earticle

영어

For the last three decades, at least, linguists working on the sociolinguistic situation in Tunisia have described it as being both a diglossia and a bilinguism. For the most part, they have presented the languages as being used under different circumstances, in accordance with the theoretical model described by C. A. Ferguson (1959) and J. Fishman (1967), that is a two-variety system where Literary Arabic would be used in formal situations, while Tunisian Arabic would be used for non-formal settings. By freeing public speech, the 2011 Tunisian revolution allowed the population to use social networks, and more specifically Facebook to write and communicate in a language that the diglossic ideology had confined to orality and non-formal settings for the longest time. Using the analysis of Tunisian internet users’ discourse, this paper aims at showing that Facebook has offered a unique chance to Tunisian Arabic—that Facebook users have nicknamed Tounsi—because not only has it taken it out of the familiarity domain, but it has helped reverse the diglossic ideology, which was canonical and rigid, by making it evolve towards normalization, in the Catalan sociolinguistics sense.