Linguistic Varieties and Social Radios in the Tunisian Sahel

Abstract

The existing studies on language uses and practices in Arab digital media mainly focus on few Mashreq countries and, as far as the Maghreb is concerned, mostly on Morocco and Algeria, while very limited attention has been devoted to other countries of the Arab West such as Tunisia. This paper will analyse some passages of news broadcasting taken from four Tunisian social media radio broadcasters, uploaded as videos on the Facebook pages of the selected radio stations, based in the Tunisian Sahel, i.e. Mahdia, Msaken, and Sousse. The data presented and analysed are taken from different information programmes. The aim is to try to describe and analyse the linguistic choices of the speakers, influenced by personal and contextual elements, such as the editorial line of a radio, in order to verify whether there is a general tendency among the radio stations or if some peculiarities can be identified. In particular, the role of Tunisian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic will be highlighted, as well as that of any possible mixed varieties occurring in the examples offered.

Keywords

• Mixed Arabic. News broadcasting. Radio. Sahel. Social media. Sociolinguistics. Tunisian Arabic