Lexical variation in Oran dialect

Abstract EN

Migration leads to changing in the residence place of an individual who moves to another place of destination (Xu-Doeve, 2007).Internal migration specifically refers to the population mobility across a boundary within the same country (the movement outside this country is designated as external migration).

Out of various Algerian regions, Oran has long received internal migrants: The process in question has stimulated a high degree of linguistic variation, very particularly at the level of lexis.

Today, the present speech community is characterised by regional intra-individual and/or inter-individual variability in daily conversations.

In case different lexical variants are supplied by the same individual producer, variability here is known as intra-individual.

Inter-individual lexical variability, on the other hand, involves more than one lexical variant articulated by more than one individual.

The paper, at hand, presents and describes some illustrative lexical data obtained and recorded by interviewing a number of ninety seven Oranees.

As an example, the researcher came across the set of verbal variants [nzǝl], [hæwǝd], [hbɑʈ] which refer to the same concept of getting down.

Although such variation is important in the current findings, there are, however, other further verbal data that will be, as well, examined in the present paper.