52 Facts About Tunisian Arabic

Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian, is a set of dialects of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in Tunisia.

Tunisian Arabic is mostly similar to eastern Algerian Arabic and western Libyan Arabic.

However, Tunisian Arabic has many loanwords from French, Turkish, Italian and the languages of Spain.

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.

Multilingualism within Tunisia and in the Tunisian diaspora makes it common for Tunisians to code-switch, mixing Tunisian with French, English, Standard Arabic or other languages in daily speech.

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Furthermore, Tunisian Arabic is closely related to Maltese, which is a separate language that descended from Tunisian and Siculo-Arabic.

Maltese and Tunisian Arabic have about 30 to 40 per cent spoken mutual intelligibility.

Tunisian Arabic is one of the Arabic languages within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

Classical Tunisian 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.

In fact, central and western Tunisian Arabic speakers began using the voiced velar stop [g] instead of the voiceless uvular stop [q] in words such as "he said".

Furthermore, the phonologies brought to the new towns speaking Tunisian Arabic are those of the immigrants and not Tunisian phonology.

Tunisian Arabic said that language contact between classical Arabic and local languages caused the creation of many Arabic varieties very distinct from formal Arabic.

Tunisian Arabic acquired several new loanwords from Italian, Spanish, and Turkish and even some structures like the Ottoman Turkish: -ji suffix added to several nouns to mean professions like,.

Also, more research about Tunisian Arabic was produced, mainly by French and German linguists.

Tunisian Arabic became even taught in French high schools, as an optional language.

Consequently, Tunisian Arabic became the main prestigious language of communication and interaction within the Tunisian Arabic community and Tunisia became the most linguistically homogeneous state of the Maghreb.

In fact, Tunisian Arabic was taught by the Peace Corps from 1966 until 1993 and more researches on it were made.

Some linguists, such as Michel Quitout and Keith Walters, consider it an independent language, and some others, such as Enam El-Wer, consider it a divergent dialect of Tunisian Arabic that is still dependent of Tunisian Arabic morphology and structures.

Also, no official recognition or standardization in Tunisia was provided for Tunisian Arabic until 2011 although the efforts of Tunisian professors Salah Guermadi and Hedi Balegh to prove that Tunisian is a language.

In 2016 and after two years of work, the Derja Association has been launched by Ramzi Cherif and Mourad Ghachem in order to standardize and regulate Tunisian Arabic, to define a standard set of orthographic rules and vocabularies for it, to promote its use in daily life, literature and science, and to get an official recognition for it as a language in Tunisia and abroad.

Tunisian Arabic is a variety of Arabic and as such shares many features with other modern varieties, especially the Maghrebi varieties of Arabic.

Nowadays and due to dialect leveling, the main dialect varieties of Tunisian Arabic are Northwestern Tunisian, southwestern Tunisian, Tunis dialect, Sahel dialect, Sfax dialect and southeastern Tunisian.

In fact, people speaking this variety of Tunisian Arabic do not add the regular u suffix after the vowel a but used to drop the a and then add the u For example, ??? msa is conjugated as ???? msu instead of ????? msaw with the third person of plural.

In fact, people who are speaking this variety of Tunisian Arabic do not add the regular u suffix after the vowel a but used to drop the a and then add the u For example, ??? msa is conjugated as ???? msu with the third person of plural.

Tunisian Arabic is the mother tongue of the Arabic-speaking population in Tunisia.

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However, Tunisian Arabic has the role of the low variety in an example of classic diglossia, and Standard Arabic is the high variety.

In religion, the use of Tunisian Arabic in promoting Islam is limited although there are some trial efforts.

In Christianity, the use of Tunisian Arabic is significant beginning with a 1903 New Testament translation.

The recorded Tunisian folktales were transcribed in Tunisian Arabic using Arabic script only in the 2010s, thanks to the work of the Kelemti Association of the promotion of Tunisian Arabic in 2013 and the work of Karen McNeil of 2014.

Tunisian Arabic was the first to translate a novel to Tunisian Arabic in 1997 and to make collections of Tunisian idioms and proverbs in 1994 using Arabic script.

That resulted in the creation of notable plays in Tunisian Arabic following the trends of world literature between 1965 and 2005.

Since Taoufik Ben Brik's Kalb Bin Kalb in 2013, Tunisian Arabic novels have been written by Faten Fazaa, Anis Ezzine, Amira Charfeddine, and Youssef Chahed.

Translation of Tunisian and world literature into Tunisian Arabic have been done by Dhia Bousselmi and Majd Mastoura.

Effective beginning of Tunisian Arabic written songs came in the early 19th century, when Tunisian Jews in the Beylik of Tunis began writing songs in Tunisian Arabic about love, betrayal and other libertine subjects.

Tunisian Arabic became the main variety used in writing lyrics of songs in Tunisia and even the main technical words in music have their synonyms in Tunisian Arabic.

Tunisian underground music, mainly written in Tunisian Arabic, became successful in the 2000s, thanks to its spread over the Internet, and came to involve other alternative genres like reggae and rock.

Television and radio programs in Tunisian Arabic began officially in 1966 with the establishment of the Etablissement de la Radiodiffusion-Television Tunisienne.

Tunisian Arabic is widely used for all television and radio programs, with the exception of news, religious programs and historical dramas.

Some Tunisian Arabic works acquired some honors in the broader Arab world like the ASBU Festival First Prize in 2015.

However, transcription of Tunisian Arabic was not common until 1903, when the Gospel of John was transcribed in Tunisian Arabic using Arabic script.

In 2016, Tunisian Arabic Arabizi has been recognized by Ethnologue as an official informal script for writing Tunisian Arabic.

However, this chat alphabet is not standardized and is seen as informal as the Tunisian Arabic sounds are transcribed as numbers and letters at the same time.

In 2013, a complete work about the regulations of the use of the Buckwalter transliteration for Tunisian Arabic was issued by Ines Zribi and her team from the University of Sfax.

Tunisian Arabic has a very different syllable structure from Standard Arabic like all other Northwest African varieties.

Standard Tunisian Arabic can have no more than two consonants in this position.

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Nouns and adjectives in Tunisian Arabic are classified into nouns that have a regular plural and nouns that have an irregular plural.

Tunisian Arabic has five types of pronouns: personal, possessive, demonstrative, indirect object and indefinite pronouns.

Unlike in Standard Tunisian Arabic, there is a unique pronoun for the second person singular and a unique pronoun for the second person in plural.

Discourses in Tunisian Arabic are likely to use some rhetorical styles like metaphors.

Several Tunisian words were used in the lyrics of some famous Arabic songs and poems like ?aslama of Majda Al Roumi.

Tunisian Arabic influenced several Berber dialects by transferring to them several Arabic or Tunisian structures and words.

The Il-Talyani Tunisian Arabic word meaning "the Italian" was used as a title of a novel in standard Arabic which received the Booker Prize for Arabic literature in 2015.