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Number agreement in South Iranian Arabic

Somewhere between Arabic and Farsi

 | University of Graz
ORCiD logo with link | University of Graz
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Graz.

Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/arli.25005.har
Abstract
This paper examines agreement with plural controllers in Gulf Arabic dialects spoken in South Iran through two complementary studies. Results show that the agreement system of Arabic is gradually converging toward the Persian system. However, this shift varies by the sociolinguistic context between the investigated communities. The results highlight the role of contact intensity in shaping morphosyntactic change and contribute to our understanding of language change in minority-majority language contact scenarios.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Agreement with plural controllers in spoken Arabic
    • 1.2Arabic in South Iran
    • 1.3Objectives and research questions
  • 2.Data and methodology
    • 2.1The corpus data set
    • 2.2The animal data set
    • 2.3Annotation of internal factors
    • 2.4Statistical methods
  • 3.Agreement with inanimate plural controllers
    • 3.1External factors
    • 3.2Collectives, abstract and concrete controllers and target type
    • 3.3Summary and discussion
  • 4.Study 2: Animal controllers
    • 4.1Controller-related variables: Collectivity, animal size and quantification
    • 4.2Target type
    • 4.3Sociolinguistic observations
    • 4.4Summary and discussion
  • 5.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
References (44)
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