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Competition Between Four "World" Languages in Algeria: Mohamed - Benrabah@
Competition Between Four "World" Languages in Algeria: Mohamed - Benrabah@
1. Introduction
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Algeria became the focus of rivalry between four
languages acknowledged as “world” languages. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, and
French. The present article looks at how and why each of these languages was introduced
in Algeria. It consists of six parts. The first one outlines the major parameters used by
scholars to study the international standing of languages. In the second section, I present
an overview of some of the definitions given in the literature of the concept of “world”
language. A historical and sociolinguistic approach is used in the third part to account for
the present-day linguistic situation in Algeria. The following two sections present Arabic–
French and French–English rivalries. In the final part, I describe the dramatic intrusion of
Chinese into the Algerian linguistic landscape as of the 2000s.
*Email: Mohamed.Benrabah@u-grenoble3.fr
sociolinguists, and so on, to measure language power, one finds that they amount to no
more than a dozen concepts. For example, Mackey selected the following six parameters
(1973, 5–16; 1976, 203–214):
In their 1977 study of the spread of English around the world, Fishman et al. (1977, 105)
used nine indicators:
● Military imposition,
● Duration of authority,
● Linguistic diversity,
● Material advantage,
● Urbanization,
● Economic development,
● Educational development,
● Religious composition,
● Political affiliation.
The political scientist Jean Laponce (1987, 75–85) chose five criteria:
● Number of speakers,
● Scientific culture,
● Economic strength,
● Standard of living,
● Military strength.
The sociologist George Weber (1999, 22–28) preferred an index based on six parameters:
As for the geolinguist Roland Breton, he opted for three indicators only (2003, 22):
The choices made by these authors from different disciplines show that there is often an
overlapping between selected criteria. Almost all use the variables related to the number
of speakers, economic power, political strength (geographical dispersion), cultural/scien-
tific power, and so on. Finally, in his study of the international standing of the German
language, the sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon made a synthesis of these parameters in the
form of “basic indicators”, as he calls them (Ammon 1995, 28). Thus, Ammon selected
four parameters (Ammon 1995, 28; 2003, 233–246) which I have found very useful when
studying the status of Arabic in the world (Benrabah 2007c, 2009a, 2009b). The first one,
“numerical strength”, refers to the total number of people who are proficient in the
language studied as L1 or L2 speakers. To explain his choice of this indicator, Ammon
gives two reasons. First, the language of a large community is more likely to become a
world language than that of a small community. Second, a numerically powerful language
has a better chance of being studied as a foreign language than a numerically weak one
because the former provides more opportunities for contacts than the latter (Ammon 2003,
234). The second parameter chosen by Ammon, “economic strength”, is measured in
terms of the gross national product (GNP) of the language’s native speakers worldwide.
Ammon justifies the choice of this indicator as follows: “[a]n economically strong
language is attractive to learn because of its business potential; its knowledge opens up
an attractive market” (2003, 235).
“Political strength” is Ammon’s third indicator. A world language draws its strength
from two sources, even though Ammon deals with only one of them. The first one relates
to the number of countries that have this language as an official or co-official language
(Ammon 2003, 239). A language that is official or co-official in two or more states is
known as a “multi-national” language. However, languages draw their political strength
not only from a multiplicity of states geographically localized, but also from their
universal dispersion over at least two continents. The second source of a language’s
political strength is thus geopolitical power which gives it the status of an “inter-con-
tinental” language (Breton 2003, 72). There are six multinational and intercontinental
languages in the world: Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch-
Afrikaans. With the exception of Dutch-Afrikaans, all the other multinational and inter-
continental languages favour political coalitions (Laponce 1987, 82) such as the Arab
League for Arabic, the Commonwealth for English, the International Organization of
Francophonia for French, and the Organisation of the Ibero-American States for Spanish.
Ammon’s fourth parameter comprises various indicators put under the same heading,
and this, Ammon claims, is questionable (2003, 242). However, I decided to keep this
heading to study the international standing of the Arabic language (Benrabah 2009a), for
it allows the use of qualitative measures against the first three parameters which provide
quantitative measurements. According to David Crystal, “[w]hy a language becomes a
global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more to
do with who those speakers are” (2003a, 7). “Who those speakers are” relates to political
and economic power, and most important of all, cultural strength. Within “cultural
power”, there is the “quality” of native (and/or non-native) speakers that can be weighed
by “the proportion of native speakers who are literate and capable of generating intellec-
tual resources in the language” (Graddol 1997, 59). In addition to the production of
intellectual resources, the “quality” of native speakers can also be measured against the
Human Development Index (HDI), the number of Nobel Prizes won by native and non-
native writers, and so on. In fact, as shown later in this article, the parameter “cultural
strength” has proved to be the Arabic language’s weakest point.
Journal of World Languages 41
their similar political strength – that is, they are both intercontinental and multinational
languages with established international linguistic coalitions, the Commonwealth with 54
members for English, and the Organisation of the Ibero-American States with 20 States
for Spanish. As for “global function”, Spanish lags far behind English. To Ammon, this
discrepancy comes from the huge difference in “economic strength”, a factor which
influences global function.
Nevertheless, Ammon characterizes Spanish as a “world” language because of its
numerical strength due to its global spread as a foreign/second language. In fact, he
prioritizes the number of non-native speakers, which he calls “non-nativeness”, to rank the
globality/internationality of languages (Ammon 2013, 12, 104). Related to this is what the
German scholar calls “national neutrality” in relation to English (Ammon 2013, 117). The
widespread use of this language among people with different linguistic backgrounds led to
its disassociation from the native countries of the centre (e.g., United Kingdom and the
United States). In post-colonial contexts, the idea of “national neutrality” is best rendered
by the notion of “deethnicization”, used by Joshua Fishman in connection with the global
spread of English. The term “deethnicization” means removing cultural and historical
baggage from English as belonging to or reflecting values from its British and American
imperialist fountainheads (Fishman 1977, 118–119). As regards the status of English, the
German scholar’s position is similar to that of Solikoko Mufwene and, by extension, to
that of David Crystal and David Graddol. Despite his call for a pluralist approach, he does
admit that the role of English as a “lingua franca” makes it distinguishable “most
noticeably from other languages”, and it gives it a “unique position” among the world’s
languages (Ammon 2013, 103, 117). To him, “[t]here is virtually no descriptive parameter
or indicator for the international or global rank of a language which, if applied to today’s
languages world-wide, does not place English at the top” (Ammon 2013, 116–117).
Finally, Ammon equates his “global function” criterion with Abram De Swaan’s
typology based on the latter’s Theory of World Language System. In De Swaan’s “global
language system” (or constellation), the world’s 6000–7000 “[m]utually unintelligible
languages are connected by multilingual speakers [...] not at all in random fashion [...]
[but in] a strongly ordered, hierarchical pattern” (De Swaan 2001, 4). He compares this
hierarchy to a chart with “reverse tree-structures” which can be represented in a pyramid
with four levels. In the lower part of the pyramid, De Swaan puts the vast majority of the
world’s languages (around 6000) which he labels “peripheral languages”. The next level
up of the chart is occupied by 150–200 State (national/official) languages called “central
languages”. Higher up in the pyramid, 12 languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili) occupy the
“supercentral” position within the global language system. These supercentral languages
are essential for “long-distance and international communication”, and all of them, except
Swahili, have more than 100 million speakers. At the hub of the world language system,
De Swaan puts English, the “hypercentral” language which “holds together the entire
constellation” (De Swaan 2001, 5–6; 2010, 37; 2013, 57).
In conclusion, I need to make four remarks that should be relevant for the study of
language competition in Algeria. First, what Ammon labels “world” languages, based on
communicative globality/internationality, corresponds to De Swaan’s “supercentral lan-
guages”, whose function is for “long-distance and international communication”. These
languages are: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay,
Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. So, the four languages considered in this
article – Arabic, Chinese, English, and French – are “supercentral” and will be referred to
as “world” languages henceforth. Second English is not only “supercentral”, but it also
Journal of World Languages 43
occupies the “hypercentral” position in the world language system. The different models
and terminologies described so far all agree on one undeniable fact: English holds a
“unique” position in the linguistic constellation, both in terms of status and function.
Third in addition to “numerical strength”, “political strength”, and “cultural strength”, the
parameter “economic strength” plays a major role in enhancing the global function of
languages, particularly in the economically integrated globalized world which encourages
people to learn these languages. Fourth the role of “deethnicization” (national neutrality)
is twofold. On the one hand, it is related to the number of L2 speakers (non-nativeness)
which can have a snowball effect: the more people learn a “neutral” idiom as an additional
language, the more learners are attracted by it. On the other hand, it can affect the decline
or maintenance of ex-colonial languages in the post-colonial era.
Muslims. The low form developed into different North African varieties. Arabic and
Berber belong to the same language family, the Afro-Asiatic group of languages, and they
have a predisposition to take in features from the other. However, this mutual influence
shows results similar to those reported in treatments of contact situations born out of
conquest and large-scale language shift (Lutz 2009, 229). As a substratum language faced
with unequal contacts between conquering and conquered populations, Berber had little
lexical effect on Arabic (the superstratum). Nevertheless, it exerted far-reaching structural
influence on the latter’s phonology, morphology, and syntax. Hence, the North African
Arabic varieties in general and the Algerian ones in particular can be described as
“Berberized” Arabic (Benali-Mohamed 2003, 208; Chafik 1999, 64, 78, 120, 142;
Chtatou 1997, 104).
As regards language maintenance following the Arab conquest, despite the high
prestige associated with Arabic, this language did not displace Berber completely.
Thirteen centuries after the Arab invasion, and on the eve of French occupation in
1830, about 50% of Algerians were still monolingual in Berber. At the time, the tribal
system prevailed: out of a total of 516 tribes, there were 206 under Turkish rule, 200
independent and 86 semi-independent tribal chiefs. The population, estimated at three
million, was mainly rural, with only 5% to 6% living in urban centres. As regards literacy,
between 40% and 50% could read and write Arabic (Gordon 1978, 151; Harbi 1994, 226;
Nouschi 1986, 197; Queffélec et al. 2002, 23; Valensi 1969, 20, 29).
Modern Algeria was born in 1830 when colonial France brought the European and the
indigenous Arabo-Berber worlds into violent contact. Between 1830 and 1962, the French
implemented a methodical policy of deracination and deculturization. To realize their
“civilizing mission”, they imposed an assimilationist policy of total Frenchification on
millions of recalcitrant Algerians (Gallagher 1968, 132–133). The colonizers, who were
under the influence of nineteenth-century language attitudes, strongly believed in the
superiority of their language and culture. Thus, they targeted the native tongues and made
native elites believe they had no history or civilization. As part of this indoctrination,
colonialists used negative terms like “dialect”, “patois”, and so on, to debase the
languages of Algerians. For example, in 1886, the geographer Onésime Reclus described
Arabic and Berber as sharing “a passion for terrible guttural sounds which resemble
vomiting” (Reclus 1886, 680). Moreover, in the euphoria of the centenary of Algeria’s
conquest by France, William Marçais, a colonial academic and dialectologist, predicted
the death of all indigenous languages, Berber, dialectal, and Literary Arabic. To him,
Berber had no future because it had no writing system, and there was no doubt about the
future disappearance of dialectal Arabic because of its extensive borrowings from French.
He disqualified Literary Arabic on the grounds that it was a dominated language, not
unified linguistically because of its “incurable diglossia”, and unfit for the modern world
(Marçais 1931, 22, 26, 39; Messaoudi 2012, 285). Marçais’ Whorfian belief that the
French language would better instruct Algerian Muslims in the way of modernity would
be internalized by the future elites of independent Algeria.
Among the Algerians’ painful experiences with the French occupation is the dramatic
retreat of Berber. The displacement of this language is one of the consequences of colonial
violence and scorched-earth reprisals following Algerian resistance to the invasion of their
country. The French army’s brutal methods of “pacification” lasted almost half a century
(Horne 1987, 30; Ruedy 1992, 50). At the time, French parliamentarians contemplated the
possibility of having an Algeria without Algerians. They publicly called for a “war of
extermination” similar to the one suffered by Indians in North America. Around 1872, the
native population had diminished by one million, and the result of this ethnic cleansing
Journal of World Languages 45
was linguistic genocide (Brower 2012, 61; Kateb 2012, 83). As shown in Table 1, the
Berber-speaking community fell from about 50% in 1830 to 18.6% when the French
ended their occupation.
At the time of independence in July 1962, the necessary initial conditions for the current
competition of world languages in Algeria were already in place. Two major aspects seem
to me of paramount importance here. First, there was the presence of multilingualism which
often generates contact situations and language rivalry. Today’s geographical distribution of
languages was more or less the same as it was back in 1962, even though the population
was less than a third of what it is today, and the status of the indigenous languages was
different because of their precarious position. There are three main language groups in
present-day Algeria: Arabophones, Berberophones, and Francophones. The Arabic-speak-
ing community constitutes approximately 70–75% of the total population. Berberophones
represent 25–30% and live in communities scattered all over the country. As for the
Francophones, who are often (Arabic–French or Berber–French) bilinguals, they use
French as an additional language and live mainly in the towns and cities of the urban
strip that lines the Mediterranean Sea in the north. This is a colonial legacy: after the
conquest of Algeria, the vast majority of European colonizers settled in this fertile area
(Chaker 1998, 16; CIA 2013; Maddy-Weitzman 2001, 23, 37; Sirles 1999, 119–120).
As mentioned earlier, Arabic is marked by a diglossic situation. Literary Arabic, the
high form, is acquired through learning in educational institutions scattered around the
country. After independence, the government institutionalized this Arabic variety as the
sole national and official language of the country. Its spread among the population has
been spectacular since 1962 as a result of the authorities’ political and ideological
commitment to de-Frenchify Algeria via the policy of Arabization, and also because of
the substantial increase in literacy and related aspects, such as population growth
(Benrabah 2013, 72–74). The dialectal form of Arabic consists of two main varieties:
Algerian Spoken Arabic used by populations in the north of the country, and Algerian
Saharan Spoken Arabic in the south, in the Sahara desert. Berber consists of four major
languages: “Tamashek” is the language of the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Mozabites and
Shawia speak “Mzab” and “Shawia”, respectively; Kabyles, who represent about two-
thirds of the Berberophone population, call their mother tongue “Kabyle” or “Takbaylit”.
However, other small isolated Berber-speaking communities are scattered around the
country, the most important being “Chenoua” spoken in the Chenoua mountain region
west of Algiers. Finally, in the aftermath of independence, the different Berber varieties,
dialectal Arabic and French were the target of Arabization. The aim was to replace them
by Literary Arabic. In reaction to this assimilationist policy, Kabyles, who had distin-
guished themselves by their minority views against the mainstream ideology, rebelled
against the central authorities in April 1980 and demanded the recognition of their
language and culture. Kabyle unrest was to be rekindled nearly every decade, until
April 2002 when the government declared Berber a national (but not official) language
(Benrabah, forthcoming; El Aissati 1993, 92; Lewis, et al., 2013; Maddy-Weitzman
2001, 37).
46 M. Benrabah
The second aspect that is necessary for understanding language rivalry in Algeria
concerns Algerian language attitudes at the moment of independence in 1962. The violent
contact with the French/European world deeply affected Algerian society. Within a
relatively short period of time (132 years), French occupation had made a profound
impact on Algeria’s cultural and linguistic profile. The influence was so deep that
Algerian society was never the same again. By 1962, colonial France had dismantled
the tribal structure completely. There were 10 million Algerians, a quarter of whom lived
in towns, and less than one million non-Moslems who left the country. The illiteracy rate
stood at around 90% with only 5.5% (around 300,000) of the population literate in
Literary Arabic only. As for competence in French, one million could read it and six
million spoke it. Finally, the Berber-speaking population amounted to 18.6% in 1966
(Bennoune 2000, 12; Gordon 1978, 151; Heggoy 1984, 111; Lacheraf 1978, 313). The
aggressive French occupation was so traumatic and Algeria’s alienation so great that her
elites felt insecure and uncertain regarding their identity. The Algerian intelligentsia
experienced a crisis of confidence as colonials with an inferior status, with their languages
being debased and stigmatized as “dialects”, and so on. In an interview recorded by
sociologist David Gordon in 1963, a leading Algerian poet/writer set the tone for future
developments. “In ten to fifteen years”, he said, “Arabic will have replaced French
completely and English will be on its way to replacing French as a second language.
French is a clear and beautiful language, [...] but it holds too many bitter memories for us”
(Gordon 1966, 113). In this quote, the writer foresaw the competition between three world
languages: between Arabic and French, and between French and English. These different
rivalries are considered in turn in the remaining parts of this article. The final section deals
with the intrusion of a newcomer, the Chinese language.
French is still the key language for studies in scientific disciplines in Higher Education.
As a result, we have domain loss – that is, there is “penetration” of Arabic by the ex-
colonial language. And elites have been an agent for this development.
As from the country’s independence, most members of the Algerian establishment
associated Arabization with Islamization and Francophonia with secularization (Ruedy
1992). Furthermore, soon after France’s defeat, the authorities embarked on systematic
Arabization without adequate means (lack of qualified teachers, manuals, and so on).
They ignored warnings by prominent Algerian intellectuals who expressed their anxiety
concerning possible negative outcomes. For example, in 1969, Algerian scholar Abdallah
Mazouni published an extensive piece of work on the language issue in Algeria. He
posited that rapid Arabization might prove, among other things, harmful to the Arabic
language itself, it might be regressive and could alienate students because the language
was difficult and the teaching tools were inadequate. In particular, he warned against the
persistence of the myth that maintained Arabic as the language for prayers and poetry and
French for action, development and modernity (Mazouni 1969, 38, 185). In fact, future
developments confirmed Mazouni’s predictions. In 2004, I conducted a survey among
1051 senior high school students from three urban centres with different population size:
Oran, a large town; Saïda, a medium city; Ghazaouet, a small town. Eighty-two per cent
said they felt “close to God” in Literary Arabic and 80% described the latter as “the
language of religious and moral values”. In contrast, 91.5% said the French language
“allows openness to the world” and 85.7% described it as the “language of science and
technology” (Benrabah 2007a, 238–239).
There is another feature that characterizes Algeria’s elites and this goes back to their
indoctrination by colonial France. Many Algerians trained by the French could not
acknowledge the fact “that there are alternative and equally valuable kinds of civilizations
other than that [...] of France” (Gordon 1962, 4). This is not specific to Algerians. For
example, Habib Bourguiba, the first Head of State in post-independent Tunisia, described
quite well the extent to which colonizers indoctrinated colonials in North Africa.
Throughout his life, Bourguiba expressed doubt whether “any foreigner can consider
himself educated unless he can speak French fluently” (Battenburg 1996, 7). However,
because of the deeply rooted influence of French culture in colonial Algeria which was
totally integrated to France – Tunisia was a protectorate – Algerians were the most French
enculturated of the three peoples of North Africa. So, the Algerian intelligentsia’s belief in
the superiority of French language and culture transpire in their behaviour as public
servants and bureaucrats, and/or as parents mindful of their offspring’s future material
well-being.
The Algerian administration has its origins in the final years of the Algerian War of
Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. When Charles De Gaulle came to power
in May 1958 – in the midst of the War – he introduced an ambitious Five-Year Plan to
develop industrialization and give Algeria an economic solution to its turmoil (Horne
1987, 340–341). Training was also provided to 100,000 Algerian cadres, who were to
become the backbone of the administration of independent Algeria. As civil servants, they
became the forces of institutional inertia that would block attempts to transform the
colonial legacy by introducing, among other things, Arabic as a working language in
the administrative system (Grandguillaume 1983, 105). Incidentally, the establishment of
socialism following Algeria’s independence led to a highly centralized distributive socio-
economic system typical of “rentier” States (Benrabah 2007b, 35). The rentist and
“administered” polity proved to be a blessing in disguise for the Algerian bureaucrats.
The imposition of political authoritarianism also reinforced their power. Following
48 M. Benrabah
independence, the FLN, which was established in 1954 as part of the struggle for
independence, became the dominant political party and the arm of a single-party system.
The other issue related to Algeria’s elites is their promotion of Arabization and their
own behaviour. Policy-makers implemented this language policy for the majority, but they
prevented their own children from attending schools that catered for the masses. To
minimize competition for their own children in good careers in modern business and
technology which need French, political and military leaders used, after independence,
French educational institutions established in Algeria and controlled by France. In the
eyes of the majority of Algerians, this phenomenon of “elite closure” (Myers-Scotton
1993, 149), which creates and/or maintains social differentiation and inequalities, under-
mines the credibility of those who promote Arabization and the new identity of Arabic
(Benrabah 2007d, 206–208).
In the end, Algerian society does not use Arabic to the full. Domain loss for Arabic
has created a situation whereby language functions and registers occur in a sort of
complimentary distribution: Arabic is used for spiritual needs and represents cultural
power, while French symbolizes worldly needs and economic power. But the penetration
of Arabic by an ex-colonial language is not typical of North Africa in general and Algeria
in particular. In the Arab Middle East, domain loss turns to the advantage of another ex-
colonial language, English. This undoubtedly affects the status of Arabic as a “world”
language. There are real obstacles which prevent it from rising to this position. In previous
work, I used Ulrich Ammon’s four-label formula described earlier in the article to study
the international standing of Arabic (Benrabah 2007c, 2009a, 2009b). The latter has its
strengths and weaknesses, especially when compared with Spanish, a language with more
or less similar power.
Arabic and Spanish have roughly the same numerical and political strengths. In the
field of demolinguistics, different sources give different counts and estimates for the major
languages of the world. This variation shows the difficulty of evaluating the number of
speakers in global terms. Reasons for this are varied: lack of census data, the absence of
an acceptable definition of the notion of “native speaker”, the difficulty of defining
“macro” languages like Arabic and Chinese, the different methods of integrating native
and non-native speakers in statistics, and so on. For example, according to Ethnologue:
Languages of the World, Spanish has 322.3 million speakers worldwide, and Arabic (in all
its varieties) only 206 million (Gordon 2005, 185, 548). But in Microsoft Encarta (2006),
we find the numbers reversed: Arabic is said to have 422 million speakers and Spanish
only 322 million. When the statistics of both sources are amalgamated, the number of
speakers for each language is estimated to be around 300 million. As regards their
political strength, Arabic and Spanish are multinational and intercontinental languages,
and they both have a linguistic coalition: the Arab League with 22 states for the former,
and the Organisation of the Ibero-American States with 20 nations for the latter. The
major differences between these two languages come from their economic and cultural
power. The traditional measure of the influence of economic power on the size of
languages is the relative growth of the GNP of countries with the same language. In
2005, the GNP of Arabic-speaking countries stood at 1056.49 billion US dollars, and that
of Spanish-speaking nations at 2622.91 billion US dollars (Students of the World 2005).
Beyond economic power, we must also consider “cultural strength” which is, in truth, the
Arabic language’s weakness, its Achilles heel.
It was argued in the first section that in order to boost the international standing of a
language, the “quality” of its speakers is far more important than its demolinguistics. The
“quality” of speakers can be expressed in the production of intellectual resources in the
Journal of World Languages 49
In terms of quantity, [. . .], the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the
number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al Ma’moon
era [9th Century] to the present day amounts to 10,000 books – equivalent to what Spain
translated in a single year. (UNDP 2003, 67).
One way of highlighting the mediocre state of translation into Arabic is to compare its
performance with other world languages which have a linguistic coalition – that is
English, French, Spanish – and/or belong to the supercentral category described above
– that is Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian,
Spanish, Swahili. Also, it will be informative to consider the Arabic language’s perfor-
mance with that of a “small” language like Hebrew which is official in only one country,
Israel, and with a population estimated at around 7.7 million in July 2013 (CIA 2013).
Table 2 below shows the number of books translated into the top 50 languages between
1979 and 2012 – languages with a linguistic coalition are in bold and in italics, and
supercentral languages are in italics only. These statistics show that three out of the four
languages with a linguistic coalition are among the top four languages. Arabic stands at
position 29 with 12,700 books translated, with Hebrew close on its heels – ranked 32 with
10,965 translated books. As for the other supercentral languages, Arabic comes far behind
8 out of 10 idioms presented in this table – statistics for Malay and Swahili are not
provided. The only language it has outdistanced is Hindi which holds position 43 with
3535 translated books. One should note India’s paradox: as an emerging global power
with a major (supercentral) language it favours English over Hindi to establish its world
economic leadership (Graddol 2006, 20).
Table 2. Translation for “Top 50” target languages (1979–2012) (Source: UNESCO 2012).
which influenced the language situation in the post-independence era. The population rose
from 10 million in 1962 to 25.6 million in 1990, to 30.5 million in 1998, and an estimated
38.9 million in July 2013. In the early 1990s, 70% of the population was aged 30 and
under, and this figure fell to around 63% in the late 2000s. The percentage of the total
population living in urban areas also increased substantially: from 25% to 30% in 1962, it
moved to 50% in 1987, and around 73% in 2011. As mentioned earlier, literacy rose
substantially from around 10% in 1962 to 52% in 1990, and 72.6% today, with the
majority being proficient in institutional Arabic (Bennoune 2000, 225; CIA 2013;
Queffélec et al. 2002, 118). In addition to that, the end of the single-party system after
the widespread unrest of October 1988 led to (moderate) political liberalization, a
moderately diversified market economy and the expansion of telecommunications
media. So, the monolingual policy of Arabization turned out to be an anachronism in
the modern globalized world in general, and the “new” Algeria in particular. Arabization
as a totalizing language policy failed and, in the early 2000s, the authorities openly
declared that it was time for bilingual education (Benrabah 2007b, 29).
This outcome frustrated the expectations of those who had believed in the future
displacement of French, among other things. The prediction made in 1963 by the Algerian
poet/writer quoted above was startlingly wrong. Not only was he completely mistaken
about the replacement of French by Arabic in all domains of use, he also mistakenly
believed that English would be a substitute for French as an additional language. As
described in the third section of this article, language policies for de-Frenchifying and
Arabizing Algeria were implemented after independence. From the end of the 1970s to the
early 1990s, French was taught as a subject and as the first mandatory foreign language,
starting from the fourth grade in the primary cycle. English was the second foreign
language, introduced in Middle School (eighth grade). Under the influence of the pro-
Arabization lobby which comprised Islamists, conservatives and nationalists, the Ministry
of Primary and Secondary Education introduced English in primary school as a competitor
to French in September 1993. Thus, the pupils who accessed Grade Four (8–9 year olds)
Journal of World Languages 51
had to choose between French and English as the first mandatory foreign language
(Bennoune 2000, 303; Benrabah 2007d, 194). Unexpectedly, the competition between
the two European languages turned in favour of French. Between 1993 and 1997, out of
two million school-children in Grade Four, the total number of those who chose English
was insignificant – between 0.33% and 1.28% (Miliani 2000, 23; Queffélec et al.
2002, 38).
Several aspects of Algeria’s linguistic situation combined to thwart the plans of those
who introduced English as a competitor to French in primary education. One of them is a
form of protest against a “top-down” move that ignored popular sentiments. In fact,
language policies related to Arabization have been authoritarian and anti-democratic
ever since their implementation after independence. The authorities did not take into
account Berber and dialectal Arabic as the people’s first languages. They instead imposed
Literary/institutional Arabic as the “mother tongue” of the population expecting, thus, the
supersession of the former idioms. The result is that the vernaculars in their different
forms have remained the major means of expression in daily life, social interaction,
popular culture, and so on. And Algeria would illustrate yet again the strategies of
resistance adopted at grassroots level as a typical reaction to political and linguistic
oppression. Furthermore, ordinary people viewed the introduction of English in elemen-
tary schools as another plan adopted by their leaders to deny them the right to access
“modernity” via the language of economic power. They considered the durable mechan-
ism of “elite closure” as an expression of this language expropriation.
The other reason why English failed to supersede French can be found in the multi-
lingual orientation of the population. Unlike their elites, the majority of Algerians do not
consider English and French as rivals. To them, their leaders’ misrepresentation of
English–French competition is in fact a “pseudo” rivalry. Corroborating evidence is
provided by the 2004 survey with senior high school students described in the section
on Arabic–French rivalry. To compare attitudes towards English and French, I gave this
item: “When I choose English, this does not mean that I reject French”. Out of a total of
1051 responses, 76.4% agreed or completely agreed with this statement (Benrabah 2007b,
122). Nevertheless, by maintaining the ex-colonial language, these young students, who
represent the future in Algeria, are not completely blinded by French to the point of
ignoring the current status of English in the world. In another activity, respondents were
asked to give the best choice of language or languages to live well in Algeria and abroad.
Students were offered 10 options ranging from one choice (e.g., “Arabic only”, “English
only”, and so on), two (e.g., “Arabic and Berber”, “Arabic and French”, and so on), three
(“Arabic, English and French”), and four (e.g., “Arabic, English, French and Berber”). In
all, 58.6% preferred the trilingual combination “Arabic, English and French”. It should be
noted that informants rejected monolingualism in any form, and they did not accept all
bilingual/multilingual options. For example, the Arabic–French bilingual choice comes in
second position with 15.5%, far behind the option chosen by the majority (Benrabah
2007b, 121).
Algerian youth’s awareness of the unique global position of English has increased
significantly since the 2004 survey. To measure their perception of today’s global lan-
guage system, 204 advanced (Master) students from three language departments in the
University of Mascara (west of Algeria) answered a written questionnaire in April 2013.
The following question was presented in Arabic and French: “Out of the following 10
languages, what is the language you consider the WORLD language today? (ONE choice
only)”. The 10 language options were presented in French alphabetical order with their
Arabic translation as follows: German, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi,
52 M. Benrabah
Department
English 61 65 62 188
Arabic 5 1 6
Chinese 1 1 2
French 1 4 5
Spanish 1 1 2
German 1 1
Total 67 68 69 204
Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. These come from De Swaan’s supercentral languages
– Malay and Swahili were not included. In their 204 responses, students chose six
languages which are in the first column of Table 3. Out of the total number of responses,
188 chose English – that is over 92% – and only 16 chose some other language. So,
English outdistances the other five languages by a very large margin.
Two comments can be made on the students’ perception of the global importance of
English. First, despite the students’ awareness of the unique position of English in the
global language system, language proficiency in this language in Algeria remains low
compared with other Arabic-speaking nations. In April 2012, the global research organi-
zation Euromonitor International compiled a custom report for the British Council. It is a
quantitative study of the mastery of English in eight nations of the Middle East and North
Africa (MENA). The research organization gives the following percentages of people with
a good command of spoken English in each MENA country: 45% for Jordan, 40% for
Lebanon, 35% for Egypt and Iraq, 10–15% for Tunisia, 14% for Morocco, 9% for Yemen,
and 7% for Algeria (Euromonitor International 2012). Thus, it is Algeria which has the
lowest number of proficient speakers of English. Following these results and considering
the Algerian economic system, I formulated, in a recent publication, a hypothesis explain-
ing the possible displacement of French by English as a result of economic changes in the
country (Benrabah 2013, 121–123). Algeria’s economy depends largely on oil and gas –
in 2011, fossil fuels generated roughly 60% of budget revenues, 30% of GDP, and over
95% of export earnings (CIA 2013). It also remains dominated by the State, a legacy of its
socialist post-independence development model. As I said earlier, there was an opening to
the market economy in the 1990s, when the country was bankrupt and the IMF imposed a
structural adjustment programme to encourage a transition to a market economy.
Following the high rise of international oil prices in the early 2000s, the State resorted
once again to its old centralized socioeconomic system typical of “rentier” States. Thus, it
reinforced its control of the economic sector with the help of an inert bureaucracy which
normally supports the maintenance of French. I therefore hypothesized that the main-
tenance of the old “socialist” statist economic structure and the refusal to open completely
Algeria’s economy to the world market protect the French language against the challenge
of English, its most serious rival today. Consequently, the more Algeria’s economy is
integrated into the global capitalist system, the more English will spread in this country.
The second comment, related to the above, concerns the future of French in Algeria.
In fact, the preservation of the French language in the North African former colony of
France does not necessarily guarantee its presence in the long run, especially with English
kept as a standby. In Benrabah (2007b, 117), I argued that were French to decline in
Journal of World Languages 53
Algeria, it is English and not Arabic which would replace it as the language of economic
power. There are at least five signs that indicate where the Algerian language situation is
heading. First, systematic Arabization has produced large-scale monolingualism in
Arabic, particularly in less populated urban centres as well as in rural and Saharan
regions. Second, “elite closure” allows only a minority of speakers from the dominant
classes in large cities to acquire a strong form of bilingualism with (Arabic–French,
Berber–French) balanced bilinguals. The third sign was reported by Euromonitor
International in its 2012 custom report: “with the small population in the South, there is
significant interest in learning English and reluctance towards French is apparent” (2012,
59–60). Fourth, recently, the government’s abandonment of its four-decade long policy of
top-down language implementation has generated more demand from the grass roots of
Algerian society for multilingualism with English holding a prominent position as an
additional language. For example, in the recent past, Departments of English in several
Algerian universities attracted far more student enrolments than French Departments. The
results presented in Table 3 above seem to corroborate this situation. The fifth sign takes
into account post-colonial developments and the issue of “national neutrality” or “deeth-
nicization” which has repercussions for the two rival languages, English and French. In
contrast to English, French remains irredeemably tainted by its colonial history, and this
plays a major role in countries like Algeria where people still have not forgotten the
excesses of their ex-colonial masters. For example, when in the 1980s and 1990s, the pro-
Arabization lobby demanded that English should replace French in primary schools, they
justified their choice on the grounds that the former was “the language of scientific
knowledge” (HCF 1999, 28), and that the latter was “in essence imperialist and coloni-
alist” (Goumeziane 1994, 258). The second justification illustrates its authors’ amnesia as
regards the colonial past of the United Kingdom. Also, it shows that English has been
deethnicized but not French, a language which has not rid itself of its colonial provenance.
Despite major changes in the post-colonial demographic, urban and economic struc-
tures, the memory of colonization was still very much alive in Algeria at the beginning of
the millennium. In the 2004 survey discussed earlier, high school students associated
French with “modernity” and “openness to the world”, but also with colonization. When
asked to choose among the four languages of Algeria the one “they associated most with a
painful past”, 53% chose French, around 21% dialectal Arabic, over 15% Berber, and
around 11% Literary Arabic. These findings are confirmed by responses to one statement
in the Likert scale activity. With the statement “I associate French with colonization”, over
47% agreed or agreed completely, against 35.5% who disagreed or disagreed completely.
As for undecided informants, their number was quite high: 17.4% had no opinion. From a
statistical point of view, age and gender variables were not significant. However, the
difference in the size of cities was significant (see Table 4). The larger the city the fewer
informants associated French with a painful past (colonialism), and vice versa. The results
here indicate that the French colonial era is an enduring memory in less populated towns
and cities, where the largest part of Algeria’s urban population lives. In these areas, where
extended families with a rural or recently urbanized background tend to live together,
resentment of French is easily transferred from one generation to the next (Benrabah
2007d, 202–203; 2013, 100–103).
Table 5. Algeria’s top six imports partners in this millennium (CIA 2001, 2006, 2011).
Figure 2. Visible newcomer: rivalry between Chinese and English, two languages of business.
economic power. The billboard in the image on the right does not even contain Arabic.
There is some truth in Fishman et al.’s claim when writing: “one has more incentive to
learn the language of one’s customers than of one’s suppliers” (1977, 106). However, in
the case of Algeria, the Chinese learn their customers’ language of economic power, not
that of their cultural power. In fact, the placard shows the country’s languages of business,
Chinese and French. Symbolically, Chinese dominates French: it is positioned at the top in
a more prominent red colour, and not only is French at the bottom in light blue, it is also
presented in a faulty written form – the apostrophe coming after each of the two ‘l’s is
followed by a space.
The presence of Chinese in Algeria’s linguistic landscape does not seem to produce a
craze for learning Chinese as in neighbouring countries, Morocco and Tunisia. Very
helpful in understanding the rising demand for learning Chinese in Morocco is the
paper published by the Moroccan magazine Tel Quel and reproduced by the Algerian
daily Le Quotidien d’Oran on 2 May 2013. The global network of Confucius Institutes
consists of more than 400 centres in 108 countries and regions (Gosset 2013). And 30
56 M. Benrabah
Confucius Institutes have been established in 26 countries in Africa since 2005. There are
two in Morocco, the first one founded by the University of Rabat in 2009, and the second
by University Hassan II Casablanca in January 2013. In parallel, the Faculty of Letters of
University Mohammed V in Rabat created in 2012 the Department of Chinese Language
and Culture for students to do a Bachelor of Arts (Tel Quel 2013, 18). A similar situation
prevails in Tunisia: the first Institute established in Sfax was to be followed by another
one in El Menzah in 2012 (Hajbi 2012). By contrast, Algeria lags far behind, for no
Institute has been established on Algerian soil as yet. On 16 July 2013, I had a telephone
conversation with the Cultural Attaché of the Chinese Embassy in Algiers. He told me
that the Algerian government had refused the introduction of Confucius Institutes in
Algeria. This seems a repeat of the authorities’ inability to enhance English language
proficiency in the country. Once again, its inert bureaucracy is probably intent on
obstructing the way to Chinese, another rising and serious rival to the ex-colonial
language, French.
8. Conclusion
In this article, language rivalry in Algeria serves as a focus on the situation faced by many
states caught between a post-colonial transition that requires language unification against
a multilingual background, on the one hand, and the demands of a globalized world with
several world languages in circulation, on the other. The source of the conflict in Algeria
is threefold: first, there are tensions between local languages, with one of them having an
international status (Literary Arabic) and which is imposed by authoritarian means and
top-down planning; second, Arabic is also in conflict with the ex-colonial language,
French, which endures thanks to elites indoctrinated by colonial France, to a statist and
rentist state, and its arm the inert bureaucracy (as we have seen, the future of this ex-
colonial language remains uncertain, especially with English standing on the sidelines.);
and third, the authorities’ attempt to use the latter as a substitute for French caused the
struggle between these two European languages. By way of conclusion, we can point out
that there are some indications that the future supersession of French by English might
occur. English is the most serious rival at the moment even though a rising language like
Chinese has recently appeared in Algeria’s linguistic landscape. Lessons from the
Algerian experience may be useful for better defining the term “world” language, and
for understanding the complex interaction between native tongues and major languages in
post-colonial and globalized contexts.
Notes on contributor
Mohamed Benrabah is Professor of English Linguistics and Sociolinguistics. He was educated at
Oran University (Algeria) and University College London (UK) where he got his PhD in linguistics
in 1987. In 1978–1994, he was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the English Department at Oran
University. The author settled in France in October 1994. He has published three books (Langue et
Pouvoir en Algérie. Histoire d’un Traumatisme Linguistique, Paris: Séguier, 1999; Devenir Langue
Dominante Mondiale. Un Défi pour l’Arabe, Geneva-Paris: Librairie Droz, 2009; Language Conflict
in Algeria. From Colonialism to Post-Independence, Bristol: Multilingual Matters), a monograph,
and more than 50 articles in journals and chapters in books as well as ephemeral pieces in popular
publications in Algeria and France. Benrabah’s research interests include applied phonetics/phonol-
ogy, sociolinguistics, and language management with a particular interest in the Anglophone,
Arabophone, and Francophone worlds.
Journal of World Languages 57
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