Words fall apart

Abstract

The present thesis reports on a descriptive analytical study of contact-induced lexical obsolescence in Tashawit, the variety of Tamazight spoken across the Aurès in eastern Algeria. It traces the use of a number of Berber variants across the different regions where this variety is spoken, aiming to identify the regions where such variants are maintained and where they are lost and to find out if their maintenance and loss is regionally determined. It also aims at investigating lexical maintenance and loss in progress, i.e. across the different generations, to identify if there exist any significant differences between the different age groups in terms of the maintenance and loss of the Berber variants. A wordlist of 61 notions covering a variety of semantic domains was developed in Arabic and was administered, in the form of a sociolinguistic questionnaire, to a large number of speakers from different localities across Tashawit speaking area. The findings of the present study were obtained from the analysis of the responses of 1816 informants who returned back the questionnaire. The statistical analysis has revealed that lexical obsolescence is regionally determined for most of the notions in the wordlist. In general, lexical obsolescence was found to be less striking in the western regions, i.e. Occidental Aurès and Bellezma, in particular the southern part of the region, compared to the eastern regions, that is Oriental Aurès, Nemamcha, Segnia and Harakta. Nonetheless, a number of Berber variants were shown to be maintained better in eastern regions. The analysis has also revealed a strong association between lexical loss and age for most of the notions in the wordlist. The findings obtained for a number of notions conform to the apparent time hypothesis, whereas for other notions the analysis has revealed other tendencies.