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  • Maghribi Arabic (article)


    ​​​​Adam Benkato
    University of California, Berkeley

    This chapter gives an overview of contact-induced changes in the Maghrebi dialect group in North Africa. It includes both a general summary of relevant research on the topic and a selection of case studies which exemplify contact-induced changes in the areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon.

    1. The Maghrebi Arabic varieties

    In Arabic dialectology, Maghrebi is generally considered to be one of the main dialect groups of Arabic, denoting the dialects spoken in a region stretching from the Nile delta to Africa’s Atlantic coast – in other words, the dialects of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, parts of western Egypt, and Malta. The main isogloss distinguishing Maghrebi dialects from non-Maghrebi dialects is the first person of the imperfect, as shown in Table 1 :

    First-person imperfect ‘write’ in Maghrebi and non-Maghrebi Arabic :

    - Classical Arabic ........ sing. aktub / pl. naktub
    - Baghdad Arabic ........ sing. aktib / pl. nekteb
    - Casablanca Arabic ... sing. nekteb / pl. neketbu
    - Maltese ..................... sing. nikteb / pl. niketbu

    This Maghrebi group of dialects is in turn traditionally held to consist of two subtypes : those spoken by sedentary populations in the old urban centers of North-Africa, and those spoken by nomadic populations. The former of these,
    usually referred to as “pre-Hilali” (better: “first-layer”) would have originated with the earliest Arab communities established across North-Africa (~7th–8th centuries) up to the Iberian Peninsula. The latter of these, usually referred to as “Hilali” (better: “second-layer”), is held to have originated with the westward migration of a large group of nomad tribes (~11th century) out of the Arabian Peninsula and into North-Africa via Egypt. Their distribution is roughly as follows :
    ​​​​​​
    a) First-layer dialects exist in cities such as Tunis, Kairouan, Mahdia, Sousse, Sfax (Tunisia), Jijel, Algiers, Cherchell, Tlemcen (Algeria), Tangier, Tetuan, southern Rif villages, Rabat, Fez, Taza, so-called “northern” dialects (Morocco), Maltese, and formerly Andalusi and Sicilian dialects; most Judeo-Arabic dialects formerly spoken in parts of North-Africa are also part of this group.

    b) Second-layer dialects are spoken by populations of nearly all other regions, from western Egypt, through all urban and rural parts of Libya, to the remaining urban and rural parts of Algeria and Morocco. Though some differences between these two subtypes are clear (such as [q,ʔ, k] vs. [g] for "qāf"), there have probably been varying levels of interdialectal mixture and contact since the 11th century. In many cases,
    first-layer varieties of urban centers have been influenced by neighboring secondlayer ones, leading to new dialects formed on the basis of inter-dialectal contact.

    It is important to note that North-Africa is becoming increasingly urbanized and so not only is the traditional sedentary/nomadic distinction anachronistic (if it was ever completely accurate), but also that intensifying dialect contact accompanying urbanization means that new ways of thinking about Maghrebi dialects are necessary. It is also possible to speak of the recent but ongoing koinéization of multiple local varieties into supralocal or even roughly national varieties— thus one can speak, in a general way, of “Libyan Arabic” or “Moroccan Arabic”.

    This chapter will not deal with contact between mutually intelligible varieties of a language although this is equally important for the understanding of both the history and present of Maghrebi dialects.

    ... /...
    Dernière modification par Harrachi78, 20 octobre 2021, 20h29.
    "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

  • #2
    2. Languages in contact

    Contact between Arabic and other languages in North-Africa began in the late 7th century, when Arab armies began to spread westward through North-Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula by the early 8th century and founding or occupying settlements along the way. Their dialects would have come into contact with the languages spoken in coastal regions at that time, including varieties of Berber and Late Latin, and possibly even late forms of Punic and Greek.

    The numbers of Arabic speakers moving into North-Africa at the time of initial conquests were likely to have been quite small. By the time of the migration of nomad groups beginning in the 11th century, it is doubtful that languages other than Berber and Arabic survived in the Maghreb. The Arabization of coastal hinterlands and the Sahara increased in pace after the 11th century. Berber varieties continue to be spoken natively by millions in Morocco and Algeria, and by smaller communities in Libya, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Egypt.

    Any changes in an Arabic variety due to Berber are almost certainly the result of Berber speakers adopting Arabic rather than Arabic speakers adopting Berber – the sociolinguistic situation in North-Africa is such that Layer 1 Arabic speakers rarely acquire Berber. Beginning in the 16th century, most of North-Africa came under the control of the Ottoman Empire and thus into contact with varieties of Turkish, although the effect of Turkish is essentially limited to cultural borrowings. The sociolinguistic conditions in which Turkish was spoken in North-Africa are poorly understood.

    The advent of colonialism imposed different European languages on the region, most prominently French (in Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), Italian (in Libya), and Spanish (in Morocco). Romance words in dialects outside of Morocco may also derive from forms of Spanish (via Andalusi refugees to North-Africa in the 16th–17th centuries) or from the Mediterranean Lingua Franca.The effects on Maghrebi Arabic of contact with Chadic (ex. Hausa) or NiloSaharan (ex. Songhay, Tebu) languages is largely unstudied since in most cases data from the relevant Arabic varieties is lacking. Yet some borrowings from these languages can be found in Arabic and Berber varieties throughout the region. Lastly, Hebrew loans are present in most Jewish Arabic dialects of Nort-Africa, though unfortunately these dialects hardly exist anymore.

    To restate these facts in Van Coetsem’s terms, there are two major contact situations at work in Maghrebi Arabic in general, though the specifics will of course differ from variety to variety. The first is change in Arabic driven by source-language (Berber) dominant speakers ; this transfer type is imposition.

    The second is change in Arabic driven by recipient-language (Arabic) dominant speakers where the source language is a European colonial language ; this transfer type is called borrowing. So far, “dominance” describes linguistic dominance, that is, the fact that a speaker is more proficient in one of the languages involved in the contact situation. However, social dominance, referring to the social and political status of a language, is also important, especially in North-Africa.

    ... /...
    "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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    • #3
      3. Contact-induced changes in Maghrebi dialects

      3.1 Phonology

      Changes in Maghrebi Arabic phonology due to contact with Berber are difficult to prove. There are several cases, for example, where historical changes in Arabic phonology may be argued to be the result of contact with Berber or the result of internal developments. These include the change of ǧ to /ž/ in many varieties, or the emergence of phonemic /ẓ/. Another example, the pronunciation /ṭ/ in some Layer 1 varieties where most Arabic varieties have /ð̣/, has also been explained as a result of Berber influence, or as unclear directionality, while Al-Jallad argues that it is actually an archaism within Arabic.

      The merger in Arabic of the vowels "a" and "i" (and even "u") to a single phoneme /ǝ/ in some, especially Layer 1, varieties, is often attributed to Berber influence, as many Berber varieties have only a single short vowel phoneme /ǝ/. However Kossmann points out that Berber also merged older "ă" and "e" to a single phoneme /ǝ/ and that it cannot be proven that the reduction happened in Berber before it happened in Arabic. Hence, again the directionality of influence is difficult to show.

      Related to this development is also that many Maghrebi varieties disallow vowels in light syllables (often described as the deletion of short vowels in open syllables), such that katab ("he wrote") > Tripoli : ktǝb or kitāb ("book") > Algerian ktāb. Meanwhile, Layer 2 varieties often do allow vowels in light syllables (e.g. Benghazi kitab "he wrote", mišē "he went"). While proto-Berber and some modern varieties allow vowels in light syllables, most Berber varieties of Algeria and Morocco do not. This is another example of a similar development wherein the directionality of influence is unclear. In the Arabic variety of Ghomara, northwest Morocco, "d" and "t" are spirantized to /ð/ and /θ/ initially ("d" only), postvocalically and finally : ex. māθǝθ "she died" (cl. ar. mātat), warθ "inheritance" (although etymologically warθ, dialects of the wider Jbala region of Morocco have no interdentals so wart), dāba "now", khǝðma "work" (khidma), wāḥǝð "one" (wāḥid). Naciri-Azzouz points out that the distribution of spirantization is the same as in Ghomara Berber, a variety spoken by groups in the same region.

      New phonemes have been borrowed into Maghrebi varieties through contact with European languages: ex. /p/ and nasalized vowels in more recent French loans in Tunisian Arabic, or /v, č, ǧ/ in Italian loans in Libyan Arabic (grīǧū "gray" < grigio).

      … /…
      Dernière modification par Harrachi78, 20 octobre 2021, 20h58.
      "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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      • #4
        3.2 Morphology

        In the realm of morphology, changes in Arabic varieties due to contact vary depending on whether the relationship between Arabic and the contact language is substratal, adstratal, or superstratal. Morphological influence from Berber on the Arabic varieties of the northern Maghreb is not overly common. In some places where Berber–Arabic bilingualism is or was more common, contact has led to the borrowing of Berber nouns into Arabic together with their morphology, a phenomenon known as “parallel system borrowing”. In Ḥassāniyya, for example, many nouns have been transferred together with their gender and number marking. In the arabic dialect of Jijel, Berber singular nouns are transferred together with their prefixes (āwtūl "hare",
        cf. Kabyle āwtūl) ; plurals are then formed in a way which resembles Berber but is not identical (Jijel āsrǝf, āsǝrfǝn "bush(es)", cf. Kabyle Berber āsrǝf, īsǝrfǝn) ; moreover, the prefix ā- is also used with nouns of Arabic origin (āfḫǝd "thigh", Arabic *faḫað). In Algeria and Morocco the circumfix tā-...-t, which occurs on feminine nouns in Berber, can derive abstract nouns (ex. Jijel tākǝbūrt "boasting", tāwǝḥḥūnt "having labor pains") and in Moroccan Arabic tā-...-t is the regular way of forming nouns of professions and traits (ex. tānǝžžāṛt "carpentry").

        The verbal morphology of Arabic dialects is much less affected by Berber, though Ḥassāniyya again provides an interesting example. It has a causative prefix sä- used with both inherited Arabic verbs and borrowed Berber verbs, and most likely to be borrowed from Berber causative forms in s-/š-.

        Turkish influence on morphology is restricted to the suffix -dji/-ži (< -ci) used to indicate professions and borrowed widely into Arabic dialects in general. Its use has been extended to derive adjectives of quality from nouns (sukkārdji "drunkard") and has also even been added to borrowed French nouns (bankādji "banker" < French "banque"). As Manfredi points out, the productivity of this borrowed derivational morpheme constitutes one example of how recipient-language agentivity can introduce morphological innovations via borrowing.
        French (and other Romance) verbs are also routinely borrowed into Maghrebi varieties. Talmoudi discusses their integration into different forms of the verbal system of Tunisian Arabic, e.g. mannāk "to be absent" < French manquer or trānā "to train" < French "entraine".

        … /…
        Dernière modification par Harrachi78, 20 octobre 2021, 21h00.
        "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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        • #5
          3.3 Syntax

          Syntax is often the least documented aspect of the grammar of Maghrebi Arabic varieties and research on contact-induced changes in syntax is still in its infancy.
          Much attention has been devoted recently to explaining the rise of bipartite negation in Arabic and Berber ; in varieties of both languages the word for "thing" (Arabic shay', Berber ḱăra) has been grammaticalized postverbally in a marker of negation :

          (à suivre)

          … /…

          "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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          • #6
            3.4 Lexicon

            Much work on contact and Maghrebi Arabic has focused on loanwords, the most salient effects of borrowing, with secondary attention to their phonological or morphological adaptation.

            The concept of social dominance has particular relevance for borrowing: in the North African context, the colonial languages, and especially French, have high social status for both Arabic and Berber native speakers. One also must modify the idea of linguistic dominance to include those who acquire two languages natively (Layer 1 speakers), definitely the case for certain speakers of Berber and Arabic in North-Africa. Unsurprisingly, we see firstly that the majority of words borrowed into Arabic varieties are nouns, and secondly that the lexical domains into which these borrowings fall are often restricted. Social dominance seems to play a role in the nature of the nouns borrowed.

            Berber loans are found in most Maghrebi Arabic varieties, though their number ranges from only a handful of words in the east to many more in the west. Almost all Maghrebi varieties have borrowed the words dj(i)ṛāna "frog" and fakrūna "turtle", while in some oases Berber influence in agricultural terminology can be seen. Again, the documentation of the relevant varieties is often insufficient. Several studies on contact between Maghrebi Arabic varieties and European languages exist. For French in Morocco, Heath argues that code-switching and borrowing are essentially the same in a bilingual community which has established borrowing routines. For French in Tunisia, Talmoudi analyzes the phonological and morphological adaptation of French verbs into Arabic. Sayahi gives a broader view of lexical borrowing in diglossic or bilingual communities, focusing on French in Tunisia and Spanish in Morocco. Vicente studies Arabic-Spanish code-switching in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco. Italian in Tunisia is studied briefly by Cifoletti. Studies of contact with Turkish are limited to discussion of lexical borrowing : on Morocco see Procházka ; on Algeria, see Ben Cheneb, to be read with the review by G. S. Colin.

            The remainder of this section will consider the influence of Turkish and Italian on Libyan Arabic (LA), a hitherto under-researched topic. Uniquely in the Maghreb region there is at present no superstratum language spoken widely by Arabic speakers in Libya, while there are also fewer Berber speakers than in Algeria or Morocco. As far as documented varieties of LA (Tripoli, Benghazi) go, contact situations are historical and not active.

            There seems to be an impression among dialectologists that LA varieties have the largest number of Turkish loans, though there is not a published basis for this. Procházka suggests that the number of (Ottoman) Turkish loans in a given Arabic dialect is proportional to the length and intensity of Ottoman rule. By this criterion Libya should have quite a few, as the regions now constituting Libya were under control of the Ottoman Empire from 1551 to 1911, but Procházka estimates that the dialect would show 200 to 500 surviving loans, fewer than in other dialects. Another important factor is likely to be that Libya’s population was very small during the period of Ottoman rule so that the long-term presence of even a few thousand Turkish speakers could have had a significant effect. However, I cannot yet offer a statistical analysis of Turkish words in LA. It is clear so far, though, that the effects of Turkish on LA can mainly be seen in the lexicon and, in my data, almost entirely in nouns. In terms of their semantic domains, Procházka points out that the majority of Turkish loans in Arabic dialects in general fall into three categories, roughly described as : private life ; law, government, social classes; and army, war. By far the majority of surviving loans would belong to the first of these classes (such as šīšma "tap" < çeşme, dizdān "wallet" < cüzdan), or the second (such as fayramān "order" < ferman, ḥafð̣a "week" < hafte) while I suspect that words from the third class are increasingly rarer. Outside of these, only a few words other than nouns seem to be present, such as duġri "straight ahead" and balki "maybe". The length of time since Turkish was last actively spoken in Libya no doubt means that the number of Turkish loans actively used by speakers has been decreasing.

            LA is unique among Maghrebi varieties in having had Italian as the main European contact language. Italian had a presence in what is now Libya from the 1800s, but this was mainly limited to the Tripolitanian Jewish community and wealthy merchant families. The Italian colonization of Libya officially began in 1911; though the majority of the region was not brought under Italian control until the early 1930s, large numbers of Italian colonists had begun to settle in Libya in the 1920s. From that period until 1970, when the remaining Italian citizens were expelled from the country, Italians made up 15% or more of the population and the language was in widespread use. From the 1970s on, Italian was scarcely used in Libya, and the teaching of foreign languages was banned in 1984, not to return again until 2005.Many of the postwar generation spoke (and still speak) Italian, though they rarely use it anymore, but few Libyans of younger generations do. The 1920s to the 1970s can thus be regarded as the main period of contact between LA and Italian.However, the concentration of Italians differed from region to region and thus may have influenced local varieties differently. The primary study devoted to analyzing Italian loans in LA is that of Abdu who, focusing on the variety of Tripoli, draws up a list of nearly 700 items (a few are misidentified), of which about 50% were recognized by a majority of those surveyed. Some 93% of these are nouns and the remainder are practically all derived from nouns or adjectives, such as bwōno "well done" < buono ‘good’ or faryaz "to go out of order" < Italian fuori uso.Abdu’s study groups Italian loans into some 22 semantic categories, the vast majority of which relate to material culture. Examples of these from the Benghazi variety are byāmbu "lead" < piombo, bōskō "zoo" < bosco "wood", furkayta "fork" < forchetta, maršabīdi "sidewalk" < marciapiede.

            As D’Anna points out, the adaptation of Italian words to LA phonology varies: new phonemes, particularly [v] and [č], sometimes occur but are sometimes adapted to the dialects’ pre-existing phonologies, an indication of “subsidiary phonological borrowing” . Of course, the maintenance of new phonemes often depends on speakers continuing to have access …

            (à suivre)

            … /…
            "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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            • #7
              4. Conclusion

              The general parameters of the Maghrebi linguistic landscape and contact situations are relatively well understood. However, more documentation of Maghrebi varieties is needed, and more specifically, of those where contact situations – especially with Berber – may have existed.

              Additionally, further research into the sociolinguistic factors affecting bilingualism in Berber and Arabic, or regarding the intersection of diglossia with bilingualism, will no doubt add to our knowledge of the parameters of contact-induced change more generally. Finally, interdialectal contact as well as the gradual rise of national or at least supra-local varieties certainly merits continuing attention.
              "L'armée ne doit être que le bras de la nation, jamais sa tête" [Pio Baroja, L'apprenti conspirateur, 1913]

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              • #8
                Interessant... Les maltais, pour ceux qui ne le savent pas, parlent presque darija !

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                • #9

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