The Dialect of Sfax (Tunisia)

This paper aims to describe the most outstanding features of the Arabic spoken in Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, which is located 270km southeast of Tunis. It is based on a fieldwork conducted in the old city of Sfax in September 2016. To the best of my knowledge, this dialect hasn't been thoroughly documented yet, except for one short description written by Dhouha Lajmi, which was based on her ‘empirical experience of the linguistic situation in Sfax' (Lajmi 2009). This article is an attempt to fill this lacuna in the field of Tunisian dialectology, by providing a linguistic sketch of the most prominent features of the Sfaxi dialect on the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic levels.While falling into the pre-Hilali category, this dialect retains some archaisms that make it very different from other varieties in Tunisia, and more generally in North Africa, making it useful for the account of the history of Maghrebi Arabic.