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Tunisian Arabic
Sign in to saveAlso known as Tunisian Darija, Tunisian
Arabic dialect spoken in Tunisia
Key facts
- Pronunciation
- [ ˈtuːnsi ]
- Native to
- Tunisia
- Ethnicity
- Tunisian Arabs
- Speakers
- 13 million (2024)
- Language family
- Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Maghrebi Tunisian Arabic
- Writing system
- Arabic script
- Signed forms
- Tunisian Sign Language
- Recognised minority language in
- As a variety of Maghrebi Arabic on 7 May 1999 (Not ratified due to several Constitutional Matters):
- Iso 639 3
- aeb
- Glottolog
- tuni1259
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- modern language
- Subclass of
- Maghrebi Arabic
- Country
- Tunisia
Show 8 more facts
- Wikimedia language code
- tu
- topic's main category
- Category:Tunisian Arabic
- writing system
- Latin script
- native label
- دارجة تونسية
- Commons category
- Tunisian Arabic dialects
- P10369
- Tanka people
- number of speakers, writers, or signers
- 11200000
Sources (7)
via Wikidata · CC0
~40 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian (Arabic: تونسي, romanized: Tūnsi), is a variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known among its 13 million speakers as Tūnsi, [ˈtuːnsi] "Tunisian" or Derja (Arabic: الدارجة; meaning "common or everyday dialect") to distinguish it from Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is mostly similar to eastern Algerian Arabic and western Libyan Arabic.
As part of the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum, Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic at the borders of the country. Like other Maghrebi dialects, it has a vocabulary that is predominantly Semitic and Arabic with a Berber, Latin and possibly Neo-Punic substratum. Tunisian Arabic contains Berber loanwords which represent 8% to 9% of its vocabulary. However, Tunisian has also loanwords from French, Turkish, Italian and the languages of Spain and a little bit of Persian.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Tunisian Arabic” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.