Rénovation linguistique et resémiotisation du monde. La presse judéo-arabe d'Afrique du Nord en quête d'une langue journalistique

This study seeks to examine the socio-cultural conditions in relation to modernity that allowed the emergence and development of the Jewish-Arab press in North Africa at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century ., with the linguistic and textual transformations that the directors and editors of newspapers had to operate in written Judeo-Arabic in order to adequately report to their readers the affairs and progress of the Jewish and non-Jewish world. This journalistic work, which required a renewal of traditional Judeo-Arabic, consisted in fact of a re-semiotization of the world most often opposed to the homiletical approach to public Jewish discourse which had hitherto prevailed in these communities. In this way, this Judeo-Arab press not only contributed to opening up and broadening the fields of knowledge and the fields of perspective for readers, but also opened up and animated a new public space where community affairs were debated. To account for these social and cognitive functions of the press and the way in which they operate in the construction of meaning and the meanings to convey, an analytical model is developed which explains the operating modes of journalistic semiotization. In their search for a suitable language for this resemiotization and the indispensable renovation of Judeo-Arabic, newspapers have deployed two different strategies. Those of Tunisia forged a new variety of language, neo-Judeo-Middle Arabic, by drawing lexical and syntactic structures from post-classical Arab-Muslim oral narrative literature and from the Arabic press,