Tunisian Arabic - Domains of Use

Domains of Use

Tunisian Arabic or derja is the mother tongue of the Arabic-speaking population in Tunisia. It is also the second language of the Berber minority living in the country. Standard Arabic and French are taught at school. Tunisian Arabic has the role of the low variety in an example of classic diglossia, where Standard Arabic is the high variety.

As such, the use of Tunisian is mainly restricted to spoken domains, though cartoons in newspapers may be written in it, and since the 1990s many advertising boards have their slogans (though not the name of the company) written in Tunisian.

Increasingly, Tunisians are also choosing to communicate in Tunisian online, especially on social-networking sites and in mobile-phone text messages. Latin characters are used for online communication, using French phonology and inserting numbers in lieu of diacritics as signifiers of non-Latin phonemes (e.g., by using number 9 to show the letter "qaf"). This trend accelerated during the recent street protests that brought down the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in which text messaging and social networking played a major role.

The current trend among young people is to dismiss Standard Arabic as pretentious and, since it is not well-understood among those who have not been through secondary school, as a tool of control and oppression by the country's various regimes. One sign of this trend is that, for the first, time, at least one private radio station, Chems FM, now broadcasts news bulletins and many panel discussions entirely in Derja. In the weeks following the fall of Ben Ali, Derja has also been heard far more frequently on both state and private television. Significantly Ben Ali's last address to the nation prior to his flight abroad was given in Derja, the first time he had used this language in an official capacity (unlike his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, who frequently gave speeches in Derja).

The Berbers of the island of Jerba and the southern part of Tunisia speak Tunisian Arabic as a second language along with a Berber language called Shelha.