عربي جوبا: الهجنة التائهة بين الهوية والانتماء

Abstract EN

The Article is trying to answer a key question about the circumstances of the emergence of Juba Arabic language, as one of the main communication medium in the newly independent State of South Sudan, and its ability to withstand and spread in the face of the official government policy that recognizes English as the official language of the state and in the teaching of curricula in schools and universities in addition to its use in official state institutions.

The main hypothesis of the research paper is that Juba Arabic as a language circulating at the level of the capital and the rest of the states was able to maintain its presence for several reasons.

Political, economic and cultural, it is the only language that forms a link between the various components of South Sudan that have been linguistically different so far, which qualifies it to become the main language of communication between citizens at all levels, including the audio and read media as well as its use by artists as an audible language.

The Article touched on the use of the analytical method to introduce the date of entry of Arabic into South Sudan and its interaction with the local languages of the endemic groups in the equator region, which ended with the emergence of a new language known as Juba Arabic as an hybrid between Arabic and local languages, and how it distinguished from its common origins by generating its own dictionary composed of Arabic, Bari group language, international languages such as English and some languages circulating in the African Region in addition to Turkish, which coincided with the entry of Arabic by Turkish soldiers during the Turkish-Egyptian rule of Sudan in the 1820s.

The paper also focused on defining the characteristics of Juba Arabic as a separate linguistic entity, as a language formed in historical circumstances of its own, as a new language in which the compositional structure (grammar, and sound system) of the dominant group languages was protected, with lexical resources (vocabulary) of the dominant group language, creating a hybrid linguistic system and then a space that grew over time, generated and extended its use.

In its conclusions, the article concluded that the Juba Arabic is the main language of communication in South Sudan, as there is no common language of communication that combines all components of the country from those local (indigenous / national, national, or even foreign) languages recognized in the official documents of the state, a characteristic that was made available to the Juba Arabic only to become the language of true common communication and the most widespread language in terms of the number of speakers on a daily basis at the level of the capital Juba and some states.