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Journal of World Languages

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Competition between four world languages inAlgeria

Mohamed Benrabah

To cite this article: Mohamed Benrabah (2014) Competition between four world languages inAlgeria, Journal of World Languages, 1:1, 38-59, DOI: 10.1080/21698252.2014.893676

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21698252.2014.893676

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Competition between four world languages in Algeria

Mohamed Benrabah*

Grenoble University, Dpartement de lIsre, Saint Martin dHres, France

As a post-colonial society with an almost unique colonial history on the Africancontinent and in the Arabophone zone, Algeria can serve as a focus on this millen-niums rivalry between a few world languages namely Arabic, Chinese, English,and French. This article highlights the importance of the influence of colonialism inshaping post-colonial language policy in a multilingual society. It also looks at the roleof elites and the effects of their top-down language implementation on planned andunplanned developments as related to the position and status of world languageswithin a polity. And it reasserts the dominant position of English as a global languagedespite the maintenance of the former colonial language, French. From a theoreticaland applied perspective, this article raises questions about what constitutes a worldlanguage, and it shows the importance of some indicators in measuring the interna-tional standing of languages in the globalized world.

Keywords: Arabic; Chinese; colonialism; English; French; globalization

1. Introduction

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Algeria became the focus of rivalry between fourlanguages acknowledged as world languages. These are Arabic, Chinese, English, andFrench. The present article looks at how and why each of these languages was introducedin Algeria. It consists of six parts. The first one outlines the major parameters used byscholars to study the international standing of languages. In the second section, I presentan overview of some of the definitions given in the literature of the concept of worldlanguage. A historical and sociolinguistic approach is used in the third part to account forthe present-day linguistic situation in Algeria. The following two sections present ArabicFrench and FrenchEnglish rivalries. In the final part, I describe the dramatic intrusion ofChinese into the Algerian linguistic landscape as of the 2000s.

2. Indicators for determining language power

Since the 1970s, several authors have suggested indicators and factors that determinelanguage power in a community, including the global community. One of the pioneers isWilliam F. Mackey who had long experience researching bilingualism and languagecontact (e.g., Mackey 1973, 1976). Mackey argued that around 100 indicators could beused to measure the strength of a language and its international standing. To him, the finalchoice of parameters depends on the purpose the researcher has in mind the emphasis isoften political, descriptive, or comparative (Mackey 1973, 1415). This is why differentauthors from different fields of interest have used different formulas. But when oneconsiders the various criteria used by sociologists, geolinguists, political scientists,

*Email: Mohamed.Benrabah@u-grenoble3.fr

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sociolinguists, and so on, to measure language power, one finds that they amount to nomore than a dozen concepts. For example, Mackey selected the following six parameters(1973, 516; 1976, 203214):

Number of speakers (demographics), Geographical dispersion (establishment in different regions of the world), Mobility (tourism), Economic wealth, Ideological indicator (religions of universal appeal, political ideologies of the same

type), Cultural indicator (publishing of books and so on).

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, 7585) chose five criteria:

Number of speakers, Scientific culture, Economic strength, Standard of living, Military strength.

The sociologist George Weber (1999, 2228) preferred an index based on six parameters:

Number of primary (L1) speakers, Number of secondary (L2) speakers, Number and population of countries using the language, Number of major fields (science, diplomacy, and so on) using the language

internationally, Economic power of countries using the language, Socio-literary prestige.

As for the geolinguist Roland Breton, he opted for three indicators only (2003, 22):

Dispersion over continents, Number of states with the same language as their (co-)official language, Number of speakers.

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The choices made by these authors from different disciplines show that there is often anoverlapping between selected criteria. Almost all use the variables related to the numberof speakers, economic power, political strength (geographical dispersion), cultural/scien-tific power, and so on. Finally, in his study of the international standing of the Germanlanguage, the sociolinguist Ulrich Ammon made a synthesis of these parameters in theform of basic indicators, as he calls them (Ammon 1995, 28). Thus, Ammon selectedfour parameters (Ammon 1995, 28; 2003, 233246) which I have found very useful whenstudying 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 thelanguage studied as L1 or L2 speakers. To explain his choice of this indicator, Ammongives two reasons. First, the language of a large community is more likely to become aworld language than that of a small community. Second, a numerically powerful languagehas a better chance of being studied as a foreign language than a numerically weak onebecause the former provides more opportunities for contacts than the latter (Ammon 2003,234). The second parameter chosen by Ammon, economic strength, is measured interms of the gross national product (GNP) of the languages native speakers worldwide.Ammon justifies the choice of this indicator as follows: [a]n economically stronglanguage is attractive to learn because of its business potential; its knowledge opens upan attractive market (2003, 235).

Political strength is Ammons third indicator. A world language draws its strengthfrom two sources, even though Ammon deals with only one of them. The first one relatesto 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 isknown as a multi-national language. However, languages draw their political strengthnot only from a multiplicity of states geographically localized, but also from theiruniversal dispersion over at least two continents. The second source of a languagespolitical strength is thus geopolitical power which gives it the status of an inter-con-tinental language (Breton 2003, 72). There are six multinational and intercontinentallanguages 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 ArabLeague for Arabic, the Commonwealth for English, the International Organization ofFrancophonia for French, and the Organisation of the Ibero-American States for Spanish.

Ammons fourth parameter comprises various indicators put under the same heading,and this, Ammon claims, is questionable (2003, 242). However, I decided to keep thisheading to study the international standing of the Arabic language (Benrabah 2009a), forit allows the use of qualitative measures against the first three parameters which providequantitative measurements. According to David Crystal, [w]hy a language becomes aglobal language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more todo with who those speakers are (2003a, 7). Who those speakers are relates to politicaland economic power, and most important of all, cultural strength. Within culturalpower, there is the quality of native (and/or non-native) speakers that can be weighedby 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 ofintellectual resources, the quality of native speakers can also be measured against theHuman 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 culturalstrength has proved to be the Arabic languages weakest point.

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3. The concept of world language

In the literature on world language dominance, authors can be roughly divided into twoseparate groups. The first one consists of those who refer to English as the only worldor global language, with no other language deserving this label. For example, Crystal(1997, 359360; 2003a, 22; 2003b, 106109) and Graddol (2006, 9, 12) belong to thiscategory. The second group of writers prefer a pluralist approach arguing that there are afew contenders for the position of world language. Interestingly, most of these scholarsare non-Anglophone, and it will be informative to look at some of their definitions of theconcept of world language. The work of two authors, Salikoko Mufwene and UlrichAmmon, will be considered in the remaining part of this section.

Mufwene (2013, 4243) gives the label world language to several ex-coloniallanguages, namely English, French, Russian, and Spanish. This label comes from theirrole as lingua francas, i.e., languages which extend over several language areas. They arealso spoken as vernaculars by non-native populations ethnically different from the nation-ality of those languages, and they function as languages of business/trade and scholarship.But Mufwene does not classify Mandarin Chinese as a world language. He considers itthe worlds foremost major language because of its numerical strength (demographics)and its limited reach: it is spoken in China and the diaspora only. By contrast, Mufweneclassifies Arabic as a world language owing to its religious/ritual use among the worldsMuslim community estimated at 1.57 billion (Postel-Vinay 2009, 3). Such classificationof Arabic is of course questionable. The ecclesiastical power of this language over-shadows one basic principle of modern linguistics: natural languages are spoken andspeech is primary. Rote learning and reciting Koranic verses for daily prayers does notnecessarily yield spoken proficiency in Arabic (Benrabah, 2009a, 150). In summary,Mufwene uses three categories to describe languages: major languages like MandarinChinese, world languages like Arabic, and lingua francas like English and French.However, he does distinguish the status of English from that of French on the grounds thatthe formers function as a lingua franca, since World War II, has outdistanced French andbecome the foremost or pre-eminent world language. He thus joins the position ofDavid Crystal and David Graddol, which we have mentioned at the beginning of thissection.

The German scholar Ulrich Ammon has been one of the most prolific writers on themeasurement of the global strength of languages. To account for his pluralist approach,Ammon (2013) added, in a recent book chapter, a further refinement to his four-labelformula described in the preceding section. He favours the plurality of world languageson the grounds that a few other languages also have a global reach (Ammon 2013, 101).Ammon calls this reach globality or internationality. To allow for ranks ordegrees of globality/internationality, he distinguishes language global status fromlanguage global function. The former corresponds to one indicator in his four-labeldescriptive formula, namely political strength normally associated with multinationaland intercontinental languages. The latter means language use for global communica-tion which can be international when interlocutors from different nations share thesame (multinational) language as L1 for instance, Spanish in the case of a Spaniard anda Venezuelan or interlingual when the two sides do not have the same linguisticbackground and use the language as an additional language (L2, L3, and so on). Ammon,then, takes some indicators from his four-label formula (numerical strength, politicalstrength, economic strength, and cultural strength) to compare English and Spanish. Heargues that the global status of these two languages is more or less the same because of

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their similar political strength that is, they are both intercontinental and multinationallanguages with established international linguistic coalitions, the Commonwealth with 54members for English, and the Organisation of the Ibero-American States with 20 Statesfor Spanish. As for global function, Spanish lags far behind English. To Ammon, thisdiscrepancy comes from the huge difference in economic strength, a factor whichinfluences global function.

Nevertheless, Ammon characterizes Spanish as a world language because of itsnumerical strength due to its global spread as a foreign/second language. In fact, heprioritizes the number of non-native speakers, which he calls non-nativeness, to rank theglobality/internationality of languages (Ammon 2013, 12, 104). Related to this is what theGerman scholar calls national neutrality in relation to English (Ammon 2013, 117). Thewidespread use of this language among people with different linguistic backgrounds led toits disassociation from the native countries of the centre (e.g., United Kingdom and theUnited States). In post-colonial contexts, the idea of national neutrality is best renderedby the notion of deethnicization, used by Joshua Fishman in connection with the globalspread of English. The term deethnicization means removing cultural and historicalbaggage from English as belonging to or reflecting values from its British and Americanimperialist fountainheads (Fishman 1977, 118119). As regards the status of English, theGerman scholars position is similar to that of Solikoko Mufwene and, by extension, tothat of David Crystal and David Graddol. Despite his call for a pluralist approach, he doesadmit that the role of English as a lingua franca makes it distinguishable mostnoticeably from other languages, and it gives it a unique position among the worldslanguages (Ammon 2013, 103, 117). To him, [t]here is virtually no descriptive parameteror indicator for the international or global rank of a language which, if applied to todayslanguages world-wide, does not place English at the top (Ammon 2013, 116117).

Finally, Ammon equates his global function criterion with Abram De Swaanstypology based on the latters Theory of World Language System. In De Swaans globallanguage system (or constellation), the worlds 60007000 [m]utually unintelligiblelanguages are connected by multilingual speakers [...] not at all in random fashion [...][but in] a strongly ordered, hierarchical pattern (De Swaan 2001, 4). He compares thishierarchy to a chart with reverse tree-structures which can be represented in a pyramidwith four levels. In the lower part of the pyramid, De Swaan puts the vast majority of theworlds languages (around 6000) which he labels peripheral languages. The next levelup of the chart is occupied by 150200 State (national/official) languages called centrallanguages. Higher up in the pyramid, 12 languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French,German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili) occupy thesupercentral position within the global language system. These supercentral languagesare essential for long-distance and international communication, and all of them, exceptSwahili, 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 entireconstellation (De Swaan 2001, 56; 2010, 37; 2013, 57).

In conclusion, I need to make four remarks that should be relevant for the study oflanguage competition in Algeria. First, what Ammon labels world languages, based oncommunicative globality/internationality, corresponds to De Swaans supercentral lan-guages, whose function is for long-distance and international communication. Theselanguages are: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay,Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. So, the four languages considered in thisarticle Arabic, Chinese, English, and French are supercentral and will be referred toas world languages henceforth. Second English is not only supercentral, but it also

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occupies the hypercentral position in the world language system. The different modelsand terminologies described so far all agree on one undeniable fact: English holds aunique position in the linguistic constellation, both in terms of status and function.Third in addition to numerical strength, political strength, and cultural strength, theparameter economic strength plays a major role in enhancing the global function oflanguages, particularly in the economically integrated globalized world which encouragespeople 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 additionallanguage, the more learners are attracted by it. On the other hand, it can affect the declineor maintenance of ex-colonial languages in the post-colonial era.

4. Present-day linguistic situation in Algeria: historical and sociolinguisticapproach

Algeria is a multilingual country and this linguistic situation comes from its complexhistory. The natives of Northern Africa in general and Algeria in particular are theBerbers. From Antiquity to the end of French colonial rule in 1962, the original popula-tions were generally unsuccessful as rulers of their own lands and hence allowed severalforeign groups to dominate the region. When they submitted to civilizations from without,the Berbers of the interior, who were by far the most numerous, kept to themselves andremained monolingual in Berber. In the few urban centres located along the coast all offoreign origin bilingualism and multilingualism became the norm (Djit 1992, 16;Elimam 2004, 300301; Morsly 1996, 77).

Several invaders more or less shaped the sociocultural history of Algeria, as well as itssociolinguistic profile. Berbers came under the yoke of the Phoenicians who imposed theirCarthaginian rule for about seven centuries, subsequently Romans for about six centuries,the Vandals and the Romanized Byzantines for about a century each. The Islamo-Arabo-Berbers dominated the region for about four centuries, the Turks for about three centuries,and the French, who brought Turkish domination to an end, for more than a century and aquarter. Spaniards occupied enclaves along the Mediterranean coast intermittentlybetween 1505 and 1792. One of the consequences of this long history of mixing peopleswas language contact and its by-product, multilingualism BerberPunic, BerberPunicLatin, BerberArabic, BerberArabicSpanishTurkish, BerberArabicFrench, andso on.

Amongst the above-mentioned conquering groups, two left a deep impact on Algeriaslinguistic profile the Arabs and the French. In the seventh century, the Byzantines weredefeated by the Arabs who came from the east to spread Islam. North Africans graduallyconverted to Islam and by the twelfth century the majority had become orthodox SunniMoslems. As for language, there was something peculiar in the introduction of Arabic inNorth Africa. Right from the beginning of the Arab invasion, the Arabic language came tobe strongly associated with Islam in North Africa (Gellner 1973, 19). So, [t]he Berbersadmitted the superiority of Arabic over their own language, probably because of this linkbetween Arabic and religion, and maybe also because of the respect they felt for thewritten forms which their own language did not possess (Bentahila 1983, 2). The Arabiclanguage spread progressively, and more and more Berbers abandoned their mothertongue to become Arabophones (Ageron 1993, 766767; Julien 1994, 341366). Theadoption of the conquerors language by the losing side led to diglossia. The high formknown as Classical or Literary Arabic remained the common liturgical language for all

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Muslims. The low form developed into different North African varieties. Arabic andBerber belong to the same language family, the Afro-Asiatic group of languages, and theyhave a predisposition to take in features from the other. However, this mutual influenceshows results similar to those reported in treatments of contact situations born out ofconquest and large-scale language shift (Lutz 2009, 229). As a substratum language facedwith unequal contacts between conquering and conquered populations, Berber had littlelexical effect on Arabic (the superstratum). Nevertheless, it exerted far-reaching structuralinfluence on the latters phonology, morphology, and syntax. Hence, the North AfricanArabic varieties in general and the Algerian ones in particular can be described asBerberized Arabic (Benali-Mohamed 2003, 208; Chafik 1999, 64, 78, 120, 142;Chtatou 1997, 104).

As regards language maintenance following the Arab conquest, despite the highprestige associated with Arabic, this language did not displace Berber completely.Thirteen centuries after the Arab invasion, and on the eve of French occupation in1830, about 50% of Algerians were still monolingual in Berber. At the time, the tribalsystem prevailed: out of a total of 516 tribes, there were 206 under Turkish rule, 200independent and 86 semi-independent tribal chiefs. The population, estimated at threemillion, 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; Quefflec et al. 2002, 23; Valensi 1969, 20, 29).

Modern Algeria was born in 1830 when colonial France brought the European and theindigenous Arabo-Berber worlds into violent contact. Between 1830 and 1962, the Frenchimplemented a methodical policy of deracination and deculturization. To realize theircivilizing mission, they imposed an assimilationist policy of total Frenchification onmillions of recalcitrant Algerians (Gallagher 1968, 132133). The colonizers, who wereunder the influence of nineteenth-century language attitudes, strongly believed in thesuperiority of their language and culture. Thus, they targeted the native tongues and madenative 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 thelanguages of Algerians. For example, in 1886, the geographer Onsime Reclus describedArabic and Berber as sharing a passion for terrible guttural sounds which resemblevomiting (Reclus 1886, 680). Moreover, in the euphoria of the centenary of Algeriasconquest by France, William Marais, a colonial academic and dialectologist, predictedthe 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 thefuture disappearance of dialectal Arabic because of its extensive borrowings from French.He disqualified Literary Arabic on the grounds that it was a dominated language, notunified linguistically because of its incurable diglossia, and unfit for the modern world(Marais 1931, 22, 26, 39; Messaoudi 2012, 285). Marais Whorfian belief that theFrench language would better instruct Algerian Muslims in the way of modernity wouldbe internalized by the future elites of independent Algeria.

Among the Algerians painful experiences with the French occupation is the dramaticretreat of Berber. The displacement of this language is one of the consequences of colonialviolence and scorched-earth reprisals following Algerian resistance to the invasion of theircountry. The French armys brutal methods of pacification lasted almost half a century(Horne 1987, 30; Ruedy 1992, 50). At the time, French parliamentarians contemplated thepossibility of having an Algeria without Algerians. They publicly called for a war ofextermination similar to the one suffered by Indians in North America. Around 1872, thenative population had diminished by one million, and the result of this ethnic cleansing

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was linguistic genocide (Brower 2012, 61; Kateb 2012, 83). As shown in Table 1, theBerber-speaking community fell from about 50% in 1830 to 18.6% when the Frenchended their occupation.

At the time of independence in July 1962, the necessary initial conditions for the currentcompetition of world languages in Algeria were already in place. Two major aspects seemto me of paramount importance here. First, there was the presence of multilingualism whichoften generates contact situations and language rivalry. Todays geographical distribution oflanguages was more or less the same as it was back in 1962, even though the populationwas less than a third of what it is today, and the status of the indigenous languages wasdifferent because of their precarious position. There are three main language groups inpresent-day Algeria: Arabophones, Berberophones, and Francophones. The Arabic-speak-ing community constitutes approximately 7075% of the total population. Berberophonesrepresent 2530% and live in communities scattered all over the country. As for theFrancophones, who are often (ArabicFrench or BerberFrench) bilinguals, they useFrench as an additional language and live mainly in the towns and cities of the urbanstrip that lines the Mediterranean Sea in the north. This is a colonial legacy: after theconquest 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, 119120).

As mentioned earlier, Arabic is marked by a diglossic situation. Literary Arabic, thehigh form, is acquired through learning in educational institutions scattered around thecountry. After independence, the government institutionalized this Arabic variety as thesole national and official language of the country. Its spread among the population hasbeen spectacular since 1962 as a result of the authorities political and ideologicalcommitment to de-Frenchify Algeria via the policy of Arabization, and also because ofthe substantial increase in literacy and related aspects, such as population growth(Benrabah 2013, 7274). The dialectal form of Arabic consists of two main varieties:Algerian Spoken Arabic used by populations in the north of the country, and AlgerianSaharan Spoken Arabic in the south, in the Sahara desert. Berber consists of four majorlanguages: Tamashek is the language of the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Mozabites andShawia 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 thecountry, the most important being Chenoua spoken in the Chenoua mountain regionwest 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 themby Literary Arabic. In reaction to this assimilationist policy, Kabyles, who had distin-guished themselves by their minority views against the mainstream ideology, rebelledagainst the central authorities in April 1980 and demanded the recognition of theirlanguage and culture. Kabyle unrest was to be rekindled nearly every decade, untilApril 2002 when the government declared Berber a national (but not official) language(Benrabah, forthcoming; El Aissati 1993, 92; Lewis, et al., 2013; Maddy-Weitzman2001, 37).

Table 1. Devolution of the Berber-speaking community (18301966) as percentage of totalpopulation of Algeria (Sources: Chaker 1998, 13; Kateb 2005, 95; Valensi 1969, 29).

1830 1860 1910 1954 1966

50% 36.7% 29.4% 20.1% 18.6%

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The second aspect that is necessary for understanding language rivalry in Algeriaconcerns Algerian language attitudes at the moment of independence in 1962. The violentcontact with the French/European world deeply affected Algerian society. Within arelatively short period of time (132 years), French occupation had made a profoundimpact on Algerias cultural and linguistic profile. The influence was so deep thatAlgerian society was never the same again. By 1962, colonial France had dismantledthe tribal structure completely. There were 10 million Algerians, a quarter of whom livedin towns, and less than one million non-Moslems who left the country. The illiteracy ratestood at around 90% with only 5.5% (around 300,000) of the population literate inLiterary Arabic only. As for competence in French, one million could read it and sixmillion 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). Theaggressive French occupation was so traumatic and Algerias alienation so great that herelites felt insecure and uncertain regarding their identity. The Algerian intelligentsiaexperienced a crisis of confidence as colonials with an inferior status, with their languagesbeing debased and stigmatized as dialects, and so on. In an interview recorded bysociologist David Gordon in 1963, a leading Algerian poet/writer set the tone for futuredevelopments. In ten to fifteen years, he said, Arabic will have replaced Frenchcompletely 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 worldlanguages: between Arabic and French, and between French and English. These differentrivalries are considered in turn in the remaining parts of this article. The final section dealswith the intrusion of a newcomer, the Chinese language.

5. Arabic versus French

The universalization of education in independent Algeria led to a dramatic increase in thestudent population. In 1962, the literacy rate was very low and the populations thirst foreducation and knowledge was real. So, the tremendous hope generated by the liberationof the country led to a substantial rise in student enrolment. For example, in December1962, the government made public the following figures: 600,000 children of school agewere enrolled in primary school, representing an increase of 80% on the preceding yearsfigure, and with 48,000 students in secondary schools, there were far more registrationsthan in 1961. Subsequently, the number of enrolments in primary and secondary schoolsrose from 3.9 million in 1979 to 7.8 million in 2003, and reached 8.2 million in September2011. As a result of this, the literacy rate went up from around 10% in 1962 to 52% in1990, and rose to 70% at the beginning of the millennium. So today the majority ispresumably literate in Literary Arabic (Bennoune 2000, 225; CIA 2013; Gordon1966, 196).

From a quantitative point of view, the results of linguistic Arabization have beenspectacular. Although French dominated the media, education, government, and admin-istration in the colonial era, the use of this language has diminished in a number of higherdomains since independence. Thus, the functions allocated to institutional Arabic haveexpanded. In addition to the Ministry of Education where de-Frenchification is almostcomplete, the shift to Arabic is either complete or almost complete in the Justice Ministry,the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the registry offices in town halls. In the educationalsector, Literary Arabic is the exclusive medium of instruction in primary and secondaryschools and in the humanities at the university level (Benrabah 2007b, 100). However,

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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 countrys independence, most members of the Algerian establishmentassociated Arabization with Islamization and Francophonia with secularization (Ruedy1992). Furthermore, soon after Frances defeat, the authorities embarked on systematicArabization without adequate means (lack of qualified teachers, manuals, and so on).They ignored warnings by prominent Algerian intellectuals who expressed their anxietyconcerning possible negative outcomes. For example, in 1969, Algerian scholar AbdallahMazouni published an extensive piece of work on the language issue in Algeria. Heposited that rapid Arabization might prove, among other things, harmful to the Arabiclanguage itself, it might be regressive and could alienate students because the languagewas difficult and the teaching tools were inadequate. In particular, he warned against thepersistence of the myth that maintained Arabic as the language for prayers and poetry andFrench for action, development and modernity (Mazouni 1969, 38, 185). In fact, futuredevelopments confirmed Mazounis predictions. In 2004, I conducted a survey among1051 senior high school students from three urban centres with different population size:Oran, a large town; Sada, a medium city; Ghazaouet, a small town. Eighty-two per centsaid they felt close to God in Literary Arabic and 80% described the latter as thelanguage of religious and moral values. In contrast, 91.5% said the French languageallows openness to the world and 85.7% described it as the language of science andtechnology (Benrabah 2007a, 238239).

There is another feature that characterizes Algerias elites and this goes back to theirindoctrination by colonial France. Many Algerians trained by the French could notacknowledge the fact that there are alternative and equally valuable kinds of civilizationsother than that [...] of France (Gordon 1962, 4). This is not specific to Algerians. Forexample, Habib Bourguiba, the first Head of State in post-independent Tunisia, describedquite well the extent to which colonizers indoctrinated colonials in North Africa.Throughout his life, Bourguiba expressed doubt whether any foreigner can considerhimself educated unless he can speak French fluently (Battenburg 1996, 7). However,because of the deeply rooted influence of French culture in colonial Algeria which wastotally integrated to France Tunisia was a protectorate Algerians were the most Frenchenculturated of the three peoples of North Africa. So, the Algerian intelligentsias belief inthe superiority of French language and culture transpire in their behaviour as publicservants and bureaucrats, and/or as parents mindful of their offsprings future materialwell-being.

The Algerian administration has its origins in the final years of the Algerian War ofIndependence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. When Charles De Gaulle came to powerin May 1958 in the midst of the War he introduced an ambitious Five-Year Plan todevelop industrialization and give Algeria an economic solution to its turmoil (Horne1987, 340341). Training was also provided to 100,000 Algerian cadres, who were tobecome the backbone of the administration of independent Algeria. As civil servants, theybecame the forces of institutional inertia that would block attempts to transform thecolonial legacy by introducing, among other things, Arabic as a working language inthe administrative system (Grandguillaume 1983, 105). Incidentally, the establishment ofsocialism following Algerias independence led to a highly centralized distributive socio-economic system typical of rentier States (Benrabah 2007b, 35). The rentist andadministered polity proved to be a blessing in disguise for the Algerian bureaucrats.The imposition of political authoritarianism also reinforced their power. Following

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independence, the FLN, which was established in 1954 as part of the struggle forindependence, became the dominant political party and the arm of a single-party system.

The other issue related to Algerias elites is their promotion of Arabization and theirown behaviour. Policy-makers implemented this language policy for the majority, but theyprevented their own children from attending schools that catered for the masses. Tominimize competition for their own children in good careers in modern business andtechnology which need French, political and military leaders used, after independence,French educational institutions established in Algeria and controlled by France. In theeyes of the majority of Algerians, this phenomenon of elite closure (Myers-Scotton1993, 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, 206208).

In the end, Algerian society does not use Arabic to the full. Domain loss for Arabichas created a situation whereby language functions and registers occur in a sort ofcomplimentary distribution: Arabic is used for spiritual needs and represents culturalpower, while French symbolizes worldly needs and economic power. But the penetrationof Arabic by an ex-colonial language is not typical of North Africa in general and Algeriain 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 worldlanguage. There are real obstacles which prevent it from rising to this position. In previouswork, I used Ulrich Ammons four-label formula described earlier in the article to studythe international standing of Arabic (Benrabah 2007c, 2009a, 2009b). The latter has itsstrengths and weaknesses, especially when compared with Spanish, a language with moreor less similar power.

Arabic and Spanish have roughly the same numerical and political strengths. In thefield of demolinguistics, different sources give different counts and estimates for the majorlanguages of the world. This variation shows the difficulty of evaluating the number ofspeakers in global terms. Reasons for this are varied: lack of census data, the absence ofan acceptable definition of the notion of native speaker, the difficulty of definingmacro languages like Arabic and Chinese, the different methods of integrating nativeand 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 allits 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 Spanishonly 322 million. When the statistics of both sources are amalgamated, the number ofspeakers for each language is estimated to be around 300 million. As regards theirpolitical 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. Themajor differences between these two languages come from their economic and culturalpower. The traditional measure of the influence of economic power on the size oflanguages is the relative growth of the GNP of countries with the same language. In2005, the GNP of Arabic-speaking countries stood at 1056.49 billion US dollars, and thatof 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, theArabic languages weakness, its Achilles heel.

It was argued in the first section that in order to boost the international standing of alanguage, the quality of its speakers is far more important than its demolinguistics. Thequality of speakers can be expressed in the production of intellectual resources in the

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language concerned. Creativity requires the presence of favourable conditions to generatethe quality of life necessary for increasing the cultural size of a language. The absence ofthese conditions in the Arab world encourages the international emigration of its highlyqualified population. The Arab brain drain mainly towards the West and to the countriesof the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) seriouslyundermines the knowledge (intellectual) capital of Arabic-speaking nations. Accordingto the 2002 report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Surveys ofhighly qualified Arabs living abroad indicate that their principal reasons for leaving relateto the absence of a positive societal environment and facilities that would allow them toplay their role in the knowledge system and in the development of their countries (UNDP2002, 144, emphasis added). In its report compiled in 2003, the UNDP highlights threedeficits afflicting the Arab world: freedom, womens rights and knowledge (UNDP 2003,1). Let us briefly consider knowledge to illustrate the poor cultural strength of the Arabic-speaking regions.

The knowledge system consists of two main components, knowledge acquisitionand knowledge production. For reasons of space, only the former component will beconsidered here. Disseminating knowledge in a society can take different routes, transla-tion being one of them. In the Arab world, this mode of knowledge diffusion is in achaotic situation and reveals the deep crisis of the knowledge capital in the Arabophonezone. In its 2003 report, the UNDP summarizes this situation as follows:

In terms of quantity, [. . .], the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of thenumber translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the Al Mamoonera [9th Century] to the present day amounts to 10,000 books equivalent to what Spaintranslated in a single year. (UNDP 2003, 67).

One way of highlighting the mediocre state of translation into Arabic is to compare itsperformance with other world languages which have a linguistic coalition that isEnglish, 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 languages 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 between1979 and 2012 languages with a linguistic coalition are in bold and in italics, andsupercentral languages are in italics only. These statistics show that three out of the fourlanguages with a linguistic coalition are among the top four languages. Arabic stands atposition 29 with 12,700 books translated, with Hebrew close on its heels ranked 32 with10,965 translated books. As for the other supercentral languages, Arabic comes far behind8 out of 10 idioms presented in this table statistics for Malay and Swahili are notprovided. The only language it has outdistanced is Hindi which holds position 43 with3535 translated books. One should note Indias paradox: as an emerging global powerwith a major (supercentral) language it favours English over Hindi to establish its worldeconomic leadership (Graddol 2006, 20).

6. Rivalry between French and English

By the end of the 1990s, Algeria became statistically the second largest French-speakingcommunity in the world after France. This happened in the midst of major social changes

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which influenced the language situation in the post-independence era. The population rosefrom 10 million in 1962 to 25.6 million in 1990, to 30.5 million in 1998, and an estimated38.9 million in July 2013. In the early 1990s, 70% of the population was aged 30 andunder, and this figure fell to around 63% in the late 2000s. The percentage of the totalpopulation living in urban areas also increased substantially: from 25% to 30% in 1962, itmoved to 50% in 1987, and around 73% in 2011. As mentioned earlier, literacy rosesubstantially from around 10% in 1962 to 52% in 1990, and 72.6% today, with themajority being proficient in institutional Arabic (Bennoune 2000, 225; CIA 2013;Quefflec et al. 2002, 118). In addition to that, the end of the single-party system afterthe widespread unrest of October 1988 led to (moderate) political liberalization, amoderately diversified market economy and the expansion of telecommunicationsmedia. So, the monolingual policy of Arabization turned out to be an anachronism inthe modern globalized world in general, and the new Algeria in particular. Arabizationas a totalizing language policy failed and, in the early 2000s, the authorities openlydeclared that it was time for bilingual education (Benrabah 2007b, 29).

This outcome frustrated the expectations of those who had believed in the futuredisplacement of French, among other things. The prediction made in 1963 by the Algerianpoet/writer quoted above was startlingly wrong. Not only was he completely mistakenabout the replacement of French by Arabic in all domains of use, he also mistakenlybelieved that English would be a substitute for French as an additional language. Asdescribed in the third section of this article, language policies for de-Frenchifying andArabizing Algeria were implemented after independence. From the end of the 1970s to theearly 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 foreignlanguage, introduced in Middle School (eighth grade). Under the influence of the pro-Arabization lobby which comprised Islamists, conservatives and nationalists, the Ministryof Primary and Secondary Education introduced English in primary school as a competitorto French in September 1993. Thus, the pupils who accessed Grade Four (89 year olds)

Table 2. Translation for Top 50 target languages (19792012) (Source: UNESCO 2012).

Rank Language Number Rank Language Number Rank Language Number

1 German 301880 18 Greek, Modern 30457 35 Latvian 81512 French 239968 19 Korean 28167 36 Albanian 67203 Spanish 228492 20 Bulgarian 27457 37 Icelandic 65364 English 156001 21 Serbian 23731 38 Ukrainian 46045 Japanese 130638 22 Estonian 20508 39 Indonesian 44406 Dutch 111267 23 Romanian 20468 40 Macedonian 39147 Russian 100699 24 Croatian 19727 41 Basque 39028 Portuguese 78838 25 Slovak 19644 42 Moldavian 37399 Polish 76697 26 Slovenian 18692 43 Hindi 353510 Swedish 71206 27 Catalan 17972 44 Welsh 318611 Czech 68919 28 Lithuanian 15389 45 Armenian 280712 Danish 64864 29 Arabic 12700 46 Uzbek 278113 Chinese 63113 30 Turkish 11908 47 Kazakh 246514 Italian 59914 31 Farsi 11105 48 Gallegan 235715 Hungarian 55214 32 Hebrew 10965 49 Georgian 218916 Finnish 48311 33 Norwegian, Bokml 9944 50 Belarusian 191917 Norwegian 35158 34 Serbo-Croatian (to

1992)8273

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had to choose between French and English as the first mandatory foreign language(Bennoune 2000, 303; Benrabah 2007d, 194). Unexpectedly, the competition betweenthe two European languages turned in favour of French. Between 1993 and 1997, out oftwo million school-children in Grade Four, the total number of those who chose Englishwas insignificant between 0.33% and 1.28% (Miliani 2000, 23; Quefflec et al.2002, 38).

Several aspects of Algerias linguistic situation combined to thwart the plans of thosewho introduced English as a competitor to French in primary education. One of them is aform of protest against a top-down move that ignored popular sentiments. In fact,language policies related to Arabization have been authoritarian and anti-democraticever since their implementation after independence. The authorities did not take intoaccount Berber and dialectal Arabic as the peoples first languages. They instead imposedLiterary/institutional Arabic as the mother tongue of the population expecting, thus, thesupersession of the former idioms. The result is that the vernaculars in their differentforms 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 ofresistance adopted at grassroots level as a typical reaction to political and linguisticoppression. 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 accessmodernity 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 notconsider English and French as rivals. To them, their leaders misrepresentation ofEnglishFrench competition is in fact a pseudo rivalry. Corroborating evidence isprovided by the 2004 survey with senior high school students described in the sectionon ArabicFrench rivalry. To compare attitudes towards English and French, I gave thisitem: When I choose English, this does not mean that I reject French. Out of a total of1051 responses, 76.4% agreed or completely agreed with this statement (Benrabah 2007b,122). Nevertheless, by maintaining the ex-colonial language, these young students, whorepresent the future in Algeria, are not completely blinded by French to the point ofignoring the current status of English in the world. In another activity, respondents wereasked 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, Englishonly, 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). Inall, 58.6% preferred the trilingual combination Arabic, English and French. It should benoted that informants rejected monolingualism in any form, and they did not accept allbilingual/multilingual options. For example, the ArabicFrench bilingual choice comes insecond position with 15.5%, far behind the option chosen by the majority (Benrabah2007b, 121).

Algerian youths awareness of the unique global position of English has increasedsignificantly since the 2004 survey. To measure their perception of todays global lan-guage system, 204 advanced (Master) students from three language departments in theUniversity 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 10languages, what is the language you consider the WORLD language today? (ONE choiceonly). The 10 language options were presented in French alphabetical order with theirArabic translation as follows: German, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi,

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Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. These come from De Swaans supercentral languages Malay and Swahili were not included. In their 204 responses, students chose sixlanguages 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 ofEnglish. First, despite the students awareness of the unique position of English in theglobal language system, language proficiency in this language in Algeria remains lowcompared 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 aquantitative study of the mastery of English in eight nations of the Middle East and NorthAfrica (MENA). The research organization gives the following percentages of people witha good command of spoken English in each MENA country: 45% for Jordan, 40% forLebanon, 35% for Egypt and Iraq, 1015% for Tunisia, 14% for Morocco, 9% for Yemen,and 7% for Algeria (Euromonitor International 2012). Thus, it is Algeria which has thelowest number of proficient speakers of English. Following these results and consideringthe 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 thecountry (Benrabah 2013, 121123). Algerias economy depends largely on oil and gas in 2011, fossil fuels generated roughly 60% of budget revenues, 30% of GDP, and over95% of export earnings (CIA 2013). It also remains dominated by the State, a legacy of itssocialist post-independence development model. As I said earlier, there was an opening tothe market economy in the 1990s, when the country was bankrupt and the IMF imposed astructural adjustment programme to encourage a transition to a market economy.Following the high rise of international oil prices in the early 2000s, the State resortedonce again to its old centralized socioeconomic system typical of rentier States. Thus, itreinforced its control of the economic sector with the help of an inert bureaucracy whichnormally supports the maintenance of French. I therefore hypothesized that the main-tenance of the old socialist statist economic structure and the refusal to open completelyAlgerias economy to the world market protect the French language against the challengeof English, its most serious rival today. Consequently, the more Algerias economy isintegrated 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 ofFrance does not necessarily guarantee its presence in the long run, especially with Englishkept as a standby. In Benrabah (2007b, 117), I argued that were French to decline in

Table 3. Algerian advanced students awareness of todays global language system.

Department

Languages Arabic English French Total

English 61 65 62 188Arabic 5 1 6Chinese 1 1 2French 1 4 5Spanish 1 1 2German 1 1Total 67 68 69 204

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Algeria, it is English and not Arabic which would replace it as the language of economicpower. There are at least five signs that indicate where the Algerian language situation isheading. First, systematic Arabization has produced large-scale monolingualism inArabic, particularly in less populated urban centres as well as in rural and Saharanregions. Second, elite closure allows only a minority of speakers from the dominantclasses in large cities to acquire a strong form of bilingualism with (ArabicFrench,BerberFrench) balanced bilinguals. The third sign was reported by EuromonitorInternational in its 2012 custom report: with the small population in the South, there issignificant interest in learning English and reluctance towards French is apparent (2012,5960). Fourth, recently, the governments abandonment of its four-decade long policy oftop-down language implementation has generated more demand from the grass roots ofAlgerian society for multilingualism with English holding a prominent position as anadditional language. For example, in the recent past, Departments of English in severalAlgerian universities attracted far more student enrolments than French Departments. Theresults presented in Table 3 above seem to corroborate this situation. The fifth sign takesinto account post-colonial developments and the issue of national neutrality or deeth-nicization which has repercussions for the two rival languages, English and French. Incontrast to English, French remains irredeemably tainted by its colonial history, and thisplays a major role in countries like Algeria where people still have not forgotten theexcesses 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, theyjustified their choice on the grounds that the former was the language of scientificknowledge (HCF 1999, 28), and that the latter was in essence imperialist and coloni-alist (Goumeziane 1994, 258). The second justification illustrates its authors amnesia asregards the colonial past of the United Kingdom. Also, it shows that English has beendeethnicized 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 ofthe millennium. In the 2004 survey discussed earlier, high school students associatedFrench with modernity and openness to the world, but also with colonization. Whenasked to choose among the four languages of Algeria the one they associated most with apainful past, 53% chose French, around 21% dialectal Arabic, over 15% Berber, andaround 11% Literary Arabic. These findings are confirmed by responses to one statementin the Likert scale activity. With the statement I associate French with colonization, over47% 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 astatistical point of view, age and gender variables were not significant. However, thedifference in the size of cities was significant (see Table 4). The larger the city the fewerinformants associated French with a painful past (colonialism), and vice versa. The resultshere indicate that the French colonial era is an enduring memory in less populated townsand cities, where the largest part of Algerias urban population lives. In these areas, whereextended families with a rural or recently urbanized background tend to live together,

Table 4. Association of French with painful past and size of town.

Statement Large town Medium town Small town p