Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Gulf Arabic (and Hindi?) Pidgin

It should be unsurprising that a pidgin trade-Arabic has evolved in the Gulf, given the incredibly large proportion of the population from non-Arabic-speaking countries. But this is the first info I've seen on it online. Not much actual detail (I would add the word siida "straight ahead"), but it also mentions a pidgin Hindi, which is more surprising. Sounds worth investigating...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good catch, as always :o)
And I see that the luckyfatima's post got a comment from Mikael Parkvall. Any chance of getting your hands on the article he mentioned?

luckyfatima said...

I think seeda is from Farsi??? but may be one of those Farsi from Hindustani.

I am not a pidgin expert, just reflecting on the ole' blog, that's why the post is slim

Anonymous said...

All this arabi hindi stuff is so interesting really!

Someone gotta put together a site to teach some basics of this pidgin language.

I just found out Gulf Arabic but it's not about pdigin, but rather the Arabic that Emaratis speak, as far as I can guess.

luckyfatima said...

oh looked in my Hindi dictionary seedha is pure Hindi, all these years I thought it was seeda, no aspiration, and from Farsi. I've been pronouncing it wrong in Hindi/Urdu all this time, too! but when i saw the aspiration on the "d", (means native Indic origin) i realized i was mistaken---yep, another for the list. most definately used in Khaleeji Arabic.

Anonymous said...

hi guys,
we can start discussing in hindi now that we have www.quillpad.in/hindi. It converts hindi in english script to hindi in hindi scriptscript.
Its very easy to write in hindi with this.

studioarabiyainegypt said...
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