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The present paper provides a preliminary description of verbal negation in the two neighboring dialects of Mahdia and Chebba, belonging to the groups of Tunisian coastal village dialects. This dialectal group has been, so far, dramatically understudied, despite its importance for the dialectal geography and history of North African Arabic. Like most other varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, the dialects of Mahdia and Chebba underwent the so-called Jespersen’s cycle, consisting in the doubling of the original prefixal negation, in dialectal Arabic mā (Stage I), with a suffixal negative particle -š, resulting in the circumfixal negation mā … š (Stage II) and, eventually, in the loss of the prefixal mā (Stage III). With regard to Arabic, Stage III was so far undocumented in North Africa, with the exception of Maltese. This paper provides samples of the three different stages in the dialects under investigation and offers some hypotheses concerning the possible locus of innovation with regard to Tunisian, contributing to our knowledge of negation in North African Arabic.
