Ma'alum, my friend?: The Grammarian's Guide to Khaleeji Pidgin

My friend Y. has just moved to Ras Al Khaimah from Australia, enthused about the possibility of using the skills acquired from her Arabic Language Degree.

Yesterday she entered my apartment, excited about Ramadan and frustrated about language.

"This must be the worst country in the world to learn Arabic! They just laugh at me when I try! I don't care, I'm going to keep on trying whether they laugh at me or not!"

I was shocked. Even with my pitiful Arabic I have never had anyone laugh at me. Then I realized two things. First of all, I look Western, so if I speak any Arabic at all, people are pleasantly surprised and encouraging. Y. however, is often told that she "looks Arab" and so people probably expect perfect Arabic from her.

But not too perfect. The other cause for laughter is that her Arabic is Fusa, the literary language and not the spoken tongue.

Y. has a love of Lebanese music videos and she's not bad at her Egyptian slang. But the Indo-Anglo-Urdu-Arabic mix of the Gulf, a by-product of its migrant population, is beyond baffling.

"They laughed at you?!"

"I told the Arabic driver to go straight ( مستقيم ), and he laughed and said it was a word from the Quran, that I was speaking like a recitation. He shouldn't laugh at me for speaking proper Arabic!"

Mustakeem (??) is a word I had never heard before. The word we use here is sida.

"Sida! But that is an Urdu word!"

I didn't know sida was Urdu. I think only half of the Arabic I know is actually Arabic. And the more Fusa I learn, the more I realize that I don't really know any Arabic at all. It's ila, not sir; it's rajul, not riyal and don't think for a minute that " inta bachem?" is an acceptable way to ask a woman if she has children.

But here it is. This is by no means the Emirati dialect, but in the shops and on the streets of Ras Al Khaimah this is a popular and effective way for people with no common language to communicate. And so somehow I can convey more with a handful of words, and a few good hand signals and guttural gruffs than I could if I had a degree in grammatically sound Arabic.

Of course, there are certain rules to Khaleeji pidgin.

First, certain words must be spoken in certain languages. Greetings, such as sala'am aleykum and sabah al kheir, are always in Arabic. How are you? is usually delievered in Arabic or Hindi. Iuwa, tamam, good, acha and, most importantly, ok are all acceptable ways of saying good. The phrase number one! must always be delivered in English, and with enthusiasm. My friend is perhaps the most popular English phrase, and is to be used liberally. No problem and mafi mushkala are both universally understood, but mafi mukh (no brain) must be spoken in Arabic. Throw in the occasional bas and khalas when ordering food or to show frustration. Then finished it all off with a masala'am for strangers or a yella, bye! for friends.

Additionally, many people who've grown up here are fluent in Emirati/Khaleeji, Lebanese, and Egyptian dialects, and maybe a few others. When my Syrian and Emirati friends go for shisha, they switch to Egyptian as a sign of respect. At school they wrote in Standard Modern Fusa, in the mosque they use Classical Fusa. And on the streets and in shops, they speak the Khaleeji pidgin. At home, they speak the dialect of their parents' country. Which is why, perhaps, you can understand Y.'s frustration.

Y. isn't the first to express her shock over this linguistic paradox. In Travels with a Tangerine, Arabic scholar Tim Mackintosh-Smith describes 'Indo-Arabic' in this manner,

"Vocabulary is stripped down to an anorxeric minimum, and the vigorous branches of Arabic verb pruned to a binary fi ( 'in' = 'there is' ) / ma fi ( 'not in' = 'there is not' ) + infinitive. (A neat example of that is of an Indian Muslim who passed a graveyard. His version of the traditional memento mori - 'You [the dead] are those that precede; we are those that follow' - came out as, 'You there is go, I there is come.' ) Omanis seem to be bilingual, I never quite got the hang of it."

So for the time being, Y. will have the advantage of understanding road signs and conversations with Lebanese staff members. I meanwhile, will be content to learn my Indo-Arabic from shopkeepers and my Fusa from a book, secure in the knowledge that my grammar is so atrocious that I will never be mistaken for a mullah or a scholar but that, at least, I can understand the small essentials and mundane greetings that give life here its extra character.