The Arabic dialects spoken on the eastern Persian Gulf have not been linguistically described yet. Due The Arab communities living in Southern Iran belong to a religious minority (Sunni) and are mostly bilingual speakers of Arabic and Farsi. The project focuses on the documentation (building a digital corpus of authentic texts) of the varieties and the investigation of the following questions: How can these dialects be classified from an areal-linguistic perspective within the continuum of the Gulf dialects? What phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features do they have in common with them? What are the structural contact phenomena with Persian that go beyond lexical borrowing. Hitherto, the description and analysis of prosody and information structure has been largely neglected in Arabic linguistics and thus constitutes an innovative aspect of the project.

The linguistic data will be gathered during long field campaigns that are carried out with the help of local researchers and speakers. This will guarantee the collection of authentic data and the creation of a corpus which consists of life stories, traditional narratives and songs, procedural texts and spontaneous conversation. For the analysis of certain linguistic features, questionnaires and staged communicative events will supply additional data. The project has been designed as an attempt to combine the approaches of general linguistics with the methodologies of Arabic dialectology. The use of up-to-date text technological methodologies to build a digital corpus also sets new standards in Arabic dialectology. The project is conducted in the spirit of open source and open access. Therefore, the linguistic corpus will be professionally archived and made available to the scientific community through a publicly accessible web interface, which will enable other scholars to do further analyses and to add their own material.