Although some Gulf varieties, such as Emirati Arabic, varieties have been gaining more attention in recent years, further investigation and resources need to be made available to the scientific community. The aim of this article is to offer the Gulf Arabic studies a contribution by presenting a selection of texts in the spoken varieties of Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman, which were recorded between 2015 and 2017, during fieldworks in the United Arab Emirates. The speakers are young women between the age of 21 and 31 and the topics regard the Emirati heritage, in order to add cultural value to the linguistic subject. The transcribed texts can provide further bases for comparison in the Emirati Arabic studies.

This article deals with the study of Gulf Arabic. By the means of the Qatari Arabic Corpus elaborated by Elmahdy et al. (2014), the aim of this study is investigating a number of selected verbal prefixes and the active participle gāʕid ‘sitting’ as a progressive aspect marker in Qatari Arabic, a relatively under researched variety in the field of Arabic Dialectology. A descriptive and quantitative approach in the data collection was adopted and the validation process, throughout the whole corpus which consists of 15 hours of speech flow, provided over 600 manually-selected tokens of verbal prefixes and active participles as progressive aspect markers whose main forms and functions were discussed in the paper.