Tunisian women folk songs have not found themselves among those subject matters enjoying a large amount of interest on the part of scholars, although attitudes in academic circles towards this area of folklore differ. Recently, however, a gradual increase of interest in folk songs can be noticed. Researchers have become aware of the importance of exploring folk songs both with respect to their contents and language. Hopefully this will lead to an increase in scholarly research in this field.

The aim of this article is to characterize some lingual traits of the dialect spoken by ʽĪšɛ with regards to some selected socio-cultural aspects. ʽĪšɛ is a woman of more than one hundred years old, living in one of the villages of Testour district in North West Tunisia, accidently discovered by a Tunisian TV program in 2018. The examination being conducted here shows before all how ʽĪšɛ’s idiolect is strongly rooted in her geo-cultural environment, lingually and socially. Both similarities and differences between ʽĪšɛ’s idiolect and the General Tunisian as well as some other Tunisian dialects are also observed. What is more, ʽĪšɛ’s idiolect, living and intelligible beyond the boundaries of Tunisia up to present days, has stood thus the communicative test of time.

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to the life and tales of Abdelaziz El-Aroui1 (1898–1971), a well-known Tunisian storyteller. He was above all a journalist and a playwright. He was also an active member of the literary group Taht Essour. His tales were transmitted by Tunisian radio and later by TV. Their popularity spread to neighboring countries, especially Algeria and Libya. This popularity derives from his practice of drawing upon traditional sayings, stories and proverbs and from his intention to associate his work with the Tunisian dialect and to penetrate the depth of the human soul.

Tunisian Arabic, in addition to words inherited and borrowed from Arabic, has a considerable number of loanwords taken from such languages as Berber, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, French, and English. The main purpose of this paper is the inquiry into the words of French origin, since it is from French that Tunisian Arabic has borrowed a considerable amount of loanwords, a process that continues especially in the fields of technology, medicine, and internet communication. Although French loanwords have already been subjected to various and even detailed investigations, it does not seem that this problem has been sufficiently elucidated, in particular from a theoretical point of view. Several proposals for different approaches to French loanwords in Tunisian are offered here for consideration.