An incredible discovery from Australia:
Lebanese Australians have a dialect which gives them an identity separate from Anglo-Australians and their own cultures…
No! I don’t beleive it! I would have never guessed. Though apparently this Lebanese ‘ethnolect’ stands out from other dialects (don’t we always):
He says the ethnolect, a variety of a language spoken by an ethnic subgroup, “is used consciously to separate the speakers from Anglo-Australian values, and at its extreme also to separate the speakers from some parts of their own culture”.
So basically Lebanese-Australians have developed their own dialect which differentiates them from Anglo-Australians and even from native Lebanese. Wow! I wonder what kind of words they have developed:
Welcome to Lebanese-Australian English – English with Arabic flavourings. “Shoo” is “what’s up?”, “yallah” is “let’s go/goodbye” and “habib”, Arabic for “darling”, is almost “mate”. As one Lebanese man explains, “habib and mate differ” because “mate is like a friend, just to make fun with them. But with the term ‘habib’ when you’re talking to him, is like a serious talk.”
Astonishing, I never knew I can speak Lebanese-Australian English! The whole time I thought I was speaking Lebanese Arabic!