Tunisian Arabic

Tunisian Arabic, or Tunisian, is a set of dialects of Maghrebi Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known by its 11 million speakers as Tounsi [ˈtuːnsi], "Tunisian", or as Derja, "colloquial dialect" to distinguish it from standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia.

As part of a dialect continuum, Tunisian merges into Algerian Arabic and Libyan Arabic at the borders of the country. Tunisian Arabic's morphology, syntax, pronunciation and vocabulary are quite different from standard or classical Arabic. Like other Maghrebi dialects, it has a vocabulary that is mostly Arabic with a significant Berber and possibly a Punicsubstratum. However, Tunisian has also a significant Latin component, as well as many loanwords from French,Turkish,Italian and Spanish.

Tunisian Arabic is mostly intelligible to speakers of other Maghrebi dialects but is hard to understand or is unintelligible for speakers of Middle Eastern Arabic.Multilingualism within Tunisia and in the Tunisian diaspora makes it common for Tunisians to code-switch, mixing Tunisian with French, English, Standard Arabic or other languages in daily speech. Within some circles, Tunisian Arabic has thereby integrated new French and English words, notably in technical fields, or replaced old French and Spanish loans with standard Arabic words.