Attitudes towards social stratification and sound change in Tlemcen speech community

Abstract EN

This study in an attempt to investigate people's attitudes towards social stratification in relevance with linguistic variation mainly the use of the glottal stop, a sedentary realization of (q) in Tlemcen speech community.

The corpus of research includes males and females from different age cohorts exercising life in the city.

Data have been gathered via a survey interview and analyzed both numerically and qualitatively.

Results show that despite the paradox of opinions, participants agree on the existence of social classes in Tlemcen speech community and that dialect use is one strong parameter for which the glottal stop, despite being stigmatized, is a marker of the highly ranked ones.

However, this stigma is leading people to change their dialect which, in turn, is paving the way for a neo-urban regional koine.