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Starting from an analysis of popular Tunisian taxinomie which consider Sfaxians (the inhabitants of Sfax, a Tunisian town) as « economical, industrious and entreprising », we shall try to show that :Popular stereotypes are always built on a basis of socio-cultural differences which characterise the competing groups.A cultural stereotype is not static but can undergo substantial transformations when decisive historical events—in this instance, the colonial context—modify the traditional relations between the groups in question.Much as these stereotypes (which, like scientific concepts, use a process of extreme simplification of an objectified reality) effectively refer us to some tangible fragments of reality, they are (given the process of their social construction and their various uses by the social actors) deprived of any self-regulatory system explicitly defining the number and nature of the potential interactive links which might exist between the different fragments of the social reality to which they refer. Hence the possibility of at once speaking about their deceiving side and their mixed « truth ».