Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0372/03727.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 39KB | 609 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03727}
$Pretitle{289}
$Title{Tunisia
Chapter 2B.   Ethnic Groups and Languages}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{arabic
french
population
social
tunisia
independence
modern
society
class
language}
$Date{1986}
$Log{Camels*0372701.scf
}
Country:     Tunisia
Book:        Tunisia, A Country Study
Author:      LaVerle Berry and Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1986

Chapter 2B.   Ethnic Groups and Languages

The Peoples of Tunisia

     Modern-day Tunisians are a mixture of Berber and Arab stock. The Berbers,
the indigenous people of North Africa, have no generic name for themselves.
The Romans called them barbari, or "barbarians," the term applied to those
peoples who lived outside the framework of Greco-Roman civilization and from
which the designation Berber probably comes. Of stocky physique and having a
high incidence of light hair and blue eyes, the Berbers are Caucasians akin
to other Mediterranean peoples.

     The Arab component of the society was introduced during the conquests
of the seventh, the eleventh, and succeeding centuries. Racially, the Arabs
brought a slender build, dark eyes and hair, and darker skin to the
community from which most modern Tunisians are descended. The Berbers quickly
accepted the religion, language, and culture of the invaders and intermarried
with them. In modern times most Tunisians claim Arab ancestry, speak Arabic,
profess Islam, and find only traces of Berber culture in their lives.

     In this respect Tunisia contrasts with Algeria and Morocco, where in the
1980s people still ethnically identifiable as Berbers made up substantial
minorities of the population. The relative completeness, as well as the
early date, of the arabization of the Tunisian Berbers may have been in part
because most of the Berbers occupied a relatively compact geographical area.
It may also have been because long before the coming of the Arabs, the Berbers
had undergone a substantial degree of assimilation under the Carthaginians
and the Romans. In the 1980s small Berber communities were still found on the
island of Jerba, in a few villages and oases on the edge of the Sahara, in
highlands along the Libyan border, and in the mountainous northwestern corner
of the country. The Berbers numbered about 180,000, or less than 3 percent of
the total population, of which less than one-half had retained their native
Berber speech.

     The Arab-Berber population is dispersed over the whole country. Subtle
racial distinctions, however, are discernible: the coastal and northern
peoples tend to have the stocky Berber physique, while those of the inland
and southern regions where Arab concentration has been highest are slender
and darker skinned. Cultural differences are also noticeable between
inhabitants of the coastal region and those of the hinterland. Since the time
of the Phoenicians, Tunisia has had a sedentary coastal civilization and a
nomadic interior populace (see Early History, ch. 1). The Arab invasions
increased the cultural and linguistic homogeneity of the population but
sharpened this ancient division, which remains visible in the form of
dialects, in the sedentary versus the nomadic life, and in the rate of
acceptance of modernization in the two areas.

     Since the end of the Arab invasion the ethnic composition of the
population has changed little. Black Africans, once widely used as household
slaves and concubines, have affected the composition of the population only
slightly, although skin color ranges from bronze to black in the southern
oases. In the fifteenth century the Tunisian population received an infusion
of Spanish blood with the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain. Intermarriage
between Tunisians and Balkan peoples, Greeks, Turks, and European Christians
made a significant social and commercial impact on the coastal society but
did little to alter the Arab-Berber population as a whole. With the
disappearance of these foreign elements, their characteristics have diffused
in the ethnic majority.

     Jews, indigenous and foreign born, were once far more numerous in
Tunisia. Their numbers have declined steadily over the last few decades, from
about 86,000 at the time of independence in 1956 to some 60,000 in 1966, to
perhaps 5,000 in the early 1980s. About 2,500 still reside in Tunis, and
others live in Zarzis and elsewhere in Tunisia; but probably the most
interesting enclaves are the tiny communities on Jerba Island. Numbering about
1,200 in the early 1980s, the Jews of Jerba were one of the last remnants of
once extensive Jewish communities that were scattered across the Maghrib.
Most of them were merchants or skilled crafts-people. They have lived
according to age-old cultural traditions and have preserved a form of
theocratic republican government under the tutelage of a leading rabbi.

     Both Tunisian and foreign-born Jews left in large numbers at national
independence and have continued to do so in smaller numbers in response to
tensions arising from events in the Middle East. At the time of the
Arab-Israeli June 1967 War, anti-Jewish demonstrations in Tunis resulted in
heavy damage to the principal synagogue. Rioting in three southern towns
occurred in 1982 after the murder of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and
two Jerban Jews were killed when anti-Jewish sentiment again ran high in
late 1985 in the wake of an Israeli bombing raid on Palestinian headquarters
south of Tunis (see International Security Concerns, ch. 5).

     Throughout the years of the protectorate the population included a large
number of Europeans, French and Italians predominating. The two groups were
sociologically distinct, the French constituting a well-to-do elite and
the bulk of the Italians consisting of working-class people from southern
Italy and Sicily. In 1956 the European colony totaled more than 341,000
people, the majority of whom were French.

     During the first two years after independence about one-half of the
Europeans departed, but their departure was less hurried than that from
Morocco and Algeria. For a time the new government continued to employ
more than 3,000 former French officials and a great many schoolteachers, and
the replacement of French bureaucrats and business leaders was generally
orderly. By 1966, however, the census showed that the population included only
66,834 foreigners, of whom only 32,520 were not Arabs. The size of the
non-Tunisian population in the early 1980s was estimated at about 50,000,
but some sources placed it significantly below that.

Language and the Society

     Arabic is the official language of Tunisia and in its North African
Maghribi form constitutes the native language of virtually the entire
population. Berber, the indigenous tongue, is spoken by substantial ethnic
minorities in Algeria and Morocco, but in Tunisia only about 1 percent of
the population use it as their mother tongue. Berber speakers, who
numbered about 70,000 in the mid-1980s, occupy villages on the edge of
the desert in such areas as Sened, Matmata, Jerba Island, and Nefusa on
the Libyan border. They also inhabit the oasis of Ghadames. Half of the
population speaks French as a second language, and many French-educated
Tunisians find themselves more at ease with French than with Arabic. French
has declined somewhat in both usage and status since independence. Although it
is widely used in government, education, and commerce, it is no longer an
official language, as it was before independence.

     The apparent simplicity of language-use patterns is illusory. While
Berber and French can be clearly identified, Tunisian Arabic is not a single
language but rather a complex of different forms and dialects. Arabic is a
Semitic tongue related to Amharic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. The predominant
language throughout North Africa and the Middle East, it was introduced by
Arab invaders and conquerors in the seventh, eleventh, and succeeding
c