The Tunisian Dialect
Tunisia is a North African country bordering the
Mediterranean Sea and Sahara Desert, and has an estimated 11.4 million
inhabitants.
In Tunisia, a set of dialects of
Maghrebi Arabic are spoken by eleven million speakers and are referred to as
Tounsi, Tunisian or Derja that means “everyday language.” This distinguishes
the languages from the official Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
Like other Maghrebi dialects, its
vocabulary is mostly Arabic but with significant Berber and Latin inclusions.
Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic at the borders of the
country.
Tunisian Arabic is mostly intelligible
to speakers of other Maghrebi dialects but is hard to understand or is
unintelligible for speakers of Middle Eastern Arabic. Its pronunciation,
vocabulary and syntax are different enough from MSA and Classical Arabic to not
be mutually intelligible with either of them. It also has many loanwords from
French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish.
There is much multilingualism within
Tunisia, and Tunisians often mix Tunisian with French, English, Standard
Arabic, or other languages in daily speech. There has been integration of new
French and English words with Tunisian Arabic, notably in technical fields, or
replacement of old French and Italian loan words with standard Arabic ones.
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