Judeo-Tunisian Arabic

Judeo-Tunisian Arabic
Native to Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem District, Israel[1]
Houmt Souk, Djerba, Tunisia[2]
Tunis, Tunisia[3]Gabes[4]
Native speakers
 46,000 (1995)[5]
Arabic script[1]
Hebrew alphabet[1][6]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 ajt
Glottolog jude1263[7]

Judeo-Tunisian Arabic is a variety of Tunisian Arabic mainly spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Tunisia.[6] Speakers are older adults and the younger generation has only a passive knowledge of the language.[1]

The vast majority of Tunisian Jews have relocated to Israel and have switched to using Hebrew in as their home language.[3][8] Those in France typically use French as their first language, while the few still left in Tunisia tend to use either French or Tunisian Arabic in their everyday lives.[3][8]

Judeo-Tunisian Arabic is one of the Judeo-Arabic languages, a collection of Arabic dialects spoken by Jews living or formerly living in the Arab world.[6]

History

Before 1901

Jewish community existed in Tunisia even before the before the Roman rule of Africa.[9] After the Arabic conquest of North Africa, this community has begun to use Arabic for their daily communication.[3] They had then adopted Pre-Hilalian Tunisian as their own dialect.[3] As Jewish communities tend to be close and get isolated from other communities of their countries,[6] their dialect spreaded all over the country[2][10] had not been in contact with the languages of the communities that invaded Tunisia in the middle age.[3][11] The only language contact that occurred for Judeo-Tunisian Arabic is the one with the languages of the Jewish communities that came to Tunisia to run away from Persecution.[9] This is what explains that Judeo-Tunisian Arabic did not get any influence from the dialects of Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym and had developed several phonological and lexical particularities that had distinguished it from Tunisian Arabic.[11][12][13] This also explains the fact the Judeo-Tunisian words are less varying from their ethymological origin than Tunisian words.[14]

After 1901

In 1901, Judeo-Tunisian became one of the main spoken Arabic dialects of Tunisia with thousands of speakers.[9] Linguists have seen the particularity of this dialect and have chosen to study it.[9] Among the people studying Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, Daniel Hagege listed a signifcant amount of Judeo-Tunisian Arabic newspapers from the early 1900's in his essay The Circulation of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic Books.[15] However, its emergence has significantly declined since 1948 due to the creation of Israel.[9] In fact, the jewish community of Tunisia had either chosen or forced to leave Tunisia and immigrate to France or Israel.[3][8] Nowadays, the language had quite extinguished in Tunisia and is still used by a limited Jewish community in Tunis or Djerba[2][3] and even most of the Jewish community that had left Tunisia had chosen to change their language of communication to the main language of their current country.[3]

Language Vitality

The vitality of this Judeo-Tunisian Arabic is believed to be vulnerable with 500 speakers in Tunisia [16] and with about 45,000 speakers in Israel[17]

Variations of Judeo-Tunisian Arabic

In Tunisia, geography plays a huge role in how Judeo-Tunisian Arabic varies between speakers.[18] Yehudit Henshke found that these variations of Tunisian Judeo-Arabic can be divided by certain regions such as the North and South of Tunisia as well as the islands off the coast of the country, in addition the way Judeo-Tunisian is spoken can vary based on the town.[19]

Distinctives from Tunisian Arabic

Like all other Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Tunisian Arabic does not seem to be very different from the Arabic dialect from which it derives, Tunisian Arabic.[3][6][20][21][22]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
  2. 1 2 3 4 (Hebrew) Henschke, J. (1991). Hebrew elements in the Spoken Arabic of Djerba. Massorot, 5-6, 77-118.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 (French) Cohen, D. (1975). Le parler arabe des Juifs de Tunis. La Haye: Mouton.
  4. 1 2 Sumikazu, Yoda. ""Sifflant" and "Chuitant" in the Arabic Dialect of the Jews of Gabes (south Tunisia)". Jounal of Arabic Linguistics 46: 21. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  5. ↑ Judeo-Tunisian Arabic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (French) Bar-Asher, M. (1996). La recherche sur les parlers judéo-arabes modernes du Maghreb: état de la question. Histoire épistémologie langage, 18(1), 167-177.
  7. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Judeo-Tunisian Arabic". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  8. 1 2 3 Bassiouney, R. (2009). Arabic sociolinguistics. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 104.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Leddy-Cecere, T. A. (2010). Contact, Restructuring, and Decreolization: The Case of Tunisian Arabic. University of Pennsylvania, pp. 47-71.
  10. ↑ (French) Saada, L. (1956). Introduction à l'étude du parler arabe des juifs de Sousse.
  11. 1 2 3 (French) Vanhove, M. (1998). De quelques traits préhilaliens en maltais. Aguade et al., ed, 97-108.
  12. 1 2 3 4 (French) Cohen, D. (1970). Les deux parlers arabes de Tunis. Notes de phonologie comparee. In his Etudes de linguistique semitique et arabe, 150(7).
  13. ↑ (French) Caubet, D. (2000). Questionnaire de dialectologie du Maghreb (d'après les travaux de W. Marçais, M. Cohen, GS Colin, J. Cantineau, D. Cohen, Ph. Marçais, S. Lévy, etc.). Estudios de dialectología norteafricana y andalusí, EDNA, (5), 73-90.
  14. ↑ Aslanov, C. (2016). Remnants of Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic among French-born Jews of North-African Descent. Journal of Jewish Languages, 4(1), 69-84.
  15. ↑ Tobi, Joseph (2014). Judeo-Arabic Literature In Tunisia, 1850-1950. Detroit,Michigan: Wayne State University Press. pp. 241–320. ISBN 978-0-8143-2871-2.
  16. ↑ "UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger". Unesco.org. UNESCO. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
  17. ↑ "Arabic, Judeo-Tunisian". Ethologue Languages of the World. Ethnologue. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
  18. ↑ Henshke, Yehudit (2010). "Different Hebrew Traditions: Mapping Regional Distinctions in the Hebrew Component of Spoken Tunisian Judeo-Arabic". Studies in the History and Culture of North African Jewry: 109. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  19. ↑ Henshke, Yehudit (2010). "Different Hebrew Traditions: Mapping Regional Distinctions in the Hebrew Component of Spoken Tunisian Judeo-Arabic". Studies in the History and Culture of North African Jewry: 110. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  20. 1 2 Talmoudi, Fathi (1979) The Arabic Dialect of Sûsa (Tunisia). Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
  21. ↑ Hammet, Sandra (2014). "Irregular verbs in Maltese and Their Counterparts in The Tunisian and Moroccan Dialects" (PDF). Romano-Arabica 14: 193–210. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  22. ↑ Arevalo, Tania Marica Garcia (2014). "The General Linguistic Features of Modern Judeo-Arabic Dialects in the Maghreb". Zutot 11: 54–56. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  23. ↑ Cuvalay, M. (1991). The expression of durativity in Arabic. The Arabist, Budapest studies in Arabic, 3-4, 146.
  24. ↑ Cohen, D. (1985). Some historical and sociolinguistic observations on the arabic dialects spoken by north african Jews. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill, 246-260.

Bibliography

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, May 04, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.