Competition between four “world” languages in Algeria

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.

2. Indicators for determining language power

Since the 1970s, several authors have suggested indicators and factors that determine language power in a community, including the global community. One of the pioneers is William F. Mackey who had long experience researching bilingualism and language contact (e.g., Mackey 1973, 1976). Mackey argued that around 100 indicators could be used to measure the strength of a language and its international standing. To him, the final choice of parameters depends on the purpose the researcher has in mind – the emphasis is often political, descriptive, or comparative (Mackey 1973, 14–15). This is why different authors from different fields of interest have used different formulas. But when one considers the various criteria used by sociologists, geolinguists, political scientists, 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):

• 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, 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:

• 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.

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/scientific 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-continental” 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 intercontinental 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 intellectual 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.

3. The concept of “world” language

In the literature on world language dominance, authors can be roughly divided into two separate groups. The first one consists of those who refer to English as the only “world” or “global” language, with no other language deserving this label. For example, Crystal (1997, 359–360; 2003a, 22; 2003b, 106–109) and Graddol (2006, 9, 12) belong to this category. The second group of writers prefer a pluralist approach arguing that there are a few contenders for the position of “world” language. Interestingly, most of these scholars are non-Anglophone, and it will be informative to look at some of their definitions of the concept of “world” language. The work of two authors, Salikoko Mufwene and Ulrich Ammon, will be considered in the remaining part of this section.

Mufwene (2013, 42–43) gives the label “world” language to several ex-colonial languages, namely English, French, Russian, and Spanish. This label comes from their role as lingua francas, i.e., languages which extend over several language areas. They are also spoken as vernaculars by non-native populations ethnically different from the nationality 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 it the world’s “foremost ‘major language’” because of its numerical strength (demographics) and its limited reach: it is spoken in China and the diaspora only. By contrast, Mufwene classifies Arabic as a “world” language owing to its religious/ritual use among the world’s Muslim community estimated at 1.57 billion (Postel-Vinay 2009, 3). Such classification of Arabic is of course questionable. The ecclesiastical power of this language overshadows one basic principle of modern linguistics: natural languages are spoken and speech is primary. Rote learning and reciting Koranic verses for daily prayers does not necessarily yield spoken proficiency in Arabic (Benrabah, 2009a, 150). In summary, Mufwene uses three categories to describe languages: “major” languages like Mandarin Chinese, “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 that the former’s function as a lingua franca, since World War II, has outdistanced French and become the “foremost” or “pre-eminent” world language. He thus joins the position of David Crystal and David Graddol, which we have mentioned at the beginning of this section.

The German scholar Ulrich Ammon has been one of the most prolific writers on the measurement 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-label formula described in the preceding section. He favours the plurality of “world” languages on 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 or degrees” of globality/internationality, he distinguishes language “global status” from language “global function”. The former corresponds to one indicator in his four-label descriptive formula, namely “political strength” normally associated with multinational and intercontinental languages. The latter means language “use for global communication” which can be “international” when interlocutors from different nations share the same (multinational) language as L1 – for instance, Spanish in the case of a Spaniard and a Venezuelan – or “interlingual” when the two sides do not have the same linguistic background 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, political strength, economic strength, and cultural strength) to compare English and Spanish. He argues that the global status of these two languages is more or less the same because of 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 languages”, 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 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.

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

Algeria is a multilingual country and this linguistic situation comes from its complex history. The natives of Northern Africa in general and Algeria in particular are the Berbers. From Antiquity to the end of French colonial rule in 1962, the original populations were generally unsuccessful as rulers of their own lands and hence allowed several foreign 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 and remained monolingual in Berber. In the few urban centres located along the coast – all of foreign origin – bilingualism and multilingualism became the norm (Djité 1992, 16; Elimam 2004, 300–301; Morsly 1996, 77).

Several invaders more or less shaped the sociocultural history of Algeria, as well as its sociolinguistic profile. Berbers came under the yoke of the Phoenicians who imposed their Carthaginian 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 a quarter. Spaniards occupied enclaves along the Mediterranean coast intermittently between 1505 and 1792. One of the consequences of this long history of mixing peoples was language contact and its by-product, multilingualism – Berber–Punic, Berber–Punic–Latin, Berber–Arabic, Berber–Arabic–Spanish–Turkish, Berber–Arabic–French, and so on.

Amongst the above-mentioned conquering groups, two left a deep impact on Algeria’s linguistic profile – the Arabs and the French. In the seventh century, the Byzantines were defeated by the Arabs who came from the east to spread Islam. North Africans gradually converted to Islam and by the twelfth century the majority had become “orthodox” Sunni Moslems. As for language, there was something peculiar in the introduction of Arabic in North Africa. Right from the beginning of the Arab invasion, the Arabic language came to be strongly associated with Islam in North Africa (Gellner 1973, 19). So, “[t]he Berbers admitted the superiority of Arabic over their own language, probably because of this link between Arabic and religion, and maybe also because of the respect they felt for the written forms which their own language did not possess” (Bentahila 1983, 2). The Arabic language spread progressively, and more and more Berbers abandoned their mother tongue to become Arabophones (Ageron 1993, 766–767; Julien 1994, 341–366). The adoption of the conquerors’ language by the losing side led to diglossia. The high form known as Classical or Literary Arabic remained the common liturgical language for all 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 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-speaking 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 distinguished 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).

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.

5. Arabic versus French

The universalization of education in independent Algeria led to a dramatic increase in the student population. In 1962, the literacy rate was very low and the population’s thirst for education and knowledge was real. So, the tremendous “hope” generated by the liberation of the country led to a substantial rise in student enrolment. For example, in December 1962, the government made public the following figures: 600,000 children of school age were enrolled in primary school, representing an increase of 80% on the preceding year’s figure, and with 48,000 students in secondary schools, there were far more registrations than in 1961. Subsequently, the number of enrolments in primary and secondary schools rose from 3.9 million in 1979 to 7.8 million in 2003, and reached 8.2 million in September 2011. As a result of this, the literacy rate went up from around 10% in 1962 to 52% in 1990, and rose to 70% at the beginning of the millennium. So today the majority is presumably literate in Literary Arabic (Bennoune 2000, 225; CIA 2013; Gordon 1966, 196).

From a quantitative point of view, the results of linguistic Arabization have been spectacular. Although French dominated the media, education, government, and administration in the colonial era, the use of this language has diminished in a number of higher domains since independence. Thus, the functions allocated to institutional Arabic have expanded. In addition to the Ministry of Education where de-Frenchification is almost complete, 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 educational sector, Literary Arabic is the exclusive medium of instruction in primary and secondary schools and in the humanities at the university level (Benrabah 2007b, 100). However, 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 socioeconomic 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 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, undermines 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 language concerned. Creativity requires the presence of favourable conditions to generate the quality of life necessary for increasing the cultural size of a language. The absence of these conditions in the Arab world encourages the international emigration of its highly qualified population. The Arab brain drain – mainly towards the West and to the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – seriously undermines the “knowledge (intellectual) capital” of Arabic-speaking nations. According to the 2002 report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) “Surveys of highly qualified Arabs living abroad indicate that their principal reasons for leaving relate to the absence of a positive societal environment and facilities that would allow them to play their role in the knowledge system and in the development of their countries” (UNDP 2002, 144, emphasis added). In its report compiled in 2003, the UNDP highlights three deficits afflicting the Arab world: freedom, women’s 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 “acquisition” and knowledge “production”. For reasons of space, only the former component will be considered here. Disseminating knowledge in a society can take different routes, translation being one of them. In the Arab world, this mode of knowledge diffusion is in a chaotic situation and reveals the deep crisis of the knowledge capital in the Arabophone zone. 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 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 performance 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).

6. Rivalry between French and English

By the end of the 1990s, Algeria became statistically the second largest French-speaking community in the world after France. This happened in the midst of major social changes 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) 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 elementary 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 mechanism of “elite closure” as an expression of this language expropriation.

The other reason why English failed to supersede French can be found in the multilingual 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 language 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, 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 organization 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 explaining 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 maintenance 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 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 “deethnicization” 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 colonialist” (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 structures, 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).

7. Chinese, a newcomer in the Algerian linguistic landscape

The introduction of the Chinese language in one of the North African bastions of Arabophonia and Francophonia reveals the power of “economic strength” as a strong parameter for measuring and predicting the rise of major languages in a new and globalized world. Being “a buzzword of the moment”, the term globalization changes its meaning depending on the discipline of those involved with its study – cultural studies, sociology, economics, international relations, political theory, art, and linguistics (Eriksen 2007, ix). “Whatever else globalization is”, Réaume and Pinto wrote, “it involves a vast increase in the amount and intensity of interaction amongst peoples all around the globe including contact between speakers of different languages” (2012, 38). So, new linguistic and cultural patterns emerge as a result of a more integrated and interconnected world economy. This favours well-established dominant languages like English, or rising ones like Chinese. Today, China is at the centre of the new globalized economy, and the processes of globalization support its economic development and the rise of its influence in the globe, including that of the Chinese language. The presence of the latter in Algeria seems to corroborate these developments.

China’s increasing economic influence in the modern world transpires in its evolving status as Algeria’s imports partner since the beginning of the millennium. The data in Table 5 shows that China was not ranked among the top six partners of Algeria in 2001. Five years later, it stood at sixth position, then it moved to the second place in 2011. In December 2012, the French media reported that France was (about to be) superseded by China as Algeria’s first imports partner, a position held by the ex-colonial power since Algerian independence in 1962 (Aït-Aoudia 2012, 53; Lamriben 2013, 8; Maussion 2012, 3). Expectedly, the former colonial power was displaced by China in the fall of 2013.

Chinese–French rivalry for economic supremacy in Algeria can be found in the Algerian linguistic landscape. Unknown in the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese writing became quite common as of the 2000s, especially on construction sites. For example, the two pictures in Figure 1 show the English acronym “CSCEC” (“China State Construction-Engineering Corporation”) of a Chinese company accompanied by its equivalent in Chinese script. Far more interesting are the two images presented in Figure 2. Both photographs were taken in June 2010 on the construction site of a motorway built by a Chinese company in the outskirts of the city of Tlemcen, in the west of the country. In the foreground (picture on the left), we have a public road sign written in the country’s only official language, Arabic, and in French, a “tolerated” language but the language of 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.

Figure 1.

Construction site of a Chinese company, CSCEC (China State Construction-Engineering Corporation).

Figure 2.

Visible newcomer: rivalry between Chinese and English, two languages of business.

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 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.