Contact-Induced Change in an Endangered Language: The Case of Cypriot Arabic

Cypriot Arabic (CyAr) is a severely endangered Semitic variety spoken by Maronites. It belongs to the group of “peripheral varieties” that were separated from core Arabic-speaking area and came into contact with non-Semitic languages. Although there has been renewed interest since turn century for study CyAr, some aspects its structure are still not well known. In this paper, we present analyze number developments in CyAr induced Greek. Our methodology investigating such phenomena makes novel contribution description underrepresented variety, as it was based only on existing linguistic descriptions text corpora literature, but mainly vast corpus naturalistic oral speech data Archive Oral Tradition CyAr. analysis revealed complexity investigated differing degrees integration borrowings lexico-grammatical system