The discourse of text messaging as a locus of contact-induced linguistic change in Algeria : the case of Relizane speech community

Abstract EN

This paper investigates language contact outcomes in the structure of text messaging in the Algerian context.

To disentangle language contact outcomes in the discourse of text messaging in Relizane Speech Community (hereafter RSC), a quasi- structured questionnaire was carried out with a random sample of 67 respondents and a content analysis of a corpus of 108 text messages was adopted.

The results showed that the highest rates of texters regularly borrow, code-switch, code mix and even transliterate for different reasons to serve multiple communicative functions.

At last, the study has opened up numerous of our promising areas of research about other linguistic practices in the discourse of text messaging namely morphological neologism and normative or formative words formation processes.