Language Policy and Planning in Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Tunisia: Some Common Issues

Robert B. Kaplan

Professor Emeritus, Applied Linguistics, University of Southern California. Mailing Address: PO Box 577, Port Angeles, WA 98362 USA

Richard B. Baldauf Jr.

Associate Professor of TESOL, School of Education, University of Queensland, QLD 4072 Australia

Introduction

This volume brings together four language policy and planning studies related to Africa. (See the 'Series Overview' for a more general discussion of the nature of the series, Appendix A for the 22 questions each study set out to address, and Kaplan et al. 2000 for a discussion of the underlying concepts for the studies themselves.) In this paper, in addition to providing an introductory summary of the material covered in these studies, we want to draw out and discuss some of the more general issues raised by them.

Although Algeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Tunisia do not represent a geographic cluster, they do have in common a number of factors:

• all four of the countries are participants in francophonie, the association of French speaking nations;

• following global trends, in the three francophone countries, there is evidence that language shift is occurring away from French as a lingua franca (Wright, 2006) to a greater use of English;

• Arabicisation is a national issue in Algeria and Tunisia (Sirles, 1999) and Arabic use is a regional and religious issue in the north of Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria;

• geographically, they represent two distinct clusters: Algeria and Tunisia in the Maghreb in the northwest corner of the continent, and Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria in Central West Africa. Thus, the group is not geographically coherent except in the sense that all the polities lie in western Africa;

• Algeria and Tunisia (see, Daoud, this volume) are in fact part of a coherent grouping – Morocco (see, Marley, 2000) is the remaining major member of this Magrhebian group, and all have French as a major exogenous language.

• Côte d'Ivoire is also a French-speaking polity, and Nigeria – where French has been made the second official language (Omoniyi, 2003) – has joined the francophonie.

French has been maintained as an important language in many of France's former colonies, especially in Africa. In post-independence Africa, there has developed a sharp rivalry between Arabic and French, and ongoing competition between these two languages and national/ethnic languages for the position of official language. The role of the French language in the Francophone world must be set in the context of the preoccupations that Francophones themselves have about the importance of their own languages, about their relationship to France and about post-independence governments not only from a postcolonial point of view but also from the standpoint of an understanding that national/ethnic languages are also an essential dimension of their development. Consequently, French has become a language of communication between cultures as well as a vehicle for transmitting French culture. (See, Salhi, 2002 for further discussion of French language in the Francophone world; Breton, 2003 for some discussion of sub-Saharan Africa).

Algeria

Algeria constitutes an interesting subject for the study of language policy and language planning thanks to its almost unique history in the Arabic-speaking world: it is the only Arab country which lived under French assimilationist colonial rule for 132 years. Less than four years after Algeria's independence (1962), Gordon (1966: 246) wrote: 'Algeria's future will remain a fascinating case-study for Orientalists and for those interested in "development" and "modernisation".' The language issue during both the pre-independence and post-independence eras further marks this uniqueness within Africa and the Maghreb, as Djité has pointed out: 'Nowhere else in Africa has the language issue been so central in the fight against colonialism [as in Algeria]' (1992: 16). In short, the most severe problem that Algeria has had to cope with since its independence lies in language.

After the three countries of the Maghreb achieved their independence – Morocco on 2 March 1956, Tunisia on 20 March 1956, and Algeria on 5 July 1962 – it was the Algerian leadership who demonstrated ideological intransigence in recovering both language and identity. Algeria has emerged as 'the most vociferous in proclaiming its Arab Muslim identity' (Gordon, 1978: 151). The language planning activities, more systematic and assertive in Algeria than in the other two Maghrebi countries, have been carried out with revolutionary zeal. A number of observers (Abu-Haidar, 2000: 161; Grandguillaume, 2004: 33–34) have identified in this zeal a major cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria and of the civil war that has ravaged the country since the early 1990s. Ephraim Tabory and Mala Tabory (1987: 64) have summarised Algeria's interest in language planning and policy as follows:

The Algerian situation is complex, as it is at a crossroad of tensions between French, the colonial language, and Arabic, the new national language; Classical Arabic versus colloquial Algerian Arabic; and the various Berber dialects versus Arabic. The lessons from the Algerian situation may be usefully applied to analogous situations by states planning their linguistic, educational and cultural policies.

Through the decade of the 1990s, Algeria frequently made headlines because of its internal instability and the civil war. Recent developments have allowed the country to overcome this chaotic state; they have gradually put an end to the hostilities and, at the same time, have almost obliterated the language-in-education planning activities (Arabisation) current since independence.

On 8 April 2004, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the outgoing President of Algeria, was re-elected in a 'landslide victory.' Although there were reports of irregularities, foreign journalists qualified this election, which was endorsed by some foreign monitors, as a 'proper contest' (Guardian Weekly, 2004: 12). According to The Economist (2004: 40), the election was 'the cleanest that Algeria, or, for that matter, any Arab country, has ever seen'; thus, the 'first legitimate election' since the country got its independence from France in 1962.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a former diplomat, was also a member of the hardline clique that seized power in 1965, three years after the end of the Algerian war of independence. In 1999, handpicked by the military – who have, since liberation, always held the real power in Algeria – he was elected as the sole candidate after all his rivals withdrew from the competition as a protest against massive fraud. For five years, the lack of legitimacy in his administration prevented him from carrying out long-awaited social and economic reforms. However, despite his weak performance, President Bouteflika was returned to power in April 2004, probably because he had managed to reduce the violence that had plagued Algeria since the beginning of the 1990s.

After the success of the religious fundamentalists of the Islamic Salvation Army (FIS) in the 1991 parliamentary elections, the authorities cancelled the electoral process and the FIS's response took the form of an armed struggle against the secular state apparatus. In the ensuing decade, Algerians suffered from a bloody civil war in which the death toll has been estimated at between 120,000 and 200,000 victims. At the present time, displaced populations are estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million persons, and the Algerian security forces are believed to have arrested and 'disappeared' more than 7,000 persons. Furthermore, thousands of highly skilled and qualified mainly francophone Algerians were forced into exile, with the majority settling in France.

During his first term in office, President Bouteflika promoted national reconciliation; he brokered an amnesty programme in the form of the 'Law on Civil Harmony' as the result of which 25,000 Islamists agreed to stop their armed struggle. Since then, violence has fallen off, and the presumably outgoing presidential candidate reaped the benefit of that strategy in the election of April 2004. Part of the electorate may well have chosen to retain Bouteflika in office for the stability that he had managed to bring to the country and that he promised to maintain if he were re-elected. Exhausted by a decade of indescribable violence and also probably tired of constant changes of governments and leaders – Algeria had had five presidents between 1991 and 1999 – the population may have preferred Bouteflika to continue the programme of reforms to which he had committed his country during his first term in office. According to The Economist (2004: 41) 'Algeria has become a far gentler place. [...] The country's economic fortunes have also brightened. [...] [But] Mr Bouteflika has plenty of work on his hands.'

Between 1999 and 2004, President Bouteflika initiated a number of reforms most of which were not implemented because of the lack of legitimacy in his administration: opposition from within the power circles (conservatives) and without (Islamic Fundamentalists) prevented the initiation of major educational reforms that might have undermined the official language policy in place since the independence of the country. However, Bouteflika did succeed in launching a national debate over a number of sensitive issues that had previously been considered anathema. While none of his predecessors had had the courage to tackle such issues, he had, in his frequent speeches, dared to break a number of taboos. He raised such sensitive issues as those related to Algerian history, religious practices and the linguistic reality of the country. This new political discourse on language has to be seen in the light of the language policies implemented after 1962. Algerian experience with language-in-education planning can roughly be considered in two major periods: the first from 1962 to the 1970s, characterised by bilingualism in French and Standard/Literary Arabic, and the second from the 1970s to the present, characterised by monolingualism in Standard Arabic for the majority of the population and French-Arabic bilingualism for a small minority, mainly for the children of those in power.

Soon after he was elected in April 1999, Bouteflika took everyone by surprise when he suddenly started dealing with the language issue in public. In May 1999, he declared: 'It is unthinkable ... to spend ten years study in Arabic pure sciences when it would only take one year in English' (Le Matin, 1999). The President thus appeared to have tacitly acknowledged the failure of Arabisation, at least in science and technology teaching, and to envisage a return to bilingualism in these fields. For him 'There has never been a language problem in Algeria, but simply rivalry and fights for French-trained executives' positions' (El Watan, 1999a). Not only did Bouteflika make such comments, but at the same time he constantly spoke in French in his public speeches, and he also demonstrated his skill in Literary Arabic. He adopted the bilingual fluency in French and Arabic in imitation of the Moroccan leadership as exemplified by the late king, Hasan II; he wanted to project a role model for bilingual Algerian citizen.

Bouteflika's public use of language was clearly opposed to the practice of his predecessors; indeed, he purposefully violated the law known as 'Act N° 91–05' (implemented on 5 July 1998) which prohibited any and all official public use of any language other than Arabic. Bouteflika did not hide his own awareness that he was infringing the law. In an interview with a French magazine, he said: 'When I speak French, some people write in the press that I am in breach of the Constitution.' (Paris Match, 1999: 35) Furthermore, Bouteflika admitted publicly that 'our [Algerian] culture is plural,' in sharp contrast to his predecessors' insistence on Algerians being solely 'Arabs and Moslems'. Bouteflika even went so far as to claim a French contribution to Algeria's cultural heritage. In a press conference that he gave at the Crans Montana Summit in Switzerland in autumn 1999, he said: 'We attended French school and we are thus heavily influenced by Descartes' (Benrabah, 2004: 96). In addition, Bouteflika attended the Francophonie Summit in Beirut in October 2002, even though Algerian authorities had rejected the whole idea of an institutionalised Francophonie, considering it to be potentially 'neocolonialist'. In the summer of 1999, Bouteflika declared:

Algeria does not belong to Francophonie, but there is no reason for us to have a frozen attitude towards the French language which taught us so many things and which, at any rate, opened [for us] the window of French culture (Cherrad-Benchefra & Derradji, 2004: 168).

Bouteflika's constant use of French created an uproar among those of the elite who were in favour of total Arabisation and of total eradication of French. In the autumn of 1999, the President of the Committee for Foreign Affairs at the People's National Assembly (the Algerian Parliament) wrote privately to Bouteflika, then the newly elected president, reproaching him for his use of French in public; in answer, Bouteflika made the criticism public, and the deputy was forced to resign from the Assembly. Bouteflika also received a letter signed by several members of the High Council for the Arabic Language, warning him against his public use of French and taking strong exception to 'the francophone lobby in the presidency.' In a televised speech, Bouteflika reminded the authors of that message that it was not the mission of the High Council for the Arabic Language to choose the president's entourage for him (El Watan, 2000: 23); further, he declared: 'For Algeria, I will speak French, Spanish and English, and, if necessary, Hebrew.' In August, 1999, he declared on live television:

Let it be known that Algeria is part of the world and must adapt to it and that Arabic is the national and official language. This being said, let it be known that an uninhibited opening up to other international languages – at least to those used in the United Nations – does not constitute perjury. In this domain, we are neither more Arab nor more intelligent than our brothers in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine or anywhere else. To move forward, one must break taboos. This is the price we have to pay to modernise our identity. Chauvinism and withdrawal are over. They are sterile. They are destructive (El Watan, 1999b: 3).

Thus, the language situation in Algeria continues to be confused, though there seems to be evidence of a reasonable resolution to the arguments and the arrival of a more rational language (and language-in-education) policy. The Algerian situation provides a good example of individual agency in language planning (Abdelaziz Bouteflika), illustrating yet again the impact that an individual can have on language choice in a particular polity.

Côte d'Ivoire

Côte d'Ivoire is a multilingual polity, encompassing some 60 African languages, but it has retained the French language as the sole official language of education and administration, as per Article 2 of its constitution. Many inaccurate descriptions of the language situation were disseminated during the colonial period, and these inaccuracies have perpetuated the notion that the language situation there may involve literally hundreds of languages. As a consequence, it is widely believed that, in such a complex linguistic situation, the selection of any African language as the official national language would trigger tribal warfare. Thus, the complex language situation cannot lend itself to the development of a workable language (or language-in-education) plan. It is argued that the only hope for peace and national unity, and the only way to provide access to science and technology (i.e., to modernisation) lies in maintaining French as the sole official language. Such a position commits the government to inaction – that is, to maintain the linguistic status quo. On the other hand, there is evidence that the traditional descriptions of the language situation exaggerate the degree of linguistic diversity and give the false impression of divisiveness within the population. In part, this difficulty stems from the fact that national boundaries in Africa were not drawn up on the basis of linguistic and cultural criteria, but rather reflect European colonialist ambitions. Thus, the languages spoken in Côte d'Ivoire are shared with other neighbouring polities; e.g.:

• the Kwa languages are shared with Ghana;

• the Kru languages are shared with Liberia;

• the Mandè languages are shared with Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso, and

• the Gur languages are shared with Burkino Faso.