An Apparent Time Investigation of an Ongoing Sound Change in Acif El Hammam Speech Community, Bejaia

Abstract

The Berber language has received little interest from variationist linguistics research. This language is still overlooked by dialectologists who are still merely interested in the study of its heterogeneity from a purely geographical perspective. The present study adopts the variationist paradigm to study language variation and change in the Kabyle speaking speech community of Acif El Hammam. It aims to understand the distribution of the variable [l] and its two variants (y) and (lr) in relation to the social factors of age, exogamy and gender. Extensive fieldwork has been carried to compile a corpus of 33 sociolinguistic interviews as well as a close observation of 323 speakers. The analysis of this data revealed an ongoing