Decoding the Impact of Language Contact on Saudi Arabic: A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Analysis

Based on the assumption that almost all languages are subject to change due to language contact, this study investigates the impact of language contact on Saudi Arabic, with a focus on lexical, syntactic, and phonological changes driven by foreign labor migration and Saudi students returning from abroad. While existing scholarship has documented pidginization and borrowing in Gulf Arabic, this paper provides a granular analysis of Saudi-specific phenomena, including the adoption of Hindi, Persian, and Turkish lexical items and structural shifts in emergent pidgin varieties. Additionally, it posits the understudied influence of Saudi returnees from Anglophone countries as catalysts for semantic broadening and code-mixing. In doing so, the study is grounded on the social cognitive theory to show the extent to which new varieties have been introduced to Saudi Arabic due to language contact. Findings reveal that lexical borrowing dominates current changes, while phonological and semantic shifts remain marginal but evolving. The study argues that economic globalization and educational mobility are central to these transformations, offering a timely update to frameworks on Arabic dialect evolution. By bridging gaps in prior literature and introducing new sociolinguistic actors, this work contributes to understanding how localized language contact shapes contemporary Arabic varieties.