• Mohammad Aljutaily

  Author

The study investigates pharyngealized consonant variations in Gulf Pidgin Arabic
(henceforth GPA), a variety spoken by expatriates living in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar
and Bahrain (Smart, 1990). The study focuses on the production of pharyngealized consonants of
Arabic from a corpus of GPA speakers working in Saudi Arabia. I analyzed two consonant
alternations (local form vs. L1 form): (1) pharyngeal/emphatic1 stop vs. alveolar stop and
pharyngeal fricative vs. alveolar fricative. The study addresses how the length of residency
(LOR) in Saudi Arabia and L1 of the GPA speakers influence their use of these segments and, in
particular, how their realization approximates local norms. Participants of this study are male
speakers who are native of India, speak Malayalam as their L1 and have been working in Saudi
Arabia between 3 and 13 years. The L1 Malayalam participants were divided into two groups
based on their LOR in Saudi Arabia: short stay group and long stay group. Data were obtained
from picture task in which the participants had to locate pictures that contained target
pharyngealized sounds in word-initial position in a carrier phrase. To determine to what extent
their realization of the target sounds were influenced by the local variety of Arabic (i.e., the
lexifier language), I relied on acoustic cues (analyzed in Praat). The results suggest that there is
a variation within speakers and among both groups across the consonants that have been
examined in this study. I have concluded that the variation of these consonants is influenced by
the native language of the speakers and both groups tend to alternate by either producing the
local variant of Arabic or replacing it with the counterpart in their L1. I find that the degree of
alternation is significantly affected by the LOR with the pharyngeal stop in both groups.
However, the effect of LOR has no effect on the pharyngeal fricative especially among the short
stay group. Moreover, there is a clear shift to the local norm among participants who have a
longer LOR in Saudi Arabia in both investigated sounds.

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