12 55 Years of Arab Studies in Romania - Secţia de Arabă

Pidgins have also been classified on the basis of social criteria. Bakker
(1995: 27-28), for instance, classifies pidgins in terms of the social situation in
which they are used. Four types are accordingly distinguished: (i) maritime
pidgins; (ii) trade pidgins; (iii) interethnic contact languages; (iv) work force
pidgins. All four varieties under consideration can be assigned to the category of
work force pidgins. Sebba (1997: 26-33) suggests a typology according to the
social context of the language‟s origins and identifies the following types: (i)
military and police pidgins; (ii) seafaring and trade pidgins; (iii) plantation
pidgins; (iv) mine and construction pidgins; (v) immigrants‟ pidgins; (vi) tourist
pidgins; (vii) urban contact vernaculars. All four varieties qualify for the group of
immigrants‟ pidgins.
The corpus of empirical data is made up of both published and
unpublished sources. The published sources include transcripts of interviews,
answers to questionnaires, translations of test sentences designed to elicit specific
data. The unpublished sources consist of online sources, such as internet
discussion lists (between users with different mother tongues), songs, poems (see
the list of online sources in the References section). It is perhaps worth noting
that, to my knowledge, this type of source has not been tapped in any previous
study of Arabic-lexified pidgins.
Except for the data from Al-Moaily (2008), which are transliterated from
the original version in Arabic script, all examples appear in the orthography or
system of transcription used in the sources. The length of quotations has been kept
to a reasonable minimum. Relevant items in quotations are in bold characters. All
quotations are accompanied by glosses and their translation. Whenever known,
examples also include the specification of the L1 of the speaker as well as the
length of stay.
2. Pidgin Madam
Pidgin Madam 2 is spoken in Lebanon by Sri Lankan female domestic
workers, with Sinhala as their L1, and their Arab employers. Sociolinguistic
issues, such as the context in which this variety emerged, its status and functions,
are discussed by Haraty et al. (2007) and, at great length, by Bizri (2010).
Linguistic analyses of the pidgin can be found in two papers (Bizri 2005 and
2009) and in a monograph (Bizri 2010), from which the relevant data are taken.
According to Bizri (2010: 127), Pidgin Madam “has Ø in the predicative
and equative functions, and fī in the existential and locative positions”. This
distribution is illustrated by the following examples given by Bizri (2010: 127-
128):
2
Also called “Pidgin Madame” (see e.g. Bizri 2010).
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