THE INFLUENCE OF HOUSEMAIDS ON SAUDI YOUNG CHILDREN’S ARABIC LANGUAGE ACQUISITION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF MOTHERS

Abstract

Almost every upper- and middle-class family in Saudi Arabia has a foreign housemaid who does the housework and takes care of the children. This study aims to find out whether foreign housemaids have an impact on children’s acquisition of Arabic, the children’s first language. Surveys with 300 mothers with children under the age of six revealed that most housemaids speak neither English nor Arabic upon arrival in Saudi Arabia. The housemaids learn to speak Arabic by immersion. However, their language is characterized by faulty pronunciation and grammatical forms, production of incomplete sentences, and limited vocabulary. Mothers surveyed asserted that about half the children imitate the housemaid all the time when they first start to learn to speak Arabic at age two and three years. Those children cannot produce Arabic sounds correctly and make grammatical mistakes, but when they go to kindergarten, traces of foreign accent resulting from imitating the housemaid’s foreign Arabic accent disappear, and the child is able to speak Arabic correctly and natively. This means that housemaids have a temporary influence on Saudi children’s acquisition of Arabic as the children get older. It seems that the housemaid’s influence depends on how much time the child spends with her, how much time the mother spends with the child, and whether the child has siblings and playmates.