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Interrogatives in Tunisia. With a focus on the Arabic varieties spoken in northwestern, central and southern Tunisia

Veronika Ritt-Benmimoun


Seiten 52 - 71



This contribution is an analysis of the interrogatives ‘who?’, ‘whose?’, ‘what?’, ‘which?’, ‘why?’, ‘where?’, ‘where from?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’, ‘how much?’, ‘how many?’, and the polar question markers as used in northwestern, central, and southern Tunisia. It is based on data systematically elicitated between 2019 and 2021 during fieldwork campaigns in more than 90 localities situated in the seven Tunisian governorates of Jendouba, Beja, Kef, Siliana, Kasserine, Sidi Bouzid and Gafsa in the realm of the project “Tunisia’s Linguistic terra incognita: An Investigation into the Arabic Varieties of Northwestern and Central Tunisia” (TUNOCENT). The data is presented quantitatively and qualitatively, showing the most wide-spread forms and those the use of which is restricted areal-linguistically to certain regions or socio-linguistically to certain age groups. Comparisons of our findings are drawn to the urban dialect of the capital Tunis (SINGER 1984) and to the Bedouin-type dialect spoken in the region of Douz in southern Tunisia (RITT-BENMIMOUN 2014a). The newly published WAD (BEHNSTEDT & WOIDICH 2021) is used as a comparative tool on a broader diatopic level. Furthermore, the interrogatives are analyzed morphologically with regard to suffixes, and lexically regarding their etymology and grammaticalization pathways.



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