Some Morphological-Semantic Features in Modern Arabic of Tunisia

Abstract

Following a brief introduction which provides a: general view of the contemporary Arabic language and its development since the nineteenth century, the author points out the fact that the process of modernization of the Arabic language has evolved differently in various regions of the Arab world, depending on specific historical conditions of each region. According to the author, the countries of the Arab East (Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt) have already a well-formed and to a great extent unified modern language, whereas the same cannot be said for the countries of the Magreb (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). On the path to build in the Magreb a language which would to some degree incorporate certain peculiarities of the region, there emerged such philological phenomena which on the one hand constitute a divergence from the generally accepted linguistic usage and on the other -contribute to the enrichment of the language itself. In view of the fact that, to the author's knowledge, this phenomenon in the modern Arabic language has not been the subject of a detailed investigation in the contemporary Arabic Studies in Yugoslavia so far, the author felt to have enough reason to present in this paper some results of his research on the morphological-semantic features of the modern Arabic language in Tunisia.

A number of the most characteristic cases of the use of some nouns, adjectives, verbs, and prepositions are cited in the article. The author has tried to point out the way and manner in which certain usages characteristic of the modern Arabic language in Tunisia came into being. All such examples are illustrated by corresponding texts taken from the press.

In conclusion, the author is of the opinion -that certain typical features of the local literary language in Tunisia, which agree with the rules of the Arabic language, enrich the language itself and that they ought to be incorporated into the modern dictionaries, which has not been a customary practice so far. However, those specific features which cannot be brought into harmony with the standard rules of the literary language, are bound to remain confined to a particular region, without a likelihood of their usage ever spreading to other areas.