The in-between in the naming of places urban areas in two Algerian cities

Abstract

The current denomination of Algerian urban places is called plural: the inhabitants use the old names (in French) of these places and/or their new appellations (in Arabic). To these two official onomastic forms in use is added another category: an intermediate place name. To understand the functioning of this in-between denominative of urban places in Algeria, we refer to the sociolinguistic-urban theory to analyze a corpus of sociotoponyms collected through surveys carried out in 2011, in two cities: Sidi Bel Abbès and Ain Témouchent. This gap with respect to official denominative forms (and to statued languages) constitutes a new way of naming the space of these cities where identity strategies would draw the boundaries of an urban territoriality in construction.