Tunisian Arabic
| Tunisian Arabic | |
|---|---|
| تونسي Tūnsi / دارجة Dērja | |
 | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈtuːnsi] ⓘ |
| Native to | Tunisia[1] |
| Ethnicity | Tunisians |
| Speakers | 12.5 million (2024)[2] |
| Arabic script | |
| Tunisian Sign Language | |
| Official status | |
Recognised minority language in | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | aeb |
| Glottolog | tuni1259 |
 | |
Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian (Arabic: تونسي, romanized: Tūnsi), is a variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia.[8] It is known among its 12.5 million speakers as Tūnsi[9] [ˈtuːnsi] ⓘ "Tunisian"[10] or Derja (Arabic: الدارجة; meaning "common or everyday dialect"[11]) to distinguish it from Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is mostly similar to eastern Algerian Arabic and western Libyan Arabic.
As part of the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum, Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic at the borders of the country. Like other Maghrebi dialects, it has a vocabulary that is predominantly Semitic and Arabic[12] with a Berber, Latin[13][14] and Neo-Punic[15][16] substratum. Tunisian Arabic contains Berber loanwords which represent 8% to 9% of its vocabulary.[17] However, Tunisian has also loanwords from French,[18] Turkish,[18] Italian[18] and the languages of Spain[18] and a little bit of Persian.[18]
Multilingualism within Tunisia and in the Tunisian diaspora makes it common for Tunisians to code-switch, mixing Tunisian with French, English, Italian, Standard Arabic or other languages in daily speech.[19] Within some circles, Tunisian Arabic has thereby integrated new French and English words, notably in technical fields, or has replaced old French and Italian loans with standard Arabic words.[19][20] Moreover, code-switching between Tunisian Arabic and modern standard Arabic is mainly done by more educated and upper-class people and has not negatively affected the use of more recent French and English loanwords in Tunisian.[19]
Tunisian Arabic is also closely related to Maltese,[21] which is a separate language that descended from Tunisian and Siculo-Arabic.[21][22] Maltese and Tunisian Arabic have about 30 to 40 per cent spoken mutual intelligibility.[23]
Classification
[edit]Tunisian Arabic is one of the Arabic languages within the Semitic branch[24] of the Afroasiatic language family.[24] It is a variety of Maghrebi Arabic like Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, which are mostly unintelligible to Modern Standard or Mashriqi Arabic speakers.[10] It has a considerable number of pre-hilalian dialects[25][26] but is usually considered in its koiné form to be a mostly Hilalian variety of Maghrebi Arabic because it was affected by the immigration of Banu Hilal in the 11th century, as were the other Maghrebi varieties.[27][28]
As a part of the Arabic dialect continuum, it is reported that Tunisian Arabic is partly mutually intelligible with Algerian Arabic,[10] Libyan Arabic,[10] Moroccan Arabic,[10] and Maltese.[21] However, it is only slightly intelligible, if at all, with Egyptian,[29] Levantine,[29] Mesopotamian,[29] or Gulf Arabic.[29]
History
[edit]Beginnings of the dialect
[edit]Linguistic situation of Ancient Tunisia
[edit]During classical antiquity, Tunisia's population spoke Berber languages related to the Numidian language.[30] However, the languages progressively lost their function as main languages of Tunisia since the 12th century BC, and their usage became restricted mainly to the western regions of the country until their disappearance or evolution into other languages.[30]
Indeed, migrants from Phoenicia settled Tunisia during the 12th to the 2nd century BC, founded ancient Carthage and progressively mixed with the local population.[31] The migrants brought with them their culture and language that progressively spread from Tunisia's coastal areas to the rest of the coastal areas of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean islands.[32] From the eighth century BC, most of Tunisia's inhabitants spoke the Punic language, a variant of the Phoenician language influenced by the local Numidian language.[33] Also, already at that time, in the regions near to Punic settlements, the Berber that was used evolved considerably. In the urban centers such as Dougga, Bulla Regia, Thuburnica or Chemtou, Berber lost its Maghrebi phonology but kept the essential of its vocabulary. The word "Africa", which gave its name to the continent, possibly is derived from the name of the Berber tribe of the Afri that was one of the first to enter in contact with Carthage.[34] Also during this period and up to the third century BC, the Tifinagh alphabet developed from the Phoenician alphabet.[35][36]
After the arrival of Romans, following the fall of Carthage in 146 BC,[37][38] the coastal population spoke mainly Punic, but that influence decreased away from the coast.[33] From Roman period until the Arab conquest, Latin, Greek and Numidian further influenced the language, called Neo-Punic to differentiate it from its older version.[39][40] This also progressively gave birth to African Romance, a Latin dialect, influenced by Tunisia's other languages and used along with them.[41][42] Also, as it was the case for the other dialects,[40][41][43] Punic probably survived the Arabic conquest of the Maghreb: the geographer al-Bakri described in the 11th century people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in rural Ifriqiya, a region where spoken Punic survived well past its written use.[44] However, it may be that the existence of Punic facilitated the spread of Arabic in the region,[45] as Punic and Arabic are both Semitic languages and share many common roots.[46][47]
Middle Ages
[edit]Classical Arabic began to be installed as a governmental and administrative language in Tunisia that was called then Ifriqiya from its older name Africa during the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in 673.[48][49] The people of several urban cities were progressively influenced by Arabic.[49][50] By the 11th century, through contact of local languages such as African Romance or Berber with Classical Arabic, some urban dialects appeared in the main coastal cities of Tunisia.[43][51][52] The dialects were slightly and characteristically influenced by several common Berber structures and vocabulary like negation because Tamazight was the language of contact for citizens of that period.[53][54] The new dialects were also significantly influenced by other historical languages.[27][54][55]
Many Tunisian and Maghrebi words, like qarnīṭ ("octopus"), have a Latin etymology.[14][56] The dialects were later called Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects and were used along Classical Arabic for communication in Tunisia.[57][58] Also, Siculo-Arabic was spoken in several islands near Tunisia like Sicily, Pantelleria, and Malta and entered into contact with the Tunisian pre-hilalian dialects.[57][59] Consequently, it ameliorated the divergence in grammar and structures of all the concerned dialects from Classical Arabic.[40][52]
By the mid-11th century, the Banu Hilal immigrated to rural northern and central Tunisia and Banu Sulaym immigrated to southern Tunisia.[28][40][55] The immigrants played a major role in spreading the use of Tunisian Arabic in an important part of the country.[40][55][60] However, they brought some of the characteristics of their local Arabic dialects as well.[28][55] In fact, central and western Tunisian Arabic speakers began using the voiced velar stop [ɡ] instead of the voiceless uvular stop [q] in words such as qāl "he said".[28][60] Main linguists working about Hilalian dialects like Veronika Ritt-Benmimoum and Martine Vanhove supposed that even the replacement of the diphthongs /aw/ and /aj/ respectively by /uː/ and /iː/ vowels was a Hilalian influence.[27][28][60] Furthermore, the phonologies brought to the new towns speaking Tunisian Arabic are those of the immigrants and not Tunisian phonology.[28] The Sulaym even spread a new dialect in southern Tunisia, Libyan Arabic.[28][60][61]
However, some dialects avoided the Hilalian influence: Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, a vernacular spoken by Tunisian Jews and known for the conservation of foreign phonemes in loanwords and slightly influenced by Hebrew phonology,[62][63][64] Sfax dialect[65] and Tunisian urban woman dialect.[66]
By the 15th century, after the Reconquista and subsequent decline of the formerly Arabic-speaking al-Andalus, many Andalusians immigrated to the Tunisian main coastal cities. These migrants brought some of the characteristics of Andalusian Arabic to the sedentary urban dialects spoken in Tunisia. Among others, it led to the reuse of the voiceless uvular stop [q] instead of the nomadic Hilalian voiced velar stop [ɡ] and to speech simplification in Tunisian,[61][67][68] which further differentiated the language from Classical Arabic.[61] Furthermore, the changes were recognized by the Hafsid scholar ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah in 1377. He said that language contact between classical Arabic and local languages caused the creation of many Arabic varieties very distinct from formal Arabic.[69][70][71]
Ottoman period
[edit]During the 17th to the 19th centuries, Tunisia came under Spanish, then Ottoman rule and hosted Morisco then Italian immigrants from 1609.[55][70] That made Tunisian, Spanish, Italian, Mediterranean Lingua Franca, and Turkish languages connected.[70][72] Tunisian acquired several new loanwords from