Linguistic Contact and Tracing Persian Construction onto Khuzestani Arabic Structures

Abstract

Unlike other dialects of Arabic, Khuzestani vernacular Arabic seems to have attracted little attention within the linguistic community. In this vein, the present study aims to present some evidence to show that matter replication of Persian material is mostly found in Khuzestani vernacular Arabic and thus linguistic contact and grammatical borrowing is most often mapped from Persian onto Khuzestani Arabic. Replication of Persian material primarily occurs in the domain of lexical vocabulary, and partly in grammatical vocabulary. Also, pattern replication is notable in the emerging change of constraints on word order, the favoring of analytic constructions and emergence of a new analytic past tense, and the reduction of overt marking of definiteness. In addition, the most remarkable contact-induced change in the dialect is the identification of Khuzestani Arabic grammatical morphemes in attributive constructions – the Construct State marker and the definite article that appears between head and attribute – with the Persian attributive particle, and the consequent merger of two historically distinct attributive constructions – adjectival and nominal – into a single type, which replicates the state of affairs in Persian.