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The linguistic situation in the Arab world is in an important state of transition, with the “spoken” vernaculars increasingly functioning as written languages as well. While this fact is widely acknowledged and the subject of a growing body of qualitative literature, there is little quantitative research detailing the process in action. The current...
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... Online discourse saw some short-format messages that were similar to texts but not as limited, such as Twitter and Facebook, while internet forum postings allowed longer messages. While early forum posts were mostly written in Standard Arabic, they contained a sizable minority of posts written in Tunisian Arabic -nearly one-fifth in 2010, according to a recent study (McNeil 2022). These postings, though differing from text messages in that the writer may not personally know their interlocutors, still have a conversation-like format ( Figure 8). ...
Social and technological changes over the past several decades have led to widespread writing of "spoken" Arabic dialects. In Tunisia, there has been a noticeable growth of vernacular prose literature, part of a larger development of Tunisian Arabic as a written language. Tunisia does not have a history of colloquial literature: previously even the use of "derja" in literary dialogue was rare. From this nearly non-existent base, a small "leak" of vernacular writing appeared in the latter part of the 20th century, followed by a flood – first online, and increasingly in print – in the first two decades of the 21st. This has culminated in over a dozen vernacular novels and literary translations.
... To date, researchers have focused on Dialect Identification (DI), which can be modeled either as a binary MSA-DA classification or a multi-class problem with a prespecified set of DA variants (Althobaiti, 2020; Keleg and Magdy, 2023). Arabic DI has attracted considerable research attention, with multiple shared tasks (Zampieri et al. 2014;Bouamor et al. 2019;Abdul-Mageed et al. 2020, 2021b, 2022 and datasets (Zaidan and Callison-Burch, 2011;Salama et al., 2014;Alsarsour et al., 2018;Zaghouani and Charfi, 2018;El-Haj, 2020;Abdelali et al., 2021;Althobaiti, 2022). ...
... For his last speech, he explicitly said: " " -"I talk to you in the language of all the Tunisians", apparently using his choice of dialect as a way to identify himself with a particular group (cf. Shoemark et al. 2017;McNeil 2022). ...
In recent years the amount of written vernacular Arabic has increased dramatically. But encoding an unstandardized language in writing is not straightforward and mechanical; rather, it is a complex process that balances practical considerations with ideological stances such as autonomy from the standard language. This study examines how writers of Tunisian Arabic (or derja) are navigating this elaboration process. Using a quantitative analysis of a 279,000-word corpus of print literary works written in Tunisian Arabic (2014–2021) and a 5.8-million-word corpus of internet forum posts (2010–2021), this paper explores how Tunisians writing in derja make orthographic choices to collectively position themselves in relation to the larger Arab world. The study finds that forum writers who have advocated for an improved status for Tunisian Arabic use more phonemic spelling forms—more closely representing Tunisian pronunciation—while those who have advocated for Standard Arabic are more conservative in their spelling choices. The authors of Tunisian Arabic novels and translations—pulled between issues of elaboration and readability—are a bit more conservative than the pro- derja group. These results show how writers in unstandardized or not-yet-standardized languages like Tunisian Arabic use orthography to express national identity stances in relation to supranational languages and identities.
