URBANIZATION AND DIALECT CHANGE 77 4 URBANIZATION AND DIALECT CHANGE The Arabic dialect of Tripoli (Libya) Christophe Pereira 4.1 Introduction In this chapter I shall give an account of the historical and contemporary development of Tripolitan Arabic (TA), describing the historical, sociologi- cal and urban contexts which have had an influence. I shall begin by recap- ping the history of the arabization of Libya from the seventh to eleventh centuries, together with the main historical events of the twentieth century which led to population movements within Libya, and the urbanization of the city of Tripoli itself. I shall then describe some of the characteristics of TA, and compare them with features of pre-Hilalian and Bedouin verna- culars. Finally I shall examine certain questions regarding the nature and origins of TA. The present linguistic description is based on corpora compiled in Tripoli in November 2002 and February 2005, together with a corpus recorded with two 25 year old Tripolitans in Genoa, Italy in September 2003. I also use various materials taken from the published literature on Libyan Arabic. 1 Relatively little information is available regarding the linguistic situation in the city of Tripoli. This makes it difficult to provide a sociolinguistic analysis that takes into account variations relating to gender, age, social origin, etc. I have therefore adopted an historical urban dialectology ap- proach, using the categories and dialectal typologies that have been devel- oped to describe the dialectal situation of the Maghreb. I shall attempt to analyze the extent to which TA does or does not match these categories. The categories are based on the distinction between pre-Hilalian and Hilalian dialects (Caubet 2001; P. Marçais 1957; W. Marçais 1950). These terms are used in an historical perspective, based on the classifications set up by William and Philippe Marçais, with the definitions they provided, follow- ing Ibn Khaldoun. The two dialect groups can be distinguished in the Maghreb by certain linguistic features (Caubet 2001). However the distinction 9780415773119_4_004 9/10/07, 4:28 PM 77