Étude Linguistique et Sociolinguistique du somali parlé par les jeunes Djiboutiens

The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to the study of Somali, focusing on a variety that has never been studied to date, namely the Somali spoken in Djibouti, and in particular the variety spoken by young Djiboutian school children in close contact with the French language.Recently created, Djibouti is a multi-ethnic and multilingual country, characterized, like many countries in the world, by the coexistence of various ethno-linguistic communities. Among the languages spoken are Afar, Somali and Arabic, which are genetically related to the Afro-Asian phylum and are spoken by Djibouti's main "indigenous" communities. French, an Indo-European language brought by colonization, is the country's first official language (alongside Arabic), used as the main language of administration, education and the media and also as lingua franca between the various European or indigenous communities. To this should be added the presence of foreign languages in the country such as English and those spoken in neighbouring countries such as Oromo or Amharic. Somali is an Afro-Asian language, belongs to the eastern couchitique of the plains, from its Omo-Tana sub-branch, spoken in the countries of the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia). In these four countries, it is the mother tongue of about 16 million speakers (Banti, 2011). Somali was standardized in 1972 and is the official language of Somalia. In Djibouti, Somali, which has had national language status since 10 July 2000, is not taught and functions as a mother tongue and also as an inter-ethnic lingua franca in the capital. It is spoken by about 60% of the population, according to an estimate by the University of Laval. The practice of Somali in Djibouti is therefore carried out in a very different context from that of Somalia: without regular contact with the standard variety and in close contact with French, especially for the school-going population. The term Somali covers several realities, as Morin (1986 : 58) observes, namely an anthropological dimension, a linguistic dimension, and a political dimension. The linguistic dimension has been subject to debate as not all authors agree on the delimitation and definition of Somali dialects (voir Diriye 2002, Banti 1985, Lamberti 1986 versus Ehret & Nuuh, 1984; Biber 1984, Ismail, 2011). This thesis first presents the history of Djibouti from the time of the French conquest, the administrative constitution of the territory, the distribution of the population according to the main ethno-linguistic communities and the sociolinguistic situation of the country. It thendescribes the Somali spoken in Djibouti, taking into consideration several appearance : the status and place of the Somali, the representations and epilinguistic discourse on the Somali language, and the main characteristics of the Somali spoken in Djibouti, focusing on the phenomena of variation and the gap between the Djiboutian language and the Somali of the north. This gap is studied at the phonetic/phonological, morphological and syntactic levels; it results in morpho-phonological regulation processes. At the syntactic level, the thesis describes, at the linguistic and sociolinguistic level, the extremely frequent use of Somali-French code-switching among young people in school. It analyses the modalities of insertion between the two languages and the communicative functions of French-Somali code-switching. By looking at language contact and dialectal variation in a multilingual country, this research provides new material in the field of Somali linguistics and contact linguistics.

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