Gulf Arabic: Recent Data about the Variety Spoken in the Emirate of Dubai

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present some recent examples of the variety spoken in the well-known Emirate of Dubai, the second largest of the seven Emirates that constitute the federation, located in the South Eastern shore of the Arabian Peninsula. The study is based on data gathered by the author between 2015 and 2016 during her recent fieldwork in the UAE1: the informants were young Emirati women aged between 20 and 30 years old. The purpose of the study is to contribute to the previous ones about Gulf Arabic, by presenting more recent examples and some morphological and syntactic features of the local variety in Dubai.

Folia Orientalia

“…After the 2000s, further studies focused on EA were published in English 4 : Blodgett et al (2007Blodgett et al ( : 1137Blodgett et al ( -1140) investigated the intonation of EA, Jarad (2017: 742-760) wrote about grammaticalisation in EA; al-Kaabi and Ntelitheos in 2019 issued an article about a syntactic analysis of verbal morphology in EA, while Wilmsen and Al Muhairi (2022) investigated the infixed -nn-in Northern Emirati Arabic. 5 In addition, a comprehensive grammar of EA was published by Leung et al in 2021 and a study regarding the subject expression and discourse embedded-ness in EA was published in 2013 by Owens et al It is important to highlight the works in Arabic on Emirati varieties by ʕAbīd (2006; and also the two books by al-Maṭrūšī (2013;2019).…”