Tunisian Arabic

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Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian (Arabic: تونسي, romanized: Tūnsi), is a variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known among its 12.5 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 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. Multilingualism within Tunisia and in the Tunisian diaspora makes it common for Tunisians to code...

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