Contact-Induced Change in an Endangered Language: The Case of Cypriot Arabic

Abstract

Cypriot Arabic (CyAr) is a severely endangered Semitic variety spoken by Cypriot Maronites. It belongs to the group of “peripheral varieties” of Arabic that were separated from the core Arabic-speaking area and came into contact with non-Semitic languages. Although there has been a renewed interest since the turn of the century for the study of CyAr, some aspects of its structure are still not well known. In this paper, we present and analyze a number of developments in CyAr induced by contact with Cypriot Greek. Our methodology for investigating such phenomena makes a novel contribution to the description of this underrepresented variety, as it was based not only on existing linguistic descriptions and text corpora in the literature, but mainly on a vast corpus of naturalistic oral speech data from the Archive of Oral Tradition of CyAr. Our analysis revealed the complexity of investigated contact phenomena and the differing degrees of integration of borrowings into the lexico-grammatical system of CyAr.