Abstract

Arabic-based pidgins and creoles that are still spoken today represent a valuable observatory for the dynamics of language change, as well as for the analysis of its metalinguistic representations. In this chapter, we present a survey of Arabic-based pidgins and creoles spoken in the Chado-Sudanese area and in the Middle East, mainly from a sociolinguistic perspective. We briefly outline their main features, then we describe their emergence as well as their contemporary sociolinguistic situations. Finally, we give further sociolinguistic insight, drawing on the analysis of language attitudes and the metalinguistic representations of these contact varieties vis-à-vis their respective lexifiers.