Sociolinguistic variation in the speech community of Béchar

Abstract

The present research work is an attempt at analysing linguistic variation in the speech community of Béchar, a town where the sociolinguistic situation became interesting in the last few decades. Indeed, a significant homogeneity can readily be observed in the speech community nowadays; the young speakers use a new elaborated code, on the other hand the older generations use different dialects which vary according to ethnicity; Varieties of this kind do not usually receive sufficient interest in the field of investigation, though they carry many interesting linguistic phenomena. Before presenting the field of work, we will first introduce some important linguistic key concepts such as: language varieties and speech community, the second chapter draws a picture of the sociolinguistic situation in Béchar, and its linguistic repertoire, we refer to the linguistic phenomena which exist including bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia, and code switching, this chapter includes a categorization of the Algerian dialects as Rural or Urban ones. The third chapter is reserved for the description of the most salient characteristics of the existing dialects in Béchar; most of the data obtained from questionnaires and interviews, reveal that a growing number of young speakers shift to D1 or what we call “the dialect of the majority”, while young speakers from the Doui Mni3 tend to stick to their original dialect (D2). Chapter four introduces ethnicity as the main factor that correlates with linguistic variation; some phonological morphological and lexical variables are presented, in this chapter, also, we introduce age and gender as linguistic variables, in D3 there are linguistic features that appear specific to women’s speech, while in D2 the difference is not very apparent. We have found no evidence of linguistic variation correlating with social stratification or style; to a certain extent, the sociolinguistic variation we have been able to examine is due, mainly, to ethnicity, or to age and gender, an important conclusion is that, because of the growing number of speakers who shift to D1 we may be witnessing important linguistic changes in the speech community of Béchar