /ḫ/ 
> /k/, for example, 
kámsa 
‘five’ (Arabic 
ḫamsa
), it may be noted that /f/ is often 
realised as [p] and /t/ as [d], for example, 
índi árpu 
‘you [sg.] know’. Bongor Arabic 
uses high and low tones, high tones mostly corresponding to Arabic long vowels. 
In a few words this tone is distinctive, for example, 
ána 
‘I’ versus 
aná 
genitive 
exponent. Singular and plural nouns may be distinguished by a postposed marker, 
deriving from a demonstrative and functioning also to mark definiteness, for 
example, 
dérib dá 
‘the road, this road’, 
mér dólda 
‘the mayors, these mayors’.
 
The 
genitive exponent is 
aná
, for example, 
nádum aná sar 
‘a man from Sarh’.

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The Arabic Language
We have seen above that in Arabic trade jargons there is only one verbal form, 
which is used for all tenses and persons. In Bongor Arabic a new distinction has 
developed. In stative verbs, like 
árpu 
‘to know’, the bare verbal stem has the 
default meaning of present, while in non-stative verbs, like 
mási 
‘to go’, it denotes 
past tense. For the latter category of verbs, the present continuous is indicated 
by the marker 
gáy
(probably derived from 
gāʿid 
‘sitting’), for example, 
hú mási 
‘he 
went’, 
hú gáy-mási 
‘he is going’. The distinction is not an absolute one, since the 
marker 
gáy- 
may be used with stative verbs as well, for example, 
ána gáy-dóru 
‘I 
want’. Negation is indicated by sentence-final 
mapí
, for example, 
ána gáy-gáta mapí 
‘I don’t cut’.
The best-known example of an Arabic pidgin is the Sudanese Juba Arabic. 
In the nineteenth century, when the Egyptian, later the Anglo-Egyptian, army 
attempted to ‘pacify’ the Sudan, many soldiers from the indigenous people were 
recruited in Upper Egypt and in the Sudan. These included young men from the 
Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Luo and Nuba, most of whom spoke Nilotic (Eastern Sudanic) 
languages. Probably, the Nuba were the largest group among these recruits. In the 
garrison camps around Edfu in southern Egypt, the usual means of communica
-
tion was a pidginised form of (Egyptian–Sudanese) Arabic, used by the subalterns 
in their contacts with the recruits. From its use in the army camps it became 
known as Bimbashi Arabic (
bimbaši 
being a subaltern rank in the army). Since the 
Arabicisation of the Egyptian army was not carried out before 1860, the pidginised 
variety probably goes back to an earlier Arabic pidgin that had been current in the 
area for centuries in commercial contacts, in particular the slave trade, between 
Egypt and the Sudan. After the Mahdist revolt in 1882, the pidgin variety of Arabic 
remained in use as the 
lingua franca
of the area. It became known locally as Juba 
Arabic (
arabi juba
), after the capital of South Sudan, where it is often used as a 
means of communication between speakers of different languages.
An interesting aspect of the history of this variety is the later development in 
southern Sudan. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the increase in bilin
-
gual marriages in the capital led to the emergence of a group of native speakers 
of Juba Arabic, who spoke a creole that in many respects resembled the Arabic 
creole Nubi spoken in Uganda and Kenya (see below). These speakers became 
increasingly familiar with Standard Arabic and Khartoum Arabic. Eventually, this 
could have led to a restructuring of Juba Arabic in the direction of a ‘normal’ 
Arabic dialect.
Mahmud (1979) explains that Juba Arabic has only one verbal form that is used 
in combination with aspectual markers, such as 
bi- 
or 
gi-
, as in (8):
(8) 
kul 
yom 
ana 
gi-suf 
ita
 
every 
day 
1s 
CONT-see 2s
 
‘Every day I see you’ (Mahmud 1979: 90)

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Arabic Pidgins and Creoles 
307
When speakers of Juba Arabic were exposed to Standard Arabic and Khartoum 
Arabic in the media and became acquainted with both the prefix and the suffix 
conjugation of Arabic, they at first re-analysed the personal prefixes of Arabic 
imperfect verbs 
ya-
, 
ta-
, 
na-
as aspectual markers and started using them instead 
of, or in combination with, the aspectual markers in Juba Arabic, without regard 
to personal agreement. In one example given by Mahmud (1979: 187), a speaker 
uses the forms 
bi-kutubalu
, 
ta-kutubalu
and 
ya-kutubalu
in one stretch of speech to 
refer to a third-person plural, ‘they care’ (Arabic 
ḫud bāl 
‘pay attention’). At a later 
stage, they became aware of the pronominal function of the personal prefixes and 
learnt how to use them correctly. Diachronically, this means that in their speech 
they had introduced a new opposition between perfect and imperfect verbs, thus 
making their dialect structurally similar to the ‘normal’ dialects of Arabic.
This development in Juba Arabic only took place in the speech of some 
speakers, but it shows that it is possible for an Arabic pidgin to lose the distinc
-
tion between perfect–imperfect and then recover it later through the interfer
-
ence of a prestige variety. If we had no knowledge of the previous structure of 
the language of these speakers, we would probably regard their speech as just 
another regional variety of Arabic. Obviously, the independence of South Sudan 
in 2011 and the introduction of English as the official language, may put a stop 
to the process of interference from Khartoum Arabic. Since only about 18 per 
cent of the population is Muslim, continued influence from Standard Arabic is 
not very likely either. Because of the multilingualism of South Sudan, with more 
than sixty languages being spoken, theoretically Juba Arabic could still serve as 
a national language and a new identity marker. Although most speakers of Juba 
Arabic are second-language speakers, in the course of time the language might 
acquire native speakers, especially in urban centres with the greater frequency of 
mixed marriages. To some extent, Juba Arabic is indeed expanding its domain, for 
instance, in the courtroom (Miller 2007c) and in popular music.