It has been observed that ‘the twenty-three countries in which Arabic is an official language have been described as diglossic speech communities’ (Bassiouney 2009: 10). Undoubtedly, Kuwait is a diglossic speech community in which people speak one language and write another, The concept of izdiwāğiyya luġawiyya ‘linguistic duality’ or ‘diglossia’ has been a factor of Arab society almost since the era of the Islamic expansion (Johnstone 1970: 619). In a diglossic community, ‘the prestigious standard or ‘High’ (or H) variety, which is linguistically related to but significantly different from the vernacular or ‘Low’ (or L) varieties, has no native speakers’ (Trudgill 2003: 39).27
In our case, the H variety generically signifies Classical/Standard Arabic while the L variety is colloquial/vernacular/patois. There is no doubt that literary and colloquial Arabic have differences at all linguistic levels,
27 Kaye (2002: 379) states that ‘[a]lthough the French term diglossie was introduced by the Arabist
William Marçais in 1930, it is the late Charles A. Ferguson who is most often credited as the first to introduce this notion in a classic (1959) article with the now famous one-word title, ‘Diglossia’’ (cf. Campbell and Mixco 2007: 45-46). In contrast, Suleiman (2013: 264) argues that diglossia ‘was the subject of discussion and debate in the Levant in the 19th century’; this was well before Ferguson’s and Marçais’ first use of the term diglossia.
including morphology, syntax, and phonology, in addition to vocabulary. Yassin (1975: 36) describes the following two varieties used by Kuwaiti speakers:
one with higher prestige (“superposed variety of Arabic”), referred to as (High) H and a less prestigious nonstandard variety referred to as (Low) L. These two varieties of Arabic fulfil distinctly complementary and stable roles within the same speech community – H is the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, learned largely through formal education, and generally used for formal purposes, while L is the normal medium of everyday conversation.
A notable example of this includes the use of the abovementioned adjectives ixawwuf or ixa iʿ ‘frightening, scary’ which instantly tells us that the speaker is on the L level while muxīf ‘frightening’ tells us that the speaker is on the H level. Another example of this occurrence is the MSA manāx versus the common Gulf Arabic vernacular ğaww28 ‘weather, climate’ (Smart and Altorfer 2010: 158). It is manāx which would be interpreted by a native speaker as a symbol of H, whereas ğaww would be indicative of L.29 Additionally, Ferguson ([1959a] 1996: 33) offers the following observation:
A striking feature of diglossia is the existence of many paired items, one H one L, referring to fairly common concepts frequently used in both H and L, where the range of meaning of the two items is roughly the same, and the use of one or the other immediately stamps the utterance or written sequence as H or L.
Ferguson (1996: 33) then gives five examples of lexical doublets gleaned from MSA and Egyptian Arabic (EA). The asterisked item is one of the many highest-frequency dialectal words in the Gulf.
MSA EA Gloss
ʾanfun manaxī ‘nose’
ʾalʾāna dilwaʾti ‘now’
ḥiḏāʾun gazma ‘shoe’
ḏahaba āḥ* ‘went’
mā ʾēh ‘what’
It should be mentioned that some scholars have found that the vernacular, or a L(ow) variety for one group of speakers, can function as a H(igh) variety for another group. For example, from the Iraqi lexical items presented in section 3.1 above, Standard Arabic (SA) is the H
28
Dickson (1949: 626) and Sowayan (1992: 256) gloss the homonym ğaww as ‘a low, flat basin or a wide valley where underground water is not too far below the surface’ for the Kuwaiti and Šammari dialects of Arabic, respectively.
29 In the mid-1970s, Holes (2005b: 99) recorded the term manāx within the agricultural domain in
Bahrain as in mā byxālif wiyyāh l-manāx ‘the climate doesn’t disagree with it’. This seems to be a literary borrowing or merely a term associated with agriculture and farmers’ parlance. Jayakar (1889: 824) glosses manāx as ‘camp’ in Omani Arabic.
variety shared by Muslim Baghdadi (MB) and Christian Baghdadi (CB) speakers. Abu- Haidar (1991: 143) observes that MB is the L variety for Muslim Baghdadis, whereas it is another H variety for Christian Baghdadis, falling between SA and their own CB dialect, which is their L variety. She adds that ‘MB functions as an H variety for Christian Baghdadis, since it is not learnt at home and not spoken with in-group members, but used in situations requiring a certain level of formality and perhaps more guarded behaviour’ (ibid.). It can therefore be presumed that CB speakers are triglossic because they use three distinct varieties of Arabic, viz. SA, MB, and CB.
In Bahrain, Holes (1983: 439) discovered three types of linguistic variation: the first two are phonological while the third type is ‘lexical variation involving phonologically unrelated items’. He argues that the ‘lexical variation arises chiefly as a result of the borrowing into the dialect of MSA neologisms’ (ibid.). Thus, many pairs of synonyms, such as the following, are found in the speech of Bahrainis (Holes 1983: 440). It should be remembered that the asterisked items are understood and used in colloquial Kuwaiti.
Dialectal Standard Gloss
saykal30 da āğa ‘bicycle’
ʿarras* zawwağ* ‘he married’
Consequently, a thorough review of the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) glossary compiled by Holmes and Samaan31 (1957: 111-228) shows that the individual senses or referents assigned to the vast majority of Kuwaiti vocabulary items may be realised in at least two lexical forms, or as two different lexemes. This includes verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Thus, given that the Kuwaiti lexicon contains two lexical forms for the same concept, then we could put together word lists like the ones compiled above to account for the lexical variation in KA.
When we speak of old Kuwait, a degree of lexical variation has been observed with respect to the urban and rural (read: tribal) dialects as we shall see later on. In fact, even though one could still distinguish the diverse tribal dialects of Kuwait:
30 This English borrowing is used in Kuwait to mean a ‘motorbike’.
[They] have all collapsed, not into ‘a local version of the pan-Arabic koiné’, but into a levelled but still distinctively Kuwaiti dialect which Kuwaitis routinely use, as far as one can observe, in all dialectal contexts, public or private, in their now sprawling metropolis of well over a million inhabitants (Holes 1995a: 286).
Commenting on the KOC glossary, Johnstone (1967b: xxv) notes that ‘the authors of KOC tend to give preference to pan-Arabic koiné32 over Kuwaiti in the matter of vocabulary’. So the authors of KOC did not assign a particular vocabulary item to particular religious, sectarian, or tribal groups. Diglossia-wise, the authors (Holmes and Samaan 1957) hinted that the items listed in their handbook are closer to the H level than the L level. Nonetheless, both authors termed the words listed with the generic term ‘Kuwaiti Arabic’.
By way of illustration, I will list some of the KOC vocabulary items (Holmes and Samaan 1957: 111-228) to give a clear picture of what the KA lexicon was like in the 1950s. I should emphasise that I am only interested in diglossia as reflected in the vocabulary of literary and Kuwaiti colloquial Arabic because it is particularly relevant to my scope of study, and ‘the importance of the lexical aspect in the distinction between literary and colloquial Arabic is partly due to the sheer number of the lexical items, which naturally far exceed the number of grammatical structures and phonological categories’ ( osenhouse 2007: 655). Therefore, the following word lists focus on a comparison of KA vocabulary as reflecting Arabic diglossia, and not on their diachronic development.
I provide the labels ‘KA’ for Kuwaiti colloquial Arabic/L level words and ‘pan-Arabic koiné’ for Standard/H level words. The following and the subsequent categorisations are mine, based on my intuition as a native speaker of the dialect since it is a widely held view that semantic analysis in general relies on native-speaker intuition about the acceptability and equivalence of expressions (Hellwig 2009: 311). In addition, Hellwig (ibid.) argues that the meaning of an expression has to be inferred from observing its use in context or from eliciting grammaticality and acceptability judgments.
32 ‘The term ‘koine’ comes from the Greek word oinē ‘common’, referring to the variety of Greek that
became the lingua franca, or common language, of the eastern Mediterranean area during the Hellenistic period. It has since been applied to many other languages that share certain features with the original Greek koine. Inspired by the Hellenistic tradition, a number of Arabists used the term to refer to two historical types of Arabic varieties: the pre-Islamic poetic koine and the military or urban dialect koine of the early periods of the Arab conquest’ (Miller 2006: 593).
KA (L) Pan-Arabic koiné (H) Gloss
dā madā ḥawl ‘around’
ḥilū ğamīl ‘beautiful’
ğisim ğasad ‘body’
šāl ḥamal ‘carry’
ʿalač maḍaġ ‘chew’
našlah zu ām ‘cold (n.)’
almah ʿitmah ‘darkness’
xaṣim taxfī ‘discount (n.)’
ḥag līağil ‘for’
balāš33
mağğānan ‘free’
Next, I select a number of items extracted from Holmes and Samaan (1957: 111-228) with the aim of distinguishing between KA words which are mustaʿmal ‘used’ (i.e. ‘current’) in Kuwait City and their muhmal ‘unused’ (i.e. ‘obsolete/outdated/old-fashioned’) counterparts in which the latter are now only recognised by older speakers (cf. Baalbaki 2014: 91). In fact, Holes (2007a: 214) observes the diglossic situation in the Gulf States and points out that, ‘[a]s a consequence of education and increased exposure to Modern Standard Arabic, many older borrowings are now being replaced by Modern Standard Arabic neologisms in the speech of educated younger speakers’.34
He notes that the below listed draywal (< English ‘driver’) is giving way to MSA sāʾi (= KA sāyi ) (cf. Smeaton 1973: 63, 89).
mustaʿmal (current) muhmal (obsolete) Gloss
ṭabīb daxtar ‘doctor’
sāyi draywal ‘driver’
ishāl ḥillah ‘dysentery’
abāb mrayx ‘fog’
kura ṭimbāxiyyah ‘football’
marag ṣālūnah ‘gravy’
ġitrah čafiyyah ‘head-kerchief’
čib īt šixxāṭah ‘matches’
33 balāš is generally accepted as an abbreviation of Standard Arabic bilā šayʾ ‘without a thing’ (Altoma
1969: 95).
34 In the same way, Stowasser and Ani (2004: xiii) note the influence of the written ‘educated’ language
on Syrian Arabic. They observe that ‘the extent to which a speaker incorporates features of the written language into his idiolect may still reveal his educational background’ (ibid.: xv).
Johnstone (1967b: xxviii) finds it useful to distinguish between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Kuwaiti, the latter in many cases having different verbal and phonological forms based on one of the high- prestige dialects or literary Arabic (cf. Yassin 1975: 3). For example, Johnstone (1967b: 70) notes the following features of Old Kuwaiti: ‘There is considerable S. Iraqi influence on the older Kuwaiti verbal forms, and latterly the influence of the literary language and of Egyptian and the Syrian dialects is strong’. As for New Kuwaiti, Johnstone (1967b: 91) gives the following example: ‘Beside the Kuwaiti ʿidna [‘we have’], in New Kuwaiti there can be heard ʿíndina, ʿindína, and so on’.
In 2013, I conducted a face-to-face interview with the late Ayyoub Ḥ. al-Ayyoub (1932- 2013) at his house in al-Manṣūriyya in Kuwait City. Al-Ayyoub authored several books on the Kuwaiti dialect and culture, two of which are acclaimed lexicographic sources (1982, 1997). We talked about linguistic change in the Kuwaiti dialect and the distinction between old and new Kuwaiti.35 He solemnly said:
Ayyoub: l-lahğa l-yidīda? lā, l-lahğa l-yidīda xta bat. dašš ʿalēha, daššat ʿalēha alimāt wāyid ağnabiyya. xiḏḏ anwāʿ l-maʾ ūlāt, hamḅū a mā hamḅū a . alimāt iḥna mā nʿa ifha!
‘The new (Kuwaiti) dialect? The new (Kuwaiti) dialect is wrecked. Many foreign borrowings have entered the dialect. Take, for example, types of food, “hamburger” and such like, and these words are not known to us!’
Furthermore, I will select a number of different items, as recorded by Holmes and Samaan (1957: 111-228), with the aim of showing that some older Kuwaiti forms have now been replaced with non-Semitic loanwords; their etymologies are given in the footnotes.
Old KA1 Old KA2 Modern KA Gloss
baymbāġ36
bāṭ karafitta37 ‘necktie’
waṣil ab fātū a38 ‘receipt’
abīḥ bašiʿ šēn/šīfa/siḥt/ğē a 39
‘ugly’
35
Al-Ayyoub also gave me a guided tour of his private museum located in the second floor of the house where he displayed his classical Kuwaiti antiquities and old maps of downtown Kuwait.
36 Turkish borrowing: boyunbağı ‘necktie’, also noted by Abu-Haidar (1991: 186) in the Christian Arabic
of Baghdad.
37
Italian borrowing: cravatta ‘necktie’.
38 Italian borrowing: fattura ‘invoice’. 39 English borrowing: ‘joker’.
In the following list, I present a number of items extracted from Holmes and Samaan (1957: 111-228) to show that both colloquial lexical items are used side by side throughout the community in current Kuwaiti speech. In other words, they are synonyms and virtually interchangeable, though there are no discernible criteria that dictate the speakers’ choice. Some of the examples are actually attested in my spoken material. It should be pointed out that some of the listed words are also Gulf-wide forms such as baṭṭal40 ‘to open, turn on (light)’ (cf. Holes 2007a: 215). I use the labels ‘KA1’and ‘KA2’ for organisational purposes
only.
KA1 KA2 Gloss
sāʿad ʿāwan ‘help’
ʿod čabī ‘huge’
ganaṣ ṣād ‘hunt (v.)’
maṭlūb madyūn ‘indebted’
tawwā alḥīn ‘just now’
ʿaraf da ā ‘know’
čāyid ğāsī ‘laborious’
ʿirs zawāğ ‘marriage’
fačč baṭṭal ‘open’
Moreover, recent semantic variation examples reported by Behnstedt and Woidich41 (2011, 2012, 2014) also support the idea that Kuwait is a diglossic community and the lexicon of KA contains multiple lexical items for the same concept. What is interesting about their monumental Word Atlas of Arabic Dialects, which is a milestone in Arabic lexicography, is that it shows that KA may contain five lexical forms for the same concept. For instance:
40
Holes (2005b: 116) notes that, in virtually every other Arabic dialect group, baṭṭal means ‘to stop, put an end to’, its virtual opposite, may perhaps be a local Gulf development of baṭṭ [to cleave open, make many openings].
41 According to the atlas blurb, ‘[e]ach map presents a topic or notion and its equivalents in Arabic as
collected from the dialectological literature (dictionaries, grammars, text collections, ethnographic reports, etc.), from the editors’ own field work, from questionnaires filled out by native speakers or by experts for a certain dialect region, and also from the internet’ (Behnstedt and Woidich 2011, 2012, 2014).
Concept Form1 Form2 Form3 Form4 Form5
FILL (v.) taras mila ʿabba fawwal ṭass
FRIEND ṣāḥib abiʿ xabī ifīğ ṣadī
HEAT (n.) ḥarr ḥaṛāṛa āyla ḥ ū a ġatta
JUMP (v.) ši aḥ naṭṭ ṭumaṛ nigáz qifáz
LANE fi īğ yādda dāʿūs daxḷa sikka
POOR fa ī mas īn f a ṛān ḥāfi mnattaf
SEND dazz ṭaṛṛaš arsal wadda arkab
THROW (v.) ḥiḏaf gaṭṭ ġaḷḷ šāḥ ḏabb
WAIT (v.) niṭaṛ ağa tana taḥarra tiraggab
It is apparent from the list above that, for example, ‘jump’ has five realisations in KA, viz. ši aḥ, naṭṭ, ṭumaṛ, nigáz, and qifáz. However, if we put ši aḥ in a sentence as in il-gaṭwa š aḥat fō ṭ-ṭōfa ‘the cat jumped over the wall’, this sentence may end up having a number of probable trajectories. This relies on highly specified lexical entries. In all probability, the speaker/hearer will find this sentence unambiguous and readily understandable. One might arguably say that meaning construction must be inherently conceptual in nature. Many more examples can easily be listed.
I should point out that some of the lexical forms listed are foreign borrowings such as fawwal (< English ‘to fill, full’), others are pan-Arabic koiné such as arsal ‘to send’, and some are tribal/Bedouin words which might be unintelligible to the urbanites such as arkab ‘to send’ (unless some sedentary dialects have been ‘bedouinised’ by the incorporation of certain elements), which is used by ʿAjmān42 tribespeople as noted by Ingham (1982a: 104) in Kuwait. Similarly, Johnstone (1961: 249) notes that the ʿAjmān and Duwāsir tribes ‘have tribal vocabulary which covers many everyday things and which (they claim) is not used by other tribes’.43
Lexically, I found out that the verb ‘catch/grasp’ is polyglossic and has six forms, namely, i ab, misak, šabbaṣ, ligaf, yawwad, and xamaṭ, all of which are found in current speech (Behnstedt and Woidich 2014: 246-258).
42 More accurately ʿIjmān, but usually spelt ʿAjmān in orientalist literature. Johnstone (1964: 85) notes
that ‘[i]n the Kuwait area the ʿAjmān have the reputation of speaking the ‘best’ Arabic and their dialect has considerable prestige both amongst the tribesmen and the people of Kuwait town’.
Furthermore, the interplay in everyday speech between MSA and KA is worth discussing here. In this case, between banğa a, di īša, šibbā , and nāfiḏa, all of which mean ‘window’. However, one may arguably perceive di īša, šibbā , and nāfiḏa as synonyms rather than lexical variants. Three decades ago, al-Sabʿān (1983: 119) noted that šibbā used to be the local form. In modern Kuwait, however, the most common of all nouns for ‘window’ is di īša44
because šibbā has been specialised to refer to the šibbā t-taḏā i ‘window of the box office’ where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event and it is used in Modern Written Arabic, whereas nāfiḏa is nowadays a literary borrowing used, for instance, as a computer term as in ‘Microsoft Windows’. Additionally, banğa a45 once used to be the local form for ‘window’ but has now become obsolete (al-Ayyoub 1982: 301; al-Sabʿān 1983: 119). In the al-Ḥasa province of Saudi Arabia, Smeaton (1973: 78, 99) reports that the original reference to da īšah in the spoken Arabic of al-Ḥasa is the following: ‘a window consisting of a vertically barred opening in the wall of a building, and its application to a window is based on the unchanged function of the referent, though the structure and appearance are altered’. In contrast, the Standard Arabic šubbā is ‘as good as unknown in Al Hasa in reference to a window’. This lexical variation is a major source of polysemy. In fact, within each of these ‘window’ terms, we may find complementary polysemy whereby ‘the alternative readings are manifestations of the same core sense as it occurs in different contexts’ (Pustejovsky and Boguraev 1996: 3). For example, di īša may designate ‘a space in the wall which has glass in it’ or ‘pane’. Thus, both senses are logically connected and are examples of complementary polysemy.
Before I conclude my discussion, it is worth pointing out some of the forecasts which were made in the 1950s. Johnstone (1967b: xxviii) made the following prediction on the basis of research he carried out in the Arabian Gulf in the late 1950s:
There is no real doubt that the Kuwaiti dialect is doomed to disappear in a relatively short time and that it will be replaced by a local version of the pan-Arabic koiné. Young Kuwaitis already found it difficult and even embarrassing to speak ‘pure’ Kuwaiti at the time of my visit’.46