A blueprint of Saudi English typology: A substrate effect

Abstract

Although some Englishes in Asia have received extensive attention, the grammar of Saudi English remains relatively unexamined. It remains unclear whether the Saudi English grammatical (or morphosyntactic) patterns derive from universal principles. Al-Rawi (2012); Mahboob and Elyas (2014) seem to provide an individual description. This paper is an attempt to provide an analysis for the morphosyntactic features of the variety of English in Saudi Arabia from a global approach by adopting Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004) geographic and variety-specific perspectives. Our findings show that Saudi English has 7 distinctive features. Four of them are universal. Due to the limitations in covering all the distinctive features and due the clear analogy between these features and the substrate Arabic patterns, we argue that the distinctive features are simply the result of the substrate influence rather than universal principles that derive these deviant forms.

" Is teacher’s English good enough?: A case study of Saudi teacher spoken language"

“…These categories were also found in my study to occur frequently in the teachers' performance. As for the Saudi speakers in general, the teachers' errors discovered in this study were reported by other researchers to be traits of Saudi English speakers (Al-Rawi, 2012;AlRawi et al, 2022;Mahboob & Elyas, 2014). Al-Rawi (2012) reported that Saudi speakers frequently omit the third person agreement on the verb, the indefinite article, and the copula be, and frequently insert the definite article the.…”

“…Similar results were reported by Mahboob & Elyas (2014), who asserted that the variation in the use of tense markers and the variation in the concord and agreement are features of Saudi English. Furthermore, all the errors reported in this research, except for the wrong use of tenses, were proven by AlRawi et al (2022) to be practiced by the Saudi speakers. The similarity, whether with the students' errors or with the speakers in general, is an indication of a larger problem/phenomenon about the language practiced and accepted in the Saudi society.…”

“…However, when the teachers, themselves, are likely to commit these errors and, accordingly, the students seem to receive no or less feedback, it becomes a necessity to analyze the errors in the teacher's language. To this end, the current paper aims at analyzing teacher's language especially that some errors (or deviant forms) that are practiced by Saudis are proven to be features of the English variety spoken in Saudi Arabia (or Saudi English) from the perspective of World Englishes (see Al-Rawi, 2012;AlRawi et al 2022;Al-Shurafa, 2010;Mahboob & Elyas, 2014). It specifically focusses on the spoken language for its communicative role in the language learning process.…”

“…So, the teachers' errors tackled in this paper can be more of a local English rather than deviant forms. This is what makes it important to analyze the teacher's language because the society may accept these forms and practice them as indigenous traits (see Al-Rawi, 2012;AlRawi et al, 2022;Mahboob & Elyas, 2014) while the Saudi Arabian 2030 vision aims at developing the language proficiency to the level of Standard English (Al-Zahrani, 2017). Therefore, regardless of whether they are deviant forms or nativized features, analyzing them will make the society aware of the non-Standard forms which is part of the goals of 2030 vision for language development.…”