The question of Arabic-Amazigh contacts in the genitival constructions of Djidjelli

International audience Djidjelli corresponds to the varieties of North African Arabic spoken in the western part of the Babor Mountains in Algeria. These varieties are known in the literature for their conservative pre-Hilalian character as well as for the high degree of contact with Amazigh that they represent on the scale of Derja (Marçais P. 1956, Garaoun 2024). These extensive contact phenomena are the result of: 1. the long periods of bilingualism which preceded the change of language from Amazigh to Arabic. 2. the relative isolation of the region, which has kept local Arabic from levelling out with Hilalian or mixed types of Arabic containing much less contact with Amazigh because of their different histories. The aim of this presentation will be to take a close look at the data from Djidjelli concerning the behaviour of the possessive case (genitive). As in the expression žižəl əddi ḳəbb-ha ‘the old city of Jijel (literally: the heart of Jijel’)’, where we can observe the use of the genitival mark di, caracteristic of pre-Hilalian Arabic, and whose etymology we will discuss in my presentation; or in the example ḥdaš n ayyawən “eleven grandsons” in which the genitival preposition n is directly borrowed from Amazigh.Indeed, Western Pre Hilalian Arabic dialects are undoubtedly the ones where the analytical construction is the most dominant (Heath 2015). I will present data of Djidjelli, demonstrate the influence of Amazigh morphosyntax on its possessive case and discuss less obvious cases in order to contribute to the debate about the difficulties encountered in establishing the origin of some syntactic developments in Arabic. Djidjelli’corpus consists of conducted interviews with consultants (monolingual men aged between 30 and 60) on the field in the town of Jijel and three villages in its rural suburbs corresponding to the three dialectal zones of the Djidjelli area, Aït Mâad for the western area, Bni Fergan for the eastern area and Bni Amran for the central one.