University of Brighton, UK
WS120: Code-switching in electronic writing: The levelling and maintaining of linguistic borders
Harissa.com is a sort of virtual Tunisia for Tunisian Jews in France and elsewhere, a place for memories, exchanges and handing on tradition, for the nostalgic diaspora for whom language have deep powers of evocation. The site is crammed with examples of Judeo-Arabic/French code-switching. Judeo-Arabic in this context refers to the dialect of Tunisian Jews. Judeo-Arabic, whose phonology is very different from that of French and to a greater or lesser extent similar to that of dialectal Tunisian, (depending on the generation of the speaker) is mainly used for oral communication. On the site, Judeo-Arabic is transcribed in Latin characters and very approximately systematized. On the border between the written and the oral, the mixed electronic writing on harissa.com reveals a Judeo-Arabic attempting to define itself at a time when it could disappear. In my paper, I propose to construct a corpus of examples so as to find the discourse situations where code-switching occurs, to define its functions and to propose an analysis of underlying motivations.
Session: Workshop (part 1)
Code-switching in electronic writing: The levelling and maintaining of linguistic borders
Friday, April 4, 2008, 13:45-15:15
room: 01