Economic migrants, social networks, and the prospect of koinéization in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

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.

English, super‐diversity, and identity in the State of Qatar

“…Before this period, there had been lingua francas based on Hindi/Urdu and Swahili, and it was not uncommon for British oil conglomerates to use Arabic as a lingua franca. This began to change around the 1950s as more expatriates came for technical, professional, and management positions and used English (Boyle, , p. 316).…”

“…Likewise, Al‐Rawi () and Mahboob and Elyas () provide some evidence to support the position that there is a ‘Saudi English’ that is undergoing nativisation. Boyle (, p. 38), on the other hand, discusses it as ‘koinéization’—‘the outcome of dialect mixing, leveling, and simplification’ and provides evidence of pre‐koinéization happening in the United Arab Emirates in his study of English as a lingua franca there.…”

A scoping review of world Englishes in the Middle East and North Africa

“…First, there are a growing number of studies over the past five years that offer glimpses of the burgeoning of localized forms of Englishes in the region. The stage is either set or already at the ‘nativization’ phase (Schneider, 2003, 2007) for postcolonial English varieties (Al‐Rawi, 2012; Al‐Surmi, 2018; Boyle, 2012, 2014; Dashti, 2015; Fallatah, 2017; Mahboob & Elyas, 2014); this is especially the case in the Arabian Peninsula where expatriate populations coming predominantly from South and Southeast Asia outnumber citizens. Given the large percentage of expatriates, local Englishes in the Arabian Peninsula are not only influenced by Inner Circle Englishes (Kachru, 1985, 1992a) but also other Expanding and Outer Circle Englishes, predominantly Indian Englishes (Buckingham, 2015b; Poole, 2006).…”