Tunisian Arabic

Tunisian Arabic, or Tunisian, is the set of dialects of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known by its 11 million speakers as Derja, ""colloquial dialect"", to distinguish it from Standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia, or as Tounsi [ˈtuːnsi] ""Tunisian"".At the borders of the country, Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic as part of a dialect continuum. Its morphology, syntax, pronunciation and vocabulary are quite different from Standard or Classical Arabic. Tunisian Arabic, like other Maghrebi dialects, has a vocabulary that is mostly Arabic with a significant Berber substratum. Tunisian also has a significant Latin component, as well as many loanwords from French, Turkish, Italian and Spanish. Tunisian Arabic is mostly intelligible to speakers of other Maghrebi dialects but is hard to understand for speakers of Middle Eastern Arabic.Due to multilingualism within Tunisia and in the Tunisian diaspora, it is not uncommon for Tunisians to code-switch, mixing Tunisian, French, English, Standard Arabic, and other languages into their daily speech. Within some circles, Tunisian Arabic has thereby integrated new French and English words, notably in technical fields, or replaced old French and Spanish loans with Standard Arabic words. However, code-switching between Tunisian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic is mainly made by more educated and upper-class people and has not negatively affected the use of more new French and Spanish loanwords in Tunisian.Moreover, Tunisian Arabic is closely related to Maltese, which is not considered to be a dialect of Arabic for sociolinguistic reasons.