Historical and socio-political context

Without a doubt, the discovery of oil in several Gulf states in the mid-twentieth century was the prime impetus for British economic interest in the region (Onley, Reference Onley2005: 38). Prior to this, the British had maintained an informal colonial presence throughout the region, being initiated with the signing of an anti-piracy treaty, known as the General Treaty of 1820 (Onley, Reference Onley2005: 30). During this initial period of colonial contact, the British were mainly interested in protecting their trade and communications routes with British India, while also excluding the influence of other foreign colonial powers, including Ottoman, German, French and Russian interests (Onley, Reference Onley2005: 42). Ironically, English failed to gain a stronghold in the Gulf during Britain's informal period of colonial rule, but rather with the granting of ‘independence to Kuwait in 1961 and the remaining Gulf states in 1971’ (Onley, Reference Onley2005: 32), oil became Britain's (and America's) prime interest, and the stage was set for English to take its place in the region.

In order to rapidly industrialise on the path to modernisation, a certain discourse was framed around the importance of English following the oil crisis of the 1970s. Karmani (Reference Karmani2005: 92) observes, ‘English was widely becoming identified as a powerful tool in facilitating the region's course to modernisation’, and with this modernisation came the rapid expansion of a western-oriented ELT industry in the education sector, an influx of western technologies, and widespread infiltration of English in public and private institutions. So as to harness a workforce capable of initiating swift development, governments suddenly fat on oil wealth looked abroad for solutions. It was widely accepted that foreign workers, while not completely welcome in the long term, would be needed to help build the newly prosperous Gulf states. Lured by the promise of higher salaries, skilled and unskilled expatriate workers poured into the region, and with them they brought a wide variety of Englishes. Therefore, in a matter of only 40 years, English has managed to displace Arabic in a number of domains to become ‘a lingua franca at all levels of society’ (Randall & Samimi, Reference Randall and Samimi2010: 43) across the Gulf region. Within this specific context of language contact, we can now see the emergence of certain locally-produced linguistic features which can be heard, read or experienced on the streets from Muscat to Kuwait City.

Users and domains of use

Gulf English has primarily emerged in domains that involve some kind of direct or indirect contact between the local L1 (or L2) Arabic-speaking population and various ‘guest’ expatriate communities who have imported different varieties of English into the region. Some of the more prominent English-speaking expatriate communities include skilled and unskilled workers from South Asia and South-East Asia, along with smaller communities of L1 English speakers from Kachru's ‘inner circle’. Moody (Reference Moody, Zhang, Rubdy and Alsagoff2009: 103) identifies a number of areas – including business, banking, industry and commerce, transportation, tourism, international diplomacy, mass communication, and the Internet – in which ‘limited instrumental needs’ often dictate that English is used in the Gulf. More specifically, I would like to suggest that there are five important settings in which Gulf English is actively emerging in response to this cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interaction: tertiary education, skilled employment, local forms of English-medium media and entertainment, advertising and signage, and online social networking. In this section, examples of language will primarily be drawn from these settings.

Anyone who speaks English in the Gulf can potentially be a user of Gulf English. This is inclusive of both local nationals as well as expatriate residents. What defines Gulf English is not the nationality of the user, but rather a user's application of a linguistic feature which makes reference in some way to a local concept or local way of constructing meaning. As an expatriate resident in the Sultanate of Oman and a speaker of a ‘general’ variety of standard Australian English, I routinely find myself using a decidedly local form of English. Being more attuned to my linguistic surroundings in recent days, I have caught myself on several occasions using the continuous form in place of a stative verb form, using lexical items that have been borrowed from Arabic, and sometimes even saying ‘Inshallah’ (If God wills).

When considering the local Arabic-speaking population, relative education level and occupational status are two key factors in determining who is more likely to enter a domain in which Gulf English is functioning. As most Gulf countries have mandated that English ‘become the medium of instruction in many, if not the majority, of their academic institutions’ (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2010: 4), students who wish to pursue tertiary level studies are often required to enter a setting in which classroom instruction, at least, is dominated by the use of English. Successful graduates are often then employed in professional settings in which they are expected to communicate in English with both their expatriate colleagues and members of the wider expatriate community. Thus, the domains of tertiary education and skilled employment have both provided fertile environments for the development of Gulf English.

Grammatical features and syntax

In terms of grammar and syntax, many of the distinguishing features of local varieties of English can be attributed to first language transfer, whereby Arabic functions as a ‘mother-tongue’ substratum. This can be observed in the following examples which have primarily been drawn from my current context of English Language Teaching (ELT): instructing male and female students, aged 18–22, in one of Oman's colleges of applied sciences.

Figure 1. ‘Detour’ sign at construction site – Sohar, Oman

The use of the ‘dummy object’, which is a feature of Modern Standard Arabic, is commonly employed in written and spoken sentences containing a relative clause:

A variant use of both subject and object pronouns is also commonly observed in written and spoken forms of English with a preference for the masculine form when the gender of the referent is not explicitly specified:

Additionally, while standard UK or American English would typically show a preference for the infinitive form (in order to + infinitive), there seems to be an alternative preference for the use of the gerund form following ‘for’ in subordinate purposive clauses:

Again, L1 transfer may be in play here, as Modern Standard Arabic marks such purposive subordinate clauses with the preposition li, literally translated as ‘for’ in English.

The norms of Indian varieties of English have also exerted a strong influence on Gulf English. Drawing on examples from the Sultanate of Oman, Poole (Reference Poole2006: 22–3) identifies a number of distinctive grammatical features which have been imported from Indian varieties of English: the use of ‘would’ to imply a future aspect (e.g., ‘The Minister would be arriving at about 3pm’); a preference for the past perfect tense in place of the present perfect tense (e.g., ‘The good news is that she had released a new album’); the frequent use of the verb ‘do’ before a main verb (e.g, ‘We do have more prizes to give away’).

Gulf English also shares several salient grammatical features that have been attested in a range of other World Englishes. Accordingly, Schneider (Reference Schneider and Kirkpatrick2010: 372) observes:

In terms of noun countability, Gulf English exhibits a shift towards adding the plural morpheme ‘-s’ to ‘traditional’ non-countable nouns. Some specific examples that I have personally encountered include furnitures, informations, homeworks, underwears, advices, evidences, staffs, and lucks. As a result of this plural marking, these nouns are also often used in conjunction with the article ‘a’ in countable syntactic environments:

Figure 2. Shopfront of general store – Sohar, Oman

Users of Gulf English also show a preference for the continuous form when using certain stative verbs. One salient example is the use of the verb ‘come’ in the stative sense of ‘to originate from’:

Phonological features

In terms of accent, a speaker of Gulf English may ‘sound’ British, American or Indian, or exhibit L1 phonological transfer from Arabic. Accent in the first three instances is more reflective of the sociolinguistic contact a local user has had with speakers of other varieties of English, while accent in the fourth instance is more indicative of how Arabic can function as a ‘mother-tongue’ substratum. Many users of localised varieties of English have spent time studying abroad in NABA (North America, Britain and Australia) countries, or have had direct classroom contact with NABA teachers in the local tertiary sector, which employs ‘largely white, Western, “native speakers” of English’ (Karmani, Reference Karmani2005: 93). Additionally, there has been an influx of Western (predominantly American) forms of entertainment such as gaming, music, movies and television programming into the region; each providing further exposure to NABA Englishes and their respective features of phonology. One particularly salient feature of connected speech that has been transferred into Gulf English is the use of ‘gonna’. This spoken form commonly appears in formal as well as casual contexts of communication:

Poole (Reference Poole2006) identifies a number of attested phonological features of Indian varieties of English that are routinely exhibited in the speech patterns of Omani users of English. Some of these phonological features include the tendency to place stress on the first syllable of a word; the pronunciation of the word-initial /t/ which is often unaspirated as /d/; the tendency to voice the word-initial /k/ as /ɡ/ (Poole, Reference Poole2006: 22). Interestingly, Martin (Reference Martin2003: 54), who spent seven months teaching female university students in the UAE, observed that many of her students were ‘unable to free their speech of the intonation and stress patterns they had acquired from their servants’. In this specific context, Martin (Reference Martin2003: 53) suggests that the inability of her students to distinguish vowel length in English was partly the result of the close contact that many Emirati nationals have at an early age with their ‘unschooled house servants and caretakers’ from nations such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

Local vernacular varieties of Arabic have also exerted their influence on the phonological features inherent in Gulf English. In a study designed to investigate the pronunciation of English monophthongs amongst L1 Arabic-speaking university graduates in the Sultanate of Oman, Hubais & Pillai (Reference Hubais and Pillai2010: 15) observed a tendency for the subjects to assimilate ‘Arabic vowel qualities into their production of corresponding English vowels’. In particular, this Arabic-accented pronunciation pertained to the standard UK English vowels /i:/, /æ/, /α:/ which were respectively pronounced more closely to the Arabic vowels /i/, /a/, /a:/.

Figure 3. Direct translation from Arabic to English in commercial sign – Sohar, Oman

Across the Gulf, the absence of the phoneme /dʒ/ in certain vernacular dialects of Arabic also seems to pose a challenge for local speakers of English. Amongst my own Omani students, coming from all over the sultanate, I have noticed that this is particularly problematic when the /dʒ/ sound appears in the medial or final position of an English word. As such, the following words are commonly pronounced with a /ɡ/ sound: college > /kɒlɪɡ/; language > /læŋwɪɡ/; manager >/mænɪɡə/; village > /vɪlɪɡ/; original > /ərɪɡɪnəl/.

Lexical features

A wide range of lexical items have been directly borrowed from Arabic into Gulf English. Some of these direct borrowings include wadi (‘seasonal dry river bed’), jabel (‘mountain’), souq (‘market area’), mutaw'a (‘devout follower of Islam’), eid (‘religious holiday’), Haj (‘religious pilgrimage to Mecca’); haram (‘behaviour forbidden by God’), wasta (‘privilege from connections and influence’), dishdasha (‘long robe for men’), abaya (‘black cloak for women’), niqaab (‘face cover for women’), halwa (‘local sweets’), biriyani (‘flavoured rice’), and shisha (‘water pipe for smoking’). Not surprisingly, most borrowings from Arabic refer to local concepts that fall into the semantic domains of religion, food, geographical features, and clothing.

Gulf English also employs a range of locally-produced lexical items which have exhibited some kind of semantic shift in meaning. For instance, supermarkets are known as hypermarkets; road detours are sometimes described as deviations; a computer is opened and closed; young adults are referred to as boys and girls; commercial establishments that either sell fast food or provide a public space for smoking shisha are called coffee shops. One more interesting example is the health club which euphemistically describes a business establishment providing illicit services for men. Additionally, direct translation from Arabic is particularly prevalent in the language employed in business and commercial signage. The following examples were all noted in the Omani city of Sohar: Food Stuff Sale, Scientific Pharmacy, Automatic Bakery, Manual Bakery, Saif Al-Naabi for Omani Halwa Sale. This last example is a direct translation from Arabic, and would be expressed in standard NABA varieties of English as ‘Omani Halwa sold by Saif Al-Naabi’.

Certain localised verb forms have also been coined in Gulf English. As most Gulf countries are actively working towards educating and training their national citizens for skilled employment, verbs such as ‘to Omanise’, ‘to Emiratise’, and ‘to Kuwaitise’ have been creatively coined to reflect this process of change. The following newspaper headlines usefully demonstrate how these verbs can also apply the morphological rules of standard NABA English varieties to form nouns:

English words that have been abbreviated in Gulf English tend to show a preference for omitting vowels; a convention which is commonly employed in written Modern Standard Arabic. Rather than clipping a single word by retaining its initial segment, as would often be the preferred convention in NABA varieties of English, abbreviated words are regularly formed by marking three consecutive consonants. As such, Qatar is commonly shortened to ‘QTR’, Kuwait to ‘KWT’, Bahrain to ‘BHR’, and Muscat to ‘MCT’. The same pattern of abbreviation is also a feature of the programming advertisements currently broadcast on Dubai's free-to-air television channel MBC 4 with tomorrow being shortened to ‘tmw’, next to ‘nxt’, later to ‘ltr’.

Sociolinguistic features

Gulf English exhibits a specific set of rules in relation to the use of formal titles. This is particularly prevalent in local media reports when acknowledging the status of someone in a position of power. In the Omani context, newspaper reporting commonly employs several abbreviations, such as ‘HM’ (His/Her Majesty), ‘HE’ (His/Her Excellency), and ‘HH’ (His/Her Highness), as a mark of respect for those in esteemed positions of power. The following example was reported in the Oman Tribune:

A comprehensive account of the linguistic features of Gulf English would not be complete without consideration of the cultural key word Allah. In an attempt to identify with deeply felt religious sentiments, several Islamic expressions in Arabic are routinely code-mixed into localised varieties of English. Some of these expressions include Inshallah (If God wills), Alhamdulillah (Praise to God), and Mashallah (What God wishes). Masliyah (Reference Masliyah1999: 98) also notes that the expression Inshallah is often used in secular contexts to express ‘a statement of future intention’, and that in the United Arab Emirates it is commonly employed ‘when obeying an order, or performing someone's wish’.

For those who share the faith of Islam, daily communication in English in many instances would not be complete without verbal acknowledgment of the almighty power of Allah:

It could also be argued that such references serve a very real social function in which a sense of group solidarity is created amongst users of Gulf English.