Language Conflict in Algeria

From Colonialism to Post-Independence

Mohamed Benrabah

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847699664
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This is a book about the use of languages as a proxy for conflict. It traces the history of Algeria from colonization by the French in 1830 to the celebration of 50 years of independence in 2012, and examines the linguistic issues that have accompanied this turbulent period. The book begins with an examination of 'language conflict' and related concepts, and then applies them to both the French colonists' language policies and the Arabization campaigns which followed independence. This is followed by an analysis of the rivalry between the English and French languages in independent Algeria. The book concludes with a study of the language choices made by Algerian writers and the complex tensions which arose from these choices among intellectuals in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

1 Circumnavigating a Term: ‘Language Conflict’ and Related Concepts

Language conflict can occur anywhere there is language contact, chiefly in multilingual communities

Peter Nelde (2002: 330)

[C]olonial bilingualism cannot be compared to just any linguistic dualism

Albert Memmi (1974: 107)

[L]anguage planning activity may itself ultimately be the cause of serious problems as well as conflicts

Ernst Hakon Jahr (1993: 1)

[S]trategies of resistance [are] a typical reaction to overt political and linguistic oppression

Rajend Mesthrie et al. (2000: 333)

Several notions and concepts linked to the idea of ‘language conflict’ are discussed in this chapter. Most of them will serve as reference points later in the book. By way of introducing these terminological terms, examples from around the world have been gathered to illustrate manifestations of language conflict. And emphasis has been placed on issues connected with the linguistic effects of colonialism, and the consequences of decolonization and nation-building.

Language Contact and Domination

One thing that all demonstrations of language conflict have in common is that they have originated in contact situations, chiefly in multilingual communities. A simple definition of language contact can be the use of more than one language in the same place – geographical area or speech community – at the same time. It is interesting to note that not all language contacts produce strife for there are contacts that lack any conflict component. Language conflict arises when people try to carve out a space for their own tongue which expands to other linguistic ‘territories’. The metaphorical expression of ‘language spread’, coined by Robert Cooper, refers to the processes that allow an increase in the number of users and uses of a language (Cooper, 1982: 6). When languages spread to other linguistic ‘spaces’, they produce ‘tension, resentment, and differences of opinion that are characteristic of every competitive social structure’ (Nelde, 1997: 289). Conflicts and the bitter argument over linguistic issues that emerge as a result of linguistic rivalry and competition are often called ‘language wars’.

The origin of the metaphorical expression ‘language war’ goes back to the early 20th century. Between 1890 and 1913, a bitter argument took place among the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine. Like the Jews of Eastern Europe and the United States, members of the Yishuv began using Hebrew as a vernacular. Language became thus an essential marker of nationhood, or the mechanisms of we-group-building and the main patterns of national integration. These are forms of inclusion and exclusion in the collective or national identity, and forms of ‘Othering’ to produce the antithesis of ‘We’. In Ottoman Palestine, there was rivalry between Hebrew and two varieties of German considered as ‘enemies’. The first ‘enemy’ was Yiddish, the mother tongue of European Jews. Yiddish offered a plausible alternative as a language of national individuality, and public linguistic fights proved intense. By 1910, the struggle between the two Jewish linguistic forms ended in favour of Hebrew even though strong campaigns against Yiddish continued until 1936. The fight against the second ‘enemy’ was a quick battle and became known as the Language War. The rival was German, widely accepted as the language of advanced science and learning at the beginning of the 20th century. To spread their language and culture in the Middle East, the Germans created in 1901 a network of schools ranging from kindergarten to teachers’ training college known as Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden. They aimed at offsetting the influence of French, another world language supported by the Paris-based Jewish organization Alliance Israëlite Universelle. In 1912, the Hilfsverein began building a technological tertiary institute in Haifa. The board of the institute based in Berlin announced in 1913 that the new institution would use Hebrew as the language of instruction for general subjects and German for science and technology. To justify their choice, the board argued that Hebrew could not handle scientific concepts. The board’s ruling angered pro-Hebrew teachers and students from the Hilfsverein who joined strikes and public demonstrations. These actions had a positive effect and the board’s decision was revoked (Spolsky, 2009: 186–188; Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999: 185; 2001: 357–358).

Interethnic language conflicts are by far the most common types of linguistic competition. Rivalry between Yiddish and Hebrew mentioned above is an example of this. And the struggle between German and French in the Palestine of the early 20th century shows how nations in pursuit of geopolitical supremacy can produce antagonisms. But tensions can also occur within an individual who masters more than one language, a case described as inter-lingual conflict. The complex problem associated with bilinguals concerns the question of identity crisis. While many bilingual people do not have any problem with identity, others find it a problematic issue, especially in contexts of domination (Nelde, 2002: 329–330; Wei, 2006: 11).

Moving back to language spread, its ultimate goal in totalizing forms of dominance is linguistic supremacy to wipe out other languages and cultures. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the usual type of organized language conflict rose from the contact between different linguistic groups with unequal socio-political status. The dominant language group controlled the important institutions in the major social, political and economic spheres. Within this environment, the primary cause of language conflict came from the dominant group’s attempt to exclude members of the dominated community from social elevation in the political and economic sectors. And wars of words were ignited by dominant and dominated groups alike. For example, linguistic rivalry in the history of the United States was initiated by the ruling classes and in colonized societies by colonials.

The US never established an official language or a language academy, and since its independence from England, linguistic disputation has recurred regularly with periods of tolerance punctuated by periods of restrictive orientation. Intolerance towards non-Anglophone tongues occurred when an increase in immigration accelerated language diversity. Linguistic pluralism became in this way a salient public issue with the attendant legal protection of English and the restriction of other tongues. Anti-immigrant politics took the form of policies to ‘Anglicize’ and to ‘Americanize’ the immigrant. As a result of this, linguistic polarization and the politics of language became just as visceral as issues of race or religion. In truth, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) feared for their dominant position and the loss of political control over key institutions in the country. At times of uncertainty, WASPs sought ‘wedge issues’ to exploit for partisan purposes. They used the language question as a ‘lightning rod’ for political attacks from their opponents who addressed the actual underlying causes of the conflict, that is, social and political problems (Crawford, 2000: 1; 2001; Dicker, 1996: 47).

The expression ‘linguistic war’, often used synonymously with linguistic imperialism, has traditionally referred to the international dominance of languages in conjunction with imperial domination. Historically, conquerors in empires and colonies have imposed their own language on subjugated populations to eliminate a diversity of indigenous cultures and tongues. Linguists call this type of language destruction ‘linguicide’ or ‘language death’ – an extreme form of linguicide is ‘linguistic genocide’ committed through military force or educational systems. The result is language substitution: a tongue ceases to be spoken when it is no longer transmitted from one generation to another, and this creates a disruption in intergenerational transmission. Language death happens either because the speakers of the language die out naturally or are made to disappear, or because its speakers gradually adopt another distinct language, leaving no speakers of the original tongue. One way or the other, languages die from loss of speakers.

Central to linguistic imperialism as a frame of analysis is the notion of linguicism, that is, ‘ideologies, structures, and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources […] between groups which are defined on the basis of language’ (Phillipson, 1992: 47). As a concept, linguicism captures the phenomenon of hierarchizing languages and marginalizing speakers of minorized languages, in similar ways to racism and sexism. The establishment of unjust and violent structures in societies in general and colonized communities in particular generates the necessary conditions for linguistic oppression and conflict. In the past, colonial ideologies justified linguistic violence in the name of language and ethnic superiority. So, colonizers forced individuals to acquire the dominant alien language and denied them the right to maintain their native tongue(s) in prestigious functions (e.g. education). What is more, the colonizer’s monolingualism and accent were allocated much higher prestige than the colonized’s linguistic forms, be they his native tongues or his accented or non-accented ways of using the colonial language. Colonialism imposed this unequal relationship between languages wherein dominated speakers and languages were stigmatized as ‘primitive’ subjects using ‘dialects’, mere ‘patois’ and so on, and dominant speakers and their language glorified. This is typical of what Donaldo Macedo and Lilia Bartolomé have called ‘colonial bilingualism’ (Macedo & Lilia Bartolomé, 1999: 38). Albert Memmi, who described the colonial situation in North Africa in the 1950s, defined colonial bilingualism as follows:

the colonized’s mother tongue, that which is sustained by his feelings, emotions and dreams, that in which his tenderness and wonder are expressed, thus that which holds the greatest emotional impact, is precisely the one which is the least valued. It has no stature in the country or in the concert of peoples. If he wants to obtain a job, make a place for himself, exist in the community and the world, he must first bow to the language of his masters. In the linguistic conflict within the colonized, his mother tongue is that which is crushed. He himself sets about discarding this infirm language, hiding it from the sight of strangers. In short, colonial bilingualism is neither a purely bilingual situation in which an indigenous tongue coexists with a purist’s language (both belonging to the same world of feeling), nor a simple polyglot richness benefiting from an extra but relatively neuter alphabet; it is a linguistic drama. (Memmi, 1974: 107–108)

The concept of linguistic imperialism has been extended to describe cases where one language dominates other idioms within a community, especially in decolonized countries (Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994: 2223). In recent years, theorists in Applied Linguistics and Critical Sociolinguistics, and particularly Critical World Englishes working in the global spread of English, have offered astute insights into the field of language competition. In the early 1990s, Robert Phillipson introduced the concepts of linguistic imperialism and linguicism to account for the expansion of English around the world. Phillipson defined (English) linguistic imperialism as a set of practices through which the hegemony of the ex-colonial language ‘is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages’ (Phillipson, 1992: 47). He explored language dominance in the context of the relationships between the Centre and Periphery, a division of the world based on Johan Galtung’s cultural imperialism theory (1971). According to Galtung, the Centre, or the technologically advanced societies of the West, is always dominating the Periphery by keeping less developed communities in subordinate status. When members of the Periphery choose education in the ‘centre’ (ex-colonial) language or promote it in their country, they become themselves internal colonialists and agents of linguicism.

In ex-colonized states, members of the power elite set up the necessary conditions for a language to become dominant. To do so, they often reproduce their colonial master’s ideologies acquired during colonization to create and/or maintain a hierarchical relationship between the different languages of their country. They thus recycle old colonial practices to minorize local tongues because of their alleged difficulties in serving beyond the limits of their community, particularly in the complex modern fields of science and technology. By contrast, the dominant language is sanctified as the language of civilization (Portuguese, and Spanish, and French, and English and to a lesser extent German in colonial times), the language of modernity and technological progress (English more recently), the language of God and (pan-)national unity (Arabic in much Arabist-fundamentalist discourse). In sum, officialized discourses usually wrapped in nationalistic justification – in the name of national and cultural loyalty – use a linguicist terminology based on stigmatization and minorization to dominate the minds and lives of the speakers of subordinate languages. Dominated speakers internalize these ideologies in a pervasive and deep-rooted manner. Governmental institutions such as the educational system transmit mainstream ideologies and attendant sociolinguistic stereotypes. To Phillipson, language teaching in schools is one of the most powerful linguicist tools: ‘Linguicism occurs […] if priority is given in teacher training, curriculum development, and school timetables to one language’ (Phillipson, 1992: 47). What is more, just as in colonial times, schools function as ‘language killers’.

Linguistic Consequences of Colonialism: Ireland, a Case Study

By way of an extended illustration of the problems of linguistic competition and colonialism, I shall consider in this section language conflicts in Anglophone regions, more precisely, in colonial and post-colonial Ireland. In fact, Irish history is more or less similar to that of Algeria and can be instructive to understand the linguistic problems of the latter country. An examination of the politics of language in the British Empire shows two distinct tendencies, depending on whether one considers the first wave of European colonialism or the second. The first wave began in the early 15th century with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in northern Morocco, the creation of colonies in India and other Asian countries, and the conquest of the Americas. The second wave started in the 19th century when the annexation of overseas territories through military and economic dominance turned into direct control and lasted until the end of colonialism, after World War II (WWII).

The conquest of Ireland by the Tudor Dynasty in the 16th and 17th centuries corresponds to the first wave of European colonization. The British governed their Irish colony through an assimilatory policy applied in permanently incorporated territories (‘direct rule’). Colonizers viewed the maintenance of the Irish language, culture and religion (Catholic Church) as a barrier to cultural and political assimilation (Anglicization). Colonial policies and ideologies used to Anglicize Ireland were a classic. They had the sort of arrogance characteristic of conquering powers: although racially there was no difference between the Irish and the English, colonial ethnologists used racial theory to connect the natives of Ireland with non-White races for the purpose of seeing them as savages worth civilizing. As for language and education, in the early 17th century, an English aristocrat wanted his children ‘bred in England and abroad in the world, and not to have their youth infected with the leaven of Ireland’ (Foster, 1989: 14). The English conquerors imposed their mother tongue on subjugated Irishmen to eradicate local languages, customs, thinking and values.

By comparison, during the second colonial wave, English linguistic practices showed less assertive assimilatory purposes, especially in education which formed the basis of language policy. Late 18th and early 19th-centuries England reluctantly expanded its overseas territorial possessions because of practical considerations: it sought to expand trade and not territory that could prove difficult and expensive to administer. England prioritized ‘indirect rule’ to encourage local forms of control and institutions as a way of enforcing colonial government policy. In the areas of culture and education, the English respected local customs and traditions, and they encouraged vernacular languages as subjects and instructional media in schools (Bulliet et al., 2009: 615; Ferguson, 2006: 1; Galbraith, 1963: 4, 64; Tsabedze, 1994: 7–10).

The two English modes of cultural and linguistic domination produced different reactions from the part of ex-colonized subjects. In the heady early days of independence, the Indian elite’s sense of alienation led to heated debates about the appropriateness of the ex-colonial language in post-British India. Authorities planned the replacement of English by local native tongue(s), namely Hindi. For example, the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, declared that ‘within one generation’ English would no longer be used in his country. Finally, in the 1970s–1980s, most Indians would admit that the ex-colonial language was as much part of the linguistic profile of India as Hindi. They described it as ‘a non-aligned variety of English’ which allowed different communities in and out of India to live together and preserve their own language and culture. With the passage of time, resentment caused by colonialism, which has meaning only for the older generation, died down in the minds of younger generations. This is not the case in Ireland. In 1978, the Irish writer and poet Michael Harnett renounced English in his book titled A Farewell to English. He then published three volumes in Irish Gaelic, the indigenous tongue of Ireland. However, following the critical reception of these books, he changed his mind in 1985 and began publishing in English again. It is remarkable that Harnett declined using English 56 years after England’s rule ended in Ireland. While I am willing to admit that one swallow does not make a summer, I do not altogether exclude individuals’ reactions and the extremes they will go to because they still bear the scars of past colonial excesses. Harnett’s momentary ‘silence’ comes from at least three linguistic effects produced by English domination: linguicide, the bitterness caused by the pain of language loss, and decolonizing nationalist elites imposing their own form of linguistic dominance. Each of these three consequences is presented briefly in the following sections (Crowley, 2005: 207; Crystal, 2003: 184; McCrum et al., 1992: 22, 330).

Ireland represents a vivid example of language death in England’s ex-colonial possessions. When Eire, which constituted well over four-fifths of ‘the Emerald Isle’, became officially independent in 1937, there were no Irish Gaelic monolingual speakers left. Only 2% of the population spoke it, as Irish–English bilinguals and the remaining 98% were English monolinguals. English had displaced the indigenous tongue to hold the position of majority language. The causes of language displacement in Ireland are due as much to the impact of political domination as to the social and economic changes. In addition to Anglicization, colonizers confiscated lands extensively and depleted Irish resources. Their overuse of agrarian lands resulted in failed crops that set off famines regularly. For example, the Great (potato) Famine of the 1840s caused the death of around a million and a half, and over a million and a half more emigrated to escape it – a depopulation process described by some analysts as a ‘demographic holocaust’. In the end, English colonization proved devastating for Irish people at home and abroad (Foster, 1989: 324; Harris, 1991: 37–38; Joannon, 2006: 263; Melchers & Shaw, 2003: 72).

In Ireland, language was a divisive issue in both colonial and post-colonial periods. Under the English rule, Irishmen used language and religion as two conduits of anti-English feeling: Catholicism and the Gaelic tongue were associated with Irish anti-colonial struggle. There was an antipathy among the Irish to speaking English, even when they could. For example, during the first half of the 16th century, Shane O’Neill called ‘The Proud’ refused ‘to writhe his mouth in clattering English’. Similarly, when the anti-English rebel Red Hugh O’Donnell invaded the western province of Connacht in 1595, he ‘spared no male between fifteen and sixty years old who was unable to speak Irish’ (Foster, 1989: 30). Then the national movement for Irish independence developed in the 19th century. Irish nationalists belonged to two wings separated by the weight given to the language issue in their conception of we-group-building. Political nationalists considered language as a side issue, while cultural nationalists viewed it as a basis for reinforcing the sentiments of oneness and Irish nationality. At the end of the 19th century, radical nationalists, alarmed by the dramatic retreat of the indigenous language, sought to reverse Anglicization. This led to the formation, in July 1893, of The Gaelic League whose activities involved the preservation and revival of Irish as a spoken language and its introduction into the educational curriculum at all levels (Crowley, 2005: 102–103, 140; Foster, 1989: 448; Ó Riagáin, 1997: 5).

The world of literature also joined in the de-Anglicization movement. It established the ‘Irish literary revival’ to create a literature that would culturally validate a distinct Irish identity. But this move gave rise to an ideologically charged opposition between two conceptions of the language of Irish literature, and attendant attitudes towards bilingualism. The first view, held by members of The Gaelic League, favoured Irish Gaelic as the ‘authentic’ mode of literary expression in Ireland. This ‘narrow nationalism’ implied the equation of Irishness with Catholicism and with Irish literature written exclusively in Gaelic. It favoured Catholic Irishmen and rejected Anglo-Irish Protestants as well as those who chose to write in English. Those who rejected the Irish-only approach represented the second view on the language of Irish literature. William Butler Yeats and James Joyce were two major authors whose definition of Irishness collided with tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Two Cultural Wars in 50 Years
• 1 Circumnavigating a Term: ‘Language Conflict’ and Related Concepts
• 2 Frenchification: Annihilating Indigenous Languages
• 3 Arabization: At War with Diversity
• 4 Geopolitics and Language Rivalry: French versus English
• 5 Writers and Language as a Battlefield: ‘Authenticity’ versus ‘Hybridity’
• Epilogue: The Language Question As a ‘Lightning Rod’
• References
• Index