THE DUALITY BETWEEN DIALECT MAINTENANCE AND SHIFT IN AN ALGERIAN CONTEXT: THE CASE OF TLEMCEN SPEECH COMMUNITY

There is no doubt that the study of language and its variation has interested many linguists and sociolinguists starting from Labov and Trudgill (1972) to many others and that various field studies were tackled in order to determine the different kinds of variations resulting in language change. Language variation does not only occur between different countries or towns but it may be widely noticeable within the same speech community as well. This research paper seeks to discover more about patterns of linguistic variability and the duality between dialect maintenance and shift in an Algerian context mainly those occurring in Tlemcen speech community. In addition it tries to discover more patterns related to the dialects which co-exist within the same speech community, namely the urban dialect (Tlemcen Arabic) and the rural and the mixed one.