Generational change and Language in the UAE: The desertion of the Emirati vernacular

Abstract

During the Last decade, the Arabian Gulf region has been moving towards an increasing use of a ‘Pan Gulf vernacular’, “…a homogenised form of ‘Gulf’ speech not identifiable with any particular Gulf community”(Holes, 2011:130), where new words are introduced or borrowed from neighboring gulf countries and many others have disappeared from the local lexicon.

In this paper we have a special interest in investigating the Emirati Vernacular in more depth to identify the words that disappeared and were replaced by what is considered to be more semantically accessible words borrowed from neighboring Gulf countries. 

 In this paper, we conducted a survey that aimed to identify the words lost from the Emirati lexicon, and rarely or never used by Emirati university students.  The word lists based on the words used in two typical and extremely popular Emirati TV serials: the first is “Sh-ḥafan” which was broadcast in the late 1970s, and the second is a popular animation called “Fereej”, an animated media artifact started in 2006 which presented 4 old female characters that represent the different vernaculars currently used within the UAE.  The survey was divided to three parts; the first measured the student’s understanding of these words, while the second concentrated on the students’ perception on the popularity of these words use to see whether they think that these words have really disappeared from the Emirati lexicon.  The survey enabled us to outline the students’ insights on the reason behind this language change.  Finally, focus group was created to record students’ perceptions and to measure the impact of this experience.

The aim of this study is to measure whether modernity, globalization and the extensive use of English by the new generations have cost the UAE to lose its dialects and head towards what is seen as an easier and more accessible dialect shared by the speakers in the this region.