French in Algeria

Abstract This chapter analyses a short discussion between two sisters, young students living in Chlef, a small town southwest of Algiers. They are both native speakers of Arabic and completely fluent in French. The conversation concerns the way young women can or must dress in this small town. From the point of view of syntax, the excerpt shows the difficulty of expressing temporal relations resulting in a heavy use of the present tense and a specific use of certain prepositions. The phonological system of the two speakers is characterized by a generalization of the loi de position, a tendency to merge the two posterior nasal vowels, and the lack of reduction of obstruent + liquids clusters.