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España Ante El Mundo: Spain's Colonial Language Policies In North Africa, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

During its presence in Northern Morocco and the Western Sahara, Spain lauded its colonial policies, and relations with the native populations in general, as being more successful than those of the other colonial power present in the region, France. While it is true that France’s educational policies were narrowly aimed at forming acquiescent elites of the Maghrebi societies, Spain’s policies in turn were severely conditioned by a hyper-awareness of existing ethno-religious divisions, a product of the prominence of religion in the historical relations between Iberia and the Maghreb. In this essay, I discuss the differences in Spain’s educational policies between …

Current Perspectives On Tunisian Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Despite its small size (63,170 sq miles) and a rather small population with a stable growth rate,2 Tunisia represents a rich sociolinguistic laboratory with a long history of bilingualism and language contact. The delicate position of Berber, the diglossic situation of Arabic and the increasing efforts for Arabization, the regional and social variation in Tunisian Arabic, the presence of French, and the gradual spread of English, among other closely-related topics, constitute the core themes of research within Tunisian sociolinguistics. Since the publication of R. M. Payne’s Language in Tunisia in 1983, no attempt has been made to reassess the situation …

Code-Switching And Language Change In Tunisia, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This article quantitatively studies the patterns of Tunisian Arabic/French code-switching and the possible implications for contact-induced change in the Tunisian dialect. The purpose is to account for the extent of the occurrence of code-switching across gender lines and levels of education and assess its role in the interference from French into Arabic, both at the lexical and structural levels. Recorded semi-directed sociolinguistic interviews with twelve speakers are examined for type and frequency of code-switching and use of French borrowings.

Results show that education plays a role in distinguishing the group with a higher education from the group with only a …

Spanish In Contact With Arabic, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

Spanish and Arabic have been in contact for long periods and in different regions. While this is largely due to the geographical proximity of the Iberian Peninsula to western North Africa, a set of historical, political and social developments helped bring both languages into close contact. Of remarkable significance was the presence of Arabic in Iberia from 711 to 1492 and, at least, for several more decades after the Reconquista was completed. This fact, as is often mentioned, led to heavy lexical borrowing from Arabic into Spanish and other Ibero-Romance languages. Also important was the introduction of Spanish into North …

Introduction: Selected Proceedings Of The Second Workshop On Spanish Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi, Maurice Westmoreland

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This introduction to the Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics includes descriptions of the papers chosen for the volume and acknowledgments.

Phonological Adaptation Of Spanish Loanwords In Northern Moroccan Arabic, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, loanword phonology has attracted continuously growing attention as an area able to shed additional light on universal phonological patterns. The contexts and processes of loanword adaptation present a dy namic interaction between two distinct systems allowing for different theo retical interpretations (Paradis, 1996). Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993) has been suggested as a possible framework to analyze these processes (Yip, 1993; Katayama, 1998; Jacobs and Gussenhoven, 2000). The fact that OT recognizes the difference between languages as a difference in the ranking of the same universal constraints could explain the changes that loanwords may or may …

Introduction: Selected Proceedings Of The First Workshop On Spanish Sociolinguistics, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This introduction to the Selected Proceedings of the First Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics includes the background for the conference, descriptions of the papers chosen for the volume, acknowledgments, and references.

La Conservación Del Artículo Definido 'Al' En Las Palabras Españolas De Origen Árabe, Lotfi Sayahi

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.