Possession and Social Meaning: A Variationist Study of ḥaq and māl in Kuwaiti Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates the morphosyntactic alternation between the analytic possessive markers ḥaq and māl in Kuwaiti Arabic within a variationist sociolinguistic framework. Although descriptive studies acknowledge the coexistence of these forms, no prior research has provided a systematic quantitative account of their distribution or examined whether their alternation is conditioned by grammatical and social factors. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with 80 native speakers, the study operationalises the ḥaq/māl alternation within a carefully delimited envelope of variation. A total of 1,120 tokens were extracted and coded for linguistic predictors, including animacy and definiteness of the possessee, syntactic position, clause type, polarity, and register, alongside social variables such as age, gender, education, place of residence, and sectarian affiliation. Mixed-effects logistic regression analysis using Rbrul, with random effects for speaker and lexical item, revealed no statistically significant conditioning effects for any linguistic or social predictor. The distribution of ḥaq and māl remains consistent across grammatical contexts and speaker groups, suggesting that the alternation represents stable morphosyntactic variability rather than socially stratified variation or ongoing change. These findings point to functional convergence between two grammaticalised possessive markers within Kuwait’s contact-rich and levelling sociolinguistic ecology. Processes of grammaticalisation, semantic bleaching, and dialect contact appear to have neutralised earlier functional distinctions and reduced the socioindexical salience of the alternation. Empirically, the study provides the first quantitative analysis of analytic possessive variation in Kuwaiti Arabic. Theoretically, it refines variationist models of socio-syntax by accounting for domains of stable grammatical optionality and underscores the value of null results in delimiting the social embedding of morphosyntactic variation.