مجلة العلوم القانونية والاجتماعية
Volume 11, Numéro 2, Pages 131-147
2026-06-01

Bidialectal Practices In Algerian Judicial Interactions: Sociolinguistic Realities And Legal Implications



Authors : Dahaoui Wafa .

Abstract

This study examines the legal consequences of intralingual reformulation within Algerian courtrooms, where litigants frequently express testimony in Algerian Arabic while official records are drafted exclusively in Modern Standard Arabic. In this bidialectal setting, the transition from vernacular narration to standardized legal transcription is not a neutral linguistic transfer but a process of institutional transformation. The paper argues that dialectal expressions, pragmatic markers, and culturally embedded formulations often lack precise equivalents in Modern Standard Arabic. As testimony is reformulated to meet the syntactic and terminological conventions of legal writing, subtle semantic shifts may occur. These shifts do not necessarily alter factual content, but they may modify degrees of certainty, emphasis, agency, or emotional stance embedded in the original speech. The resulting judicial record therefore reflects a stabilized and institutionally validated version of events that may diverge, at the level of nuance, from the speaker’s initial discursive positioning. By analyzing this process through sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic perspectives, the study demonstrates that linguistic mediation is not peripheral to judicial practice but constitutive of how legal meaning is produced and archived. It concludes that procedural equity in multilingual legal systems depends not only on the right to speak, but also on the fidelity of linguistic reformulation within institutional documentation.

Keywords

Bidialectalism ; Intralingual reformulation ; Algerian Arabic ; Judicial discourse ; Linguistic mediation ; Procedural equity

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