Algeria in Others' Languages (review)

The issue of national languages has been a complex one for nearly all postcolonial countries. Various nations' differing choices of official language(s) attest to this difficulty, as does the fact that francophone Algerian writers have been criticized for using French ever since independence. This edited book collection (the outcome of a 1996 conference at Cornell University) maps out the politics of language use in Algeria, a country that is in many ways emblematic of postcolonial conditions. The book is beautifully edited and tightly organized into three different sections. The first examines the specificity of the linguistic situation in postcolonial Algeria; the second provides the sociopolitical background for the language issue; and the final section highlights the symbolic aspects of the question.

Algeria is in a paradoxical linguistic situation: it is a multilingual nation in which people speak dialectal Arabic, Tamazight (Berber languages), French (the language of the former colonizer), as well as a mixture of these languages. Yet, its sole official language is standard Arabic, which no one actually speaks (Khatibi). The contributors to the collection take a variety of positions on the topic: at one end of the spectrum, Gafaiti is the only one who seeks to provide a fairly sympathetic view of successive governments' policies of Arabization, a viewpoint one rarely hears in the US. Whereas most scholars tend to support the Kabyle culturalist movement, whose goal is to preserve Berber languages and cultures, Gafaiti finds the Berberist discourse of ethnic exclusivity potentially as dangerous as the exclusivity of the Arabization movement. At the other end of the spectrum, Valensi makes the overstatement that French has now become a vernacular Algerian language and Khanna concludes, perhaps too optimistically, that French in postcolonial Algeria is now a decolonized language. In contract, Bensmaia perceives Arabic as the national language and French as a vehicular, but not vernacular, language. Whereas Saadi-Mokrane makes a distinction between Arabization and Algerianization, Gafaiti suggests that there are more continuities between the two than most critics reveal. Berger sees dialectal oral Arabic as the language that brings together the heterogeneous cultures of Algeria. The book closes on Cixous's powerfully poetic meditation on the hospitality of languages.

The contributors, most of whom are originally from Algeria, are overall quite critical of the government's imposition of standard Arabic. They all agree that linguistic issues are connected not just to political choices, but to economic ones as well. Finally, several chapters make intriguing, if somewhat speculative, connections between the linguistic situation, the sociopolitical violence in contemporary Algeria, and the status of women (Berger, Carlier, Khanna). In summary, Algeria in Others' Languages is an informative, thought-provoking addition to interdisciplinary research on the Maghreb. Africanists and postcolonial studies scholars will not want to miss this book, which should be on the shelves of any serious library.