Arabic and contact-induced language change

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This project seeks to improve our understanding of how and why languages tend to change when they come into contact, with a particular focus on Arabic and the many languages it has influenced and been influenced by in its 1500 years of written and spoken history.The project has three strands. First, there is a theoretical strand, in which the aim is to construct a general model of the cognitive processes at work in the minds of bilingual individuals that cause them to introduce changes into one or both of their languages - changes which can then be acquired by children learning their first languages. In my previous work in this area I have focused on contact between languages that are mutually unintelligible to monolingual speakers of each. In this project I will extend the model so that it also accounts for changes that result from contact between related dialects, and I will also show how this model of contact-induced change can be integrated into existing models that focus on linguistic change that is caused by internal factors, not language contact.The second strand of the project involves collaboration with the project partner, Stefano Manfredi (SeDyL-CNRS), and the project research assistant, to edit a handbook of Arabic and contact-induced language change. Chapters will be contributed by leading experts on this subject, giving accessible summaries of topics including: contact-induced change in the Arabic dialects of various regions, such as Morocco, Malta and Cyprus; the Pidgin/Creole varieties of Arabic spoken in Uganda and South Sudan; Arabic influences on languages such as Aramaic, Swahili and Somali; the influence of different Arabic dialects on each other; and specific areas of Arabic grammar in which contact-induced change has played a role. This handbook will be published by Language Science Press, an open access publisher, so it will be freely available for anyone to read online.The third strand of the project aims at raising awareness of the importance of language and dialect contact for the practice of 'LADO' (language analysis for the determination of origin) in asylum claims by Arabic-speaking individuals in the UK. LADO is a tool used by some governments to aid in decisions on whether asylum claims are genuine. Typically, claimants are interviewed, in Arabic, and their speech in this interview is then examined to see if it exhibits the known features of the dialect of the claimant's stated region of origin. But there is a problem with how LADO is practiced in the initial stages of an asylum claim. In all such LADO reports that I have seen, produced by commercial organisations contracted by the UK government, no account is taken of the fact that the speech of emigrant Arabic speakers is likely to be influenced by the other languages and Arabic dialects they are exposed to daily, as well as by the speech of their interviewer. The project will address this problem by collecting and publishing data on the speech of Arabic speakers resident in London, with a view to providing concrete evidence that Arabic speakers who have left their region of origin are more likely than not to exhibit influence in their speech from dialects other than their own. A second use of LADO is at the appeal stage of an asylum claim, where an independent expert is contracted to produce a new LADO report. Here the problem is that experts are producing their reports in virtual isolation, without common standards of best practice, while solicitors seem to be contacting potential experts on a haphazard, word-of-mouth basis. The project will address this problem through consultative workshops with stakeholders in Arabic-based LADO that aim to establish and then promote the necessary best practices, and by producing and maintaining an online register of LADO-active Arabic linguists for solicitors to contact.The project thus intends to have a genuine impact both in academic linguistics and on the UK asylum system.