SIZ_VS_CONV-004 Siwi

Two men talk about how Siwa has changed Equipment: Edirol R-O5 recorder / Audiotechnica AT897 Mono condenser Mic The aim of the project is to document the variety of Berber spoken in Siwa Oasis, through a corpus collected and transcribed on the field. The aim is also to record the female speech in order to understand which are the differences between their speech and the men's one, who usually use Arabic and English, losing some of the characteristics of the Siwi language. The Siwi language (Code ISO 639-3:siz) is spoken by 25 thousand people, almost all of them are bilingual (Siwi-Arabic). Afro-Asiatic , Eastern Berber subgroup. Place: Siwa Oasis, depression of the Western desert , Libyan border. 300km far from Marsa Matruh, on the Mediterranean Coast. Part of Matruh Governatorate. Siwa is divided into 11 tribes, all of them ruled by a Sheikh, but there is also Government offices and a Police Station. The main zones are Aghurmi, AbuShruf, El Gara, Maraqi and the bedouin village Baʕdin. People from Siwa are divided into Easterns who come from Libya and Westerns who come from Algeria and Marocco. Married. He manages a coffeeshop in Fatnas Island and he works, together with other people, in a project whose aim is to collect and preserve old Siwan stories. He lives in Maraqi area. Married. He manages a restaurant in the center of Siwa and he comes from Maraqi area. As he is always in contact with tourists, he speaks Arabic quite often.