Attitudes Towards Language Variation In Tlemcen Speech Community

Résumé: This paper intends to look at the relationship between language and society from a social-psychological perspective, a line of exploration that has been of considerable importance to sociolinguistics. Indeed, people‟s attitudes towards a language variety reflect their views about the users of that variety, and the observation of their reactions can help us understand the association between social stereotypes and ways of speaking, as well as the resulting impact on their own linguistic behaviour. Based on an indirect technique of eliciting the attitudes of a number of respondents in the speech community of Tlemcen, our investigation reveals interesting results as to their reactions to the two high status languages, MSA and French, on the one hand, and the two low varieties co-existing in the community, Tlemcen speech and a rural form of Arabic.

Publié dans la revue: Revue Maghrébine des Langues