Munirah AlAjlan
Kuwait University-Kings College, London

Zubairi Kuwaiti Arabic as a Non-Dominant Variety in Kuwait

Keywords: Zubairi Arabic, Kuwaiti Arabic, Kuwait, Zubair

It is a fact beyond dispute that Arabic is a pluricentric language; Arabic is characterized with diglossia where two varieties of the same language co-exist. The Modern Standard Arabic, which is the prestigious variety, is only used in media. The low variety is the informal one, which is spoken in the mundane conversations. I focus on the Arabic spoken in the State of Kuwait, and as I have mentioned elsewhere (cc: Rudolf, 2012), within the low variety spoken in Kuwait, there are different varieties based on the region. Ibrahim (2007) illustrated that Arabic is manifested by many social and geographical speech communities. This paper examines a very significant non-dominant verity of Kuwaiti Arabic known as Zubairi, and which is spoken by the Zubairi community in Kuwait. This variety originated from the area of Zubair located in South-West Basra in Iraq, and when tribes immigrated from Zubair to Kuwait, they influenced the Kuwaiti dialect with Zubairi lexemes. Holmes (1992) stated that regional dialects involve vocabulary, pronunciation, and sentence syntax, which differ from one region to another. Although this variety is originated from Iraq, the Zubairi variety ‘showed a considerable similarity to the speech of Kuwait’ (Ingham, 1997: 42). And although there are Zubairi Kuwaitis who speak this verity nowadays, it is considered to be a non-dominant and endangered variety of Kuwaiti Arabic because only some older Kuwaitis mainly speak it. This paper reviews the linguistic characters of the Zubairi Arabic, its origin, and how it affects and effected by the different social, political and economic issues that are happening in Kuwait.

References:

AlAyoub, A. 1997. Lexemes of City People. Kuwait: Kuwait Centre for Studies and Research.

  AlOnizi, H. (n.d) Days in Zubair: The Good Old Time.

  Holmes, J. 1992. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.

  Ingham, B. 1997. Arabian Diversions: studies on the dialects of Arabia.

  Ibrahim, M. 2007. The Syllabic Consonants of Zubairi Dialect1: some  phonological points. Journal of the College of Arts. 44

  Ibrahim, M. 2012. The Sound System of Zubairi Arabic: a phonological sketch.  Studies in Literature and Language. 5 (1). 59-66.

  Ibrahim, M. 2013. Syntactic Behaviour of Subordinate Clauses of Time and  Condition in Zubairi Arabic. Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 4 (3). 480-486.