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.

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.