Maznichenko O. French borrowings in Tunisian Arabic in terms of bilingualism (based on contemporary dictionaries of dialectal lexicon)

The present research is devoted to the analysis of the French components of the active vocabulary of Tunisian Arabic, focusing primarily on the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects, and tries, in particular, to identify peculiarities of integration of the French lexical borrowings into the Tunisian lingual area and explore their functioning in the context of Arabic-French bilingualism. Within the scope of illustrating the scientific problem of language contacts, the research specifies historical preconditions of interaction of the Arabic and French languages on the territory of Tunisia, characterizes the present-day state of the language situation in the country, as well as describes the impact of the state language policy and functional complementarity of the languages spread in Tunisia upon the development of bilingualism in the country. In order to ensure a thorough survey of the specifics of the development and existence of French lexemes within Tunisian area, there were studied such aspects of their integration as formal, semantic and functional. The analysis of the samples of the borrowed words in terms of degree of their assimilation enabled us to single out three groups of Gallicisms; they are as follows: assimilated lexemes (the sound shape of which may have slightly different patterns); non-assimilated ones (which frequently preserve their original sound due to the structural features of Tunisian Arabic); the borrowed words which reflect the “compromise” appliance (that means violation of some phonetic norms of Modern Standard Arabic and subordination to other norms). While studying phonological adaptation of the selected French borrowings, regular and irregular sound changes were discovered, both with separate and synchronous (within one word) implementation. The analysis of the word stress aspect of the borrowed words when entering the Recipient Language allowed to find out the main tendencies of adaptation of the Gallicisms to the accentuation system of Tunisian Arabic, namely to outline the patterns of observing and non-observing its canons.