Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures

This paper explores the discourse functions of Arabic-Persian codeswitching and the phonological/lexical outcomes of language contact among members of the Āl ʿAlī tribe in the United Arab Emirates and Hurmuzgān Province in Iran. The linguistic environment among the Āl ʿAlī is characterized by bilingualism and multidialectalism. In the spoken and written code, they generate a tetra-glossic switching between Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf Colloquial Arabic, Modern Standard Persian, Colloquial Persian and two Persian dialects: Bandarī and Ačumī. The study draws on recorded data with tribal members in the UAE and conversation threads of fellow Iranian tribesmen on social media sites. The main theoretical construct applied for the analysis is the Matrix Language-Frame model (Myers-Scotton 2002). It will be argued that the nature of codeswitching among the Āl ʿAlī is situational and transactional, both inter- and intra-sentential. Language and dialect choice is determined by the topic of the conversation, the interlocutors’ identity and their relationship to each other.

Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi, have been exposed to significant Arabic and Persian language interference. This interference spanned over centuries of cultural, literary and religious influence under Persianate dynasties who ruled vast territories of India. It is less well-known that Dravidian languages also came into contact with Arabic and Persian, either directly or indirectly by way of Urdu. This paper aims at analysing phonological and orthographic patterns of Perso-Arabic loanwords in Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. The study differentiates between lexical borrowings used by Muslim communities, who adopted a higher number of foreign words, and borrowings used by non-Muslim speakers. The study introduces a new approach to Dravidian and Perso-Arabic language contact in two main areas: 1) it compares the phonological and orthographic features of Perso-Arabic loanwords across three Dravidian languages, viz. Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu and 2) the starting point of the analysis are the original donor languages, Arabic and Persian.

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