Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …