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English Features in Saudi Arabia: A Syntactic Study Within the World Englishes Framework

Paper · 2022 · Nuha AlShurfa, Norah Alotaibi, Maather Alrawi et al.

Summary

The paper describes Saudi English (SE) as a variety within Kachru's World Englishes framework. It treats non-standard grammar as features of a variety rather than as learner errors, which is how most earlier Saudi research framed them. The authors gathered English produced by 139 educated Saudis from three sources: a WhatsApp group chat, open-ended questions answered by voice message or Google Forms, and student writing. To sort the examples, they drew on two established inventories of New Englishes features, one compiled by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004) and the other by Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008). The features fall into four groups:

  • Noun phrases: articles, plurals, possession and pronouns.
  • Verb phrases: tense, aspect, modals, agreement, and dropped or extra be.
  • Prepositions: deleted, inserted or swapped.
  • Clauses: null subjects, doubled subjects, dropped objects, and mixed-up comparative and superlative forms.

Several of these, such as the doubled subject pronoun, are explained as transfer from Arabic. The results agree with earlier SE studies and add a phrase-level inventory of syntactic traits. The analysis is qualitative and gives no frequency counts.

Key points

  • The participants were 139 Saudis (114 women, 25 men) aged 18–44 with mixed education levels. Thirty-two of them were English majors.
  • Spontaneous data came from a WhatsApp chat among five English-major undergraduates.
  • Question data came from two routes:
    • Questions sent over WhatsApp to 41 people; 27 spoken answers were transcribed.
    • A Google Forms survey with 54 responses, of which 49 were kept, yielding 29 sentences.
  • The coding schemes were Mesthrie and Bhatt's phrase-level and clause-level categories, plus Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi's list of 76 non-standard features in 11 groups.
  • Preposition variation comes in three types:
    • Deletion: "I went … Makkah"
    • Insertion: "enjoyed in the movie"
    • Substitution: "looked from the window"
  • The doubled-subject construction ("All the women they drive") is linked to an Arabic emphatic pronoun after the subject.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper sorts deviations by the phrase they occur in (NP, VP, PP, clause) rather than listing them as isolated errors, so each pattern points to the structure it affects.
  • I2. The doubled subject is read as a pronoun that corefers with the noun phrase just before it, a pattern from the speakers' first language, not as a second argument.
  • I3. The authors note subjects that vanish after "but" in coordinated clauses ("She live … but … come").
  • I4. The authors split preposition variation into deletion, insertion and substitution, which maps neatly to three repair operations.
  • I5. Collecting the same population's English through chat, recorded speech and forms gives several registers of one variety at once.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Build a small UD test set of SE-style sentences, with be deletion, extra be and missing agreement, to measure how gracefully the parser attaches heads when copulas or inflections are missing.
  • I2 (frames): Add a rule that merges a subject NP and the pronoun right after it into one agent, so the frame does not get two subjects.
  • I3 (frames): When a coordinated clause has no subject, inherit the agent from the first clause and record that inference in the explanation trace.
  • I4 (world): Use verb-class knowledge (e.g., go takes a goal) to recover the right role in "went Makkah" or "enjoyed in the movie" before building entity states.
  • I5 (learn): Keep a non-native-variety evaluation split as a robustness control, to check that learned repair rules do not only fit Inner Circle English.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓King Abdulaziz UniversityJeddah · Saudi Arabia31 works · 508 citations🎓Taif UniversityTa'if · Saudi Arabia7 works · 51 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Nuha AlShurfa, Norah Alotaibi, Maather Alrawi and Tariq Elyas. 2022. English Features in Saudi Arabia: A Syntactic Study Within the World Englishes Framework. Frontiers in Communication 7.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/fcomm.2022.753135

@inproceedings{alshurfa2022english,
  title = {{English Features in Saudi Arabia: A Syntactic Study Within the World Englishes Framework}},
  author = {Nuha AlShurfa, Norah Alotaibi, Maather Alrawi and Tariq Elyas},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Communication 7},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.3389/fcomm.2022.753135},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.753135}
}

References

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