As foreign workers constitute about 90 per cent of the workforce of the UAE, English is used as the country's acrolectal lingua franca. In order to discover what effect this community of multilingual speakers is having on the lexicogrammar of English, a million‐word corpus of examples of formal, written English as a lingua franca (ELF) was compiled, and was compared with data from the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus. The results suggest that the patterns of use of non‐finite complement clauses and of transitive and intransitive verbs, in particular, are beginning to change and that the changes are systematic. Where a choice of patterns exists, ELF usage appears to be converging on the dominant pattern.
The population of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) rose from 1.6 million in 1990 to 8.2 million in 2010, mainly as a result of immigration, and foreigners now constitute about 88 per cent of the population. English is the second or third language for many of the expatriates, and it is used as an acrolectal lingua franca. As these economic migrants are transient workers on short-term residence visas, most communicate through loose-knit social networks, and this produces conditions favourable to language change. As a means of examining how English has established itself in the UAE and of describing the changes that are beginning to take place in the language, this paper will apply Schneider's 'dynamic model' of postcolonial Englishes to the history of the country from 1820 until the present day. It will argue that the 'nativization' phase is just beginning in the UAE and that the lexicogrammatical changes which are appearing are characteristic of this phase.
In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), immigrants constitute nearly 90% of the population. Most are adults who come from South Asia and who are ESL users of English. The paper suggests that the English speaking community in the UAE is at the stage of pre-koinéization, one in which there is an increase in transparency with regard to features which are overly complex for ESL speakers. The very small number of children in the immigrant community and the instability of the community are constraints on the process of pre-koinéization, but this paper nevertheless suggests that there are users of acrolectal English who strive for greater transparency, and it provides examples of three ways in which they are doing so. These are through the extension of verb complementation patterns, the extension of patterns of transitivity, and the extension of the pluralization of nouns, and these changes are well documented in postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007). The data are drawn from a corpus of 3.3 million words of acrolectal written English.
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