First descriptive elements of Oulad Attia Arabic: an archaïc Prehilalian dialect of Eastern Kabylia (Collo peninsula, Algeria)
Résumé
In the Collo Mountains (Eastern Kabylia, north-eastern Algeria), various varieties of Arabic are spoken: including that of the small historic port city of Collo, and the dialects of the half-dozen mountain confederations that populate the massif. There is no description of this Arabic dialects, even though it is spoken by several hundred thousand speakers, apart from the linguistic notes illustrating the administrative survey carried out by Luciani (1889:296-311) a few decades after the French conquest of the region, and the elements given in the brief dialectological monograph by Ostoya-Delmas (1938). These works insist on the original character of these sedentary villager's languages, with their conservative pre-Hilalian type and numerous contact phenomena with Berber (=Amazigh).
In order to provide contemporary descriptive data on Collo Arabic, I focused on one of its varieties: the Oulad Attia's one. This confederation is one of the largest in the region in numerical and geographical terms. Its territory covers the western third of the Collo massif from the Oued El Kbir, marking the geographical transition with the Babors and linguistic, with Jijelian Arabic. My interest in this region is also anthropo-historical: the Oulad Attia were described in the 19th century as a tribe dominated by troglodytic dwellings, and the question of identifying the Berber substratum particularly prevalent in their language leads to that of the history of the language change from Berber to Arabic. I will therefore propose a descriptive sketch of this language, based on a field survey to be carried out in 2023.
Domaines
LinguistiqueOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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