L2 Arabic and residual multilingualism among members of the former Italian community in Tunisia

This paper presents linguistic data gathered from members of the former Italian community in Tunisia, whose last members left the North African country during 1960s. The paper aims to provide a description of the L2 Arabic spoken by members of the community and to reconstruct their multilingual repertoire, so far only described on the basis of written documents of various nature. The linguistic analysis also investigates the different phenomena of language contact emerging from the interviews, and it contributes to the reconstruction of the sociolinguistic situation in Tunisia during the final years of French colonialism. After a short introduction about the history of the Italian community in Tunisia, the paper discusses previous research on its linguistic profile, then presenting linguistic data on the L2 Arabic spoken by its members, and also attempting some sociolinguistic considerations.