SIZ_VS_NARR-124 Siwi

The speaker tells me two folktales. I asked about someone who was able to tell me tales and people around me called him. He finished one tale and someone from the people who were listening asked him to tell me another one and he continued. Equipment: Edirol R-05 Many people were around us. El Gara is another small oasis, 150 km far from Siwa and siwi is also spoken. I had no microphone with me, so I just used the recorder. 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. Mother of Anonymous1, married. She spends most of the time at home with her family.