ABSTRACT
Arabic(s) is a language that has spread across significant distance and among a variety of groups in common usage, with many different developments and iterations over time and through contact. In parallel with a notion of ‘global Englishes’, we consider Arabic as diasporic and draw from sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives on where, how, and by whom Arabic is used beyond the so-called ‘Arabic-speaking world’. Exploring this wide range of users indicates some of the ways Arabic speakers have migrated and how a spectrum of usages evolves or persist and are perpetuated diasporically – even becoming lexicalized into other languages. Examples are cited from a range of research on Arabic(s) speakers in diaspora, with our own research on Arabic in France as a primary focus.
