Djerba Berber, Shilha of Djerba, Jerba Berber, Djerbi or Djerbian (in Berber: eddwi jjerbi or Tadjerbit) is a Berber language of the Eastern Maghreb, spoken on the island of Djerba, in Tunisia. It is a component of what is regularly denominated Tunisian "Shilha" or "Chelha" in the south of the country.
The Djerba Berber belongs to the group of Zenet languages of the East, to which also belong the other Berber dialects of Tunisia as well as that of the city of Zuwarah in Libya.
Geographical distribution At the end of the 19th century, Berber was apparently well established and spoken through the island. It was then possible to connect the dialect of Djerba to other Berber-speaking areas of Maghreb, and many orientalists like Adolphe de Calassanti Motilynski or René Basset (father of André Basset) were able to collect data, in particular tales and legends in vernacular. However, in the same time began the first significant statutory decline of Berber, in Djerba and more generally across the whole Maghreb. Different factors explain such a process, as the French sociolinguist Francis Manzano has pointed out. The reflection involves both French and Arabic. It also goes beyond Tunisia by suggesting a reflection on a North African scale.
On the one hand, French had reached rural populations more and more from the end of the 19th century, and the beginning of the 20th. This concerned men from Djerba, in contact with the bases of spoken French of the protectorate, in particular through commercial activities, an important activity of many Djerbians who emigrate through Tunisia and France, like "Kabyles" (Algeria) and "Chleuhs" (Morocco) migrants. At the same time, colonial education (although with shortcomings), combined with new administrative necessities, affected more and more efficiently the young people of the island. Conscription (increasingly important, with the two world wars that were to follow), also favored the growing learning of French by men. This language therefore began to play the role of a new koine as the colonial Maghreb depended heavily on metropolitan France and the whole French colonial empire.
In the 19th century, the influence of dialectal Arabic was limited to geographic sectors of contact between rural Berber areas and more urban areas, with an Arabic-speaking growing population. It is, paradoxically, colonization in Algeria (or the French protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia) which allowed the Arabic language to benefit from new channels of diffusion and penetration within the Berber continuum. In addition, Arab was an estimated written language (notably in religious and administrative matters), and this favored its dissemination. The anti-colonial struggle indeed required the use of a written language opposable to French, something impossible for Berber in this period. Of course, the fact that Arabic is closely associated with Islam was a factor of progress, as it made Arabic the main language of the identity response among regional elites. All these facts, accumulated and amplified, could therefore only weaken the Berber language and prepare the current sociolinguistic landscape. From this complex process Djerba Berber came to be variably spoken during the 20th century in seven main localities of the south and east of the island: El May, Cedriane (or Sedriyan), Mahboubine, Sedouikech, Ajim (or Adjim) and Guellala, with strong decline during the second part of the century, in most of these villages (see below the study of Francis Manzano). The main exception was Guellala where some studies and reviews mentioned regularly a clear reservoir
Recent information on Berber dialects in Tunisia and the current situation are imprecise. But we are better informed about the state and the realities of the Berber-speaking communities of the island during the first half of the 20th century, through the generalist works of René Stablo and those of the French dialectologist André Basset. At the end of the sixties, linguists and sociolinguists took up observations on the language practices of Berber of Tunisia and Djerba, while linguistics and sociolinguistics were actively spreading in Tunisia and more generally in Maghrib. The whole documentation highlights a declining language, little (or not at all) correlated with a positive collective consciousness of identity. It is, in most cases, a minority language, often stigmatized, and unprotected by the institutions or the general culture of the State.
Linguistic characteristics
Geodiachronical aspects Francis Manzano, on the basis of personal surveys and various previous works, carried out an analysis of the sociolinguistic landscape of the island at the beginning of the 1990s.
Most of the Berber speakers were found in the sectors of Guellala, Sedouikech, Srandi and Khenansa, in the centre and the south of the island. They were overwhelmingly bilingual (Arabic and Berber), trilingual (Arabic, French and Berber) and often more, as many of them were employed in the touristic area where they learned and speak usually English, German, Italian and many languages of the Mediterranean.
On the other hand, further north, there were no Berber speakers since the time of Stablo or Basset (Houmt Souk and Midoun), or it was very old people who could no longer find partners to express themselves in their mother tongue (Mahboubine). As a usual language of public space, Berber seemed to have already disappeared in El May and perhaps in Ajim, two areas where it was reported a few years earlier. In a synthetic cartography,Manzano 1999, La fin du berbère à Djerba...71-74. the author showed how the decline of the Berber language seemed to have occurred since the work of BassetAndré Basset, "Les parlers berbères" 1950, 220-226. See bibliography. and those of Thomas Penchoen.Thomas Penchoen, "La langue berbère en Tunisie et la scolarisation des enfants berbérophones", 1968, 173-186. The main Arabization started in the north of the island (1930-1940: Houmt Souk and Midoun) bypassed and isolated the centre / south of the island in the 1960s. Finally remained, in 1990, a hard core in the south, already centred on Guellala, Berber being often catalogued as the jargon of the potters of this locality.
Sociolinguistic aspects This geographic decline is accompanied by a generational decline of Berber, regularly highlighted by informants. Most of them declare that the youngest know only fragments, some words and snatches, or ignore it completely. Tunisian school seems to be a major source of this decline, because it provides a real training in Arabic and French, which tends to cut young people off from their Berber environment.
Another heavy factor lies in the touristic activity, as Djerba is one of the most famous summer spots in the Mediterranean. This situation tends to devaluate Berber in the language exchanges and contacts, the more so as no Berber heritage cultural movement took shape in the 1990s. In this context, it was judged that learning English, German or Italian (or others languages of the hotels), with high economic and professional value, was surely better; so that Berber was essentially spoken by women and old people in the villages and their rural activities.
The religious factor is also important, in the Maghrebian context. Thus, an informant from the northeast of the island, questioned in 1990, about the Algerian Berber movement (at that time very virulent), could not understand the "refusal to speak Arabic, very astonishing and shocking among Muslims".Manzano, "La fin du berbère à Djerba", 1999, p. 58 (footnote 31). He thus summarized a very "normal" opinion in the Tunisian sociolinguistic system, that of a logical replacement of Berber by Arabic.
Past studies, like the most recent ones, show that Djerba Berber is conceived as a language of intimacy, of the family, reserved or confined to collective memory, and promised to disappear. It is a language that has been dominated for a long time and which spontaneously retracted to escape the various sociolinguistic pressures mentioned.Manzano, "La fin du berbère à Djerba", 1999, p. 58.
Lexical and typological characteristics The same survey allows us to establish that in a lexical sample of a hundred fundamental words declared "Berber" in Guellala, about three-quarters are effectively Berbers indeed, such as argaz ("man"), aɣrum ("bread") or anzar ("rain") [anẓaṛ], words clearly distinguished from their Arabic equivalents, and regularly presenting a typically Berber phonological structure, such as adu ("wind") [aḏu], with very audible interdental fricative (or spirant) phoneme. In contrast, a quarter of the words tested seems to come from Arabic, such as alɛafit (< Arabic [ɛāfja]) or (ǝ)lkes (< Arabic [kạ̄s]). This probably reveal a penetration of the Berber system, in proportions yet established by Ridwan Collins, in his study of the Berber of Tamezret. This Arabization can indirectly affect the sub-system of the verb (example [əxdəm] "to work", from Arabic). Finally, we may note that several of these words borrowed from Arabic agglutinate the article and the lexeme. As Penchoen or Ahmed BoukoussAhmed Boukouss, "Le berbère en Tunisie", dans Langue et société au Maghreb : bilan et perspectives, Rabat, Publications de la faculté des lettres de Rabat, 1989, 143-150. observe years ago, we can see in this fact an inability to integrate the Arabic word into the Berber reception system, and the index of a strong and ancient sociolinguistic pressure of Arabic.
Phonetic and phonological characteristics For consonants, the Berber dialects of Djerba are in an intermediate position between the dialects with a "spirant" tendency of Algeria (such as Kabyle or Chaoui, which regularly present fricatives/spirants in place of occlusives), and the dialects where the occlusives are well maintained (like Tachelhit in Morocco, and Tamasheq in Algeria). A phenomenon comparable to what occurs in Hebrew (begadkefat) is observed in Djerba. The occlusives/plosives become fricatives after a vowel, but keep their occlusive character at the beginning of a word, or after a consonant.Vermondo Brugnatelli, "Il berbero di Jerba: secondo rapporto preliminare", Incontri Linguistici, no 23, 2001, p. 169-182 ().
For vocalism, it differs from most other varieties of Northern Berber, which generally have three cardinal vowel phonemes: , , . Indeed, may have phonological value here, at least in certain contexts. As a result, in Djerba (as also in Tamasheq), the themes of the aorist and the perfective of roots called "zero vocalism" are different (while they coincide in most other Berber dialects). For example, for əxdəm ("to work", borrowed from Arabic), the aorist theme is (purely consonantal), while the conjugate forms are realized by syllables containing ə, of changing position according to the context ( "he will work", but "I will work"); the aorist's theme is , and contains the phoneme ə, whose position remains fixed across the paradigm ( "he worked", "I worked").
Phonology Consonants LabialDentalAlveolarPost-alveolarPalatalVelarUvularPharyngealGlottalplainphar.plainphar.Plosive/AffricatevoicelessvoicedFricativevoicelessvoicedTrillNasalLateralApproximant
Vowels FrontCentralBackHighMidLow
/a/ may also range to [æ] in different positions.
Ethno-toponymic characteristics