By Passant Hisham
KUWAIT: Walking along the streets of Kuwait, visiting a supermarket, a gas station, or even riding a bus, you must have come across an odd language that is spoken among two groups of people who seem to be from totally different ethnic backgrounds, yet both can decipher its codes very smoothly. It’s not originally Indian, nor is it Urdu nor Arabic. But it feels more like a mixture between the Asian and Arabic languages. This odd language is known as "Pidgin”, which is defined as a reduced language that is used to facilitate contact with groups of people who don’t speak the same language; it is usually a hybrid between two or more languages.
It isn’t acknowledged as a written language and it is not even taught at schools, but its speakers acquire it as a second language based on social norms and frequent practice. Back in the 1840s, the first Pidgin to ever be established was the Chinese Pidgin English, which was used as a trade language among the British and Chinese people. Ever since, it’s continued spreading across many geographical areas around the world, until it landed in the Gulf area in the 1970s. "Kuwait’s residents and Asian workers, both went the same distance to reach a middle ground of communication by speaking the Gulf Pidgin Arabic to facilitate business,” Dr Ashraf Atta Salem, a linguistics expert, said during an interview with Kuwait times.
Dr Salem mentioned that he was privileged to become the first Arab researcher in the middle east to shed light on this topic by publishing his research paper "Linguistic Features of Pidgin Arabic in Kuwait” in April 2013, which has been later cited in 21 other research papers. The paper aimed to introduce the idea of developing the Gulf Pidgin language into a recognized spoken and written language that can be differentiated by certain features and rules. "After 10 years of studying the Gulf Pidgin, I believe it’s ready now to become a real language,” he said.
"Kuwait has a golden opportunity to be the first to establish framework and rules for the Gulf Pidgin, and this language can later be one of the most distinctive signatures that distinguish the gulf countries from other countries around the world.” In the interview, Dr Salem mentioned that the Gulf Pidgin has some remarkable characteristics that can easily be detected at first encounter: Scarcity of vocabulary, use of simplified grammar and less structured words.
Distinct vocabulary, grammar
According to research, pidgin includes no more than 200 words and borrows them from different languages to enrich its vocabulary. That’s why a word you may hear often in Gulf Pidgin is "Patcha” which is an Indian word that means "child”. Another is "Maku”, which is an Iraqi word that means "nothing”. Pidgin applies its simplified grammar when describing nouns. For instance, it uses only single demonstrative pronouns, even when it’s referring to multiple objects or people.
For example, "Haza nafarat zen”, which means these are good people, the language uses singular pronoun "Haza” (this) addressing the plural word "nafarat” (people). The language also tends to ignore gender identification to avoid complexity. In another phrase like "Haza nafar zen” (This man is good) "Haza”, which is an Arabic male pronoun, is used again, but it may be referring to either a man or a woman indistinctively. Pidgin is not bounded by any grammatical rules, which forms very weak sentences that deliver the intended message of the speaker based on the context.
Creating a dictionary
One can’t deny the significant impact that the Gulf pidgin had on Kuwait. For almost 40 years, the language has been used as the official way of communication between Arabs and Asians. Dr Salem said the importance of the language has inspired him to express his deep interest and readiness to team up with Kuwait’s linguistic researchers to develop Pidgin to reach a more advanced level. He also suggested collecting the Gulf Pidgin vocabulary and definitions of the words in a dictionary, so that the language can be easily and quickly transferred.
The linguistic researcher believes that Kuwait is the best to take this initiative, as among other gulf countries, it is the only area with the highest variety of Asians from different countries such as Iran, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Siri Lanka, Ethiopia, Nepal and Bangladesh. The communities make up 65 percent of Kuwait’s migrant workforce, which is a percentage high enough to facilitate the sampling process, he said.
He also stated that learning the Gulf Pidgin can only count as a transitory phase that easily enables Asians to later learn the proper rules of the Arabic language on the long run. Providing academic centers that are specialized in teaching Arabic to non- Arabic speakers in the regions where they are most present in Kuwait can help achieve that goal.