Topics in the grammar of Zahrani Spoken Arabic

Researchers: Salih Alzahrani

Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and other Saudi dialects like Hijazi Arabic and Najdi Arabic have been studied for long time. However, other Arabic dialects such as Zahrani Spoken Arabic (ZSA) (spoken widely in the southern region of Saudi Arabia) have not been studied. This dialect is endangered: it has few speakers and many of those are moving to other regions in Saudi Arabia where they use different dialects. This research is timely because this dialect has not been documented before. The description of the ZSA will be an important step to document the dialect and to highlight some of the linguistic differences between it and Standard Arabic.