Beni Snous Speakers’ Linguistic Accommodation in an Urban Contact Context

Abstract

Within a rural-urban contact context, the present paper investigates linguistic accommodation of rural speakers (originally from Beni Snous valley, south-west of Tlemcen-Algeria) being in frequent and regular contact with urban speakers in the neighbouring city of Tlemcen. Gender marker is the selected linguistic variable which is used to address a female person. This variable has a reduced form [-i] and a neutralised form ∅ in the speech of Tlemcen speakers. However, Beni Bahdel speakers tend to diphthongise it by adding the suffixes [-ij] and [-ej]. Thus, the aim is to examine whether these rural commuters to the city of Tlemcen have accommodated their speech to the input variant forms [-i] and gender neutralisation ∅ or they still maintain their native variant form. By means of quantitative and qualitative methods, data analysis has revealed that linguistic accommodation has been attested in the speech of these speakers. Some social factors dictate the accommodative behaviour of these rural speakers to urban speech, as women are likely to maintain their native speech while men are prone to accommodate their speech. Such linguistic behaviour is reinforced by social-psychological factors towards both their native speech and urban speech.