Remnants of Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic among French-born Jews of North-African Descent
Résumé
This article is an attempt to apply some operative methodologies in the research on Jewish languages to the specific blend of French used by French Jews born in France to parents with a North-African background. After a classification of the linguistic material gathered during years of fieldwork in France and Israel according to word origin (Algeria; Morocco; Tunisia; general Maghrebi), it goes on to compare the status of the Arabic word in the Jewish mouth with that of the same words in the colloquial speech of young Muslims born in France to immigrant parents. The analysis of the Arabic elements integrated within the colloquial French speech of Jews and Muslims in today’s France goes further, taking into account the last echoes of the speech specific to Catholic pieds-noirs.