schizophrenia
I'm enrolled in a French class for adults. It's two hours in the evenings, four evenings a week, and it's very small: in the beginning, it was me and a girl about my age who works as a computer specialist at Sonatrach, the big national energy company; recently we were joined by a young man, either in his last year of high school or his first year of college (I can't really tell, and I missed the class where he introduced himself in detail, but he's young and he's a student of some kind).
The professor is French, the son of Algerian immigrés. He moved to Algeria in 2000 in what he describes as part of his own identity quest - and also to escape the increasingly Arab-hostile French climate. We have kind of an understanding between us, which is neat: two second-generation "first-worlders" looking for our roots back in the motherland. Neither one of us really speaks Arabic, although his parents spoke the dialect from time to time at home, and he understands it pretty well.
The two other students are arabisant, meaning both their basic and higher education took place in Arabic. There are also Algerians who are francisant, whose university education took place entirely in French and who received a strong French background in primary school. Nowadays, almost every student is arabisant but conversant in French - although it tends to be, like mine, a sloppy French. Those who don't finish school or don't continue on to university tend to be sloppy in both French and formal Arabic, unless, like some of my cousins, they attended Quranic school as children. The common language between both arabisant and francisant is the darija, the dialect, a rough outgrown Arabic that's related to formal Arabic the way Ebonics is to English, with modified grammar and word usage, and with a little French thrown in. But even the darija changes, from region to region and city to city, such that someone from Tlemcen will use a very different vocabulary from someone in Algiers. And then there's the Imazighen, the Berber, who are likewise educated in Arabic but who speak Amazight dialects all their own.
It's a bizarre, chaotic language situation that manifests itself in different ways in different places. I sat in on a conference in December at my uncle's university in Oran - the subject of which was the preservation of culture and history in a city in southwest Algeria - where participants presented in French or Arabic depending upon educational background, with a moderator who switched frequently between the two. In question-and-answer session arguments broke out more than once between panelists and between panelists and audience members, and professors forgot themselves and darija trampled over the formal language fences - darija and French and Arabic all together, all angry and confused.
My dad, when he was here, spoke French to an Algerian security officer who stopped us while we were looking for rock art - this was down south, where French is rarely spoken (in northern cities like Oran, you hear French all over the place) - as a prestige marker, to signal his level of education and to emphasize that our expedition had a legitimate research purpose. At the end of the conversation he switched to darija, to put the officer at ease, as a gesture of friendliness, familiarity, an "I'm-really-one-of-you" signal. It was interesting - and it worked; when we'd finished, the officer ended up offering us a ride to the bus depot the next town over.
Privately, and outside the country, people know that formal Arabic in Algeria is artificially propped up both by religious pride - it's the language of the Quran - and an educational system that looks down on darija as something less than a language. French education, meanwhile, has become more and more relaxed - even abandonded - as a result of post-revolution efforts to "cleanse" the country of its colonial corruptions, even though it's still necessary for business with Europe, for research, for communication. And darija, the everyman's language, is left in the lurch, despite the fact that day-to-day it's the most uesful of all.
"I wonder what that does to the national psyche," my mom says. As far as I can tell, it induces total schizophrenia.
I hear, a lot, things like: "Don't bother learning darija, it's not worth it"; "You don't need to learn fusha [formal Arabic], nobody speaks it"; "Our language [Arabic, formal Arabic] is being corrupted - we're still in the age of colonisation!" (this from one student who'd heard that another student had to write her university thesis in French); "Everybody speaks French, that's all you need"; "Everybody speaks darija, that's all you need."
Chaos.
So I'm in a French class with Algerians who already know a lot of French but speak it sloppily, and who feel a need - because of work, because of school, because of future prospects - to get better. This week I start formal Arabic lessons with a tutor downtown. And along the way I'm trying to pick up snippets of darija to use in the street, so as not to have to use too much of the French or Arabic I'm learning, because French marks you as a foreigner (or worse, a snob - an Algerian in contempt of her Algerianness) and because nobody actually speaks the formal Arabic. Chaos.
The professor is French, the son of Algerian immigrés. He moved to Algeria in 2000 in what he describes as part of his own identity quest - and also to escape the increasingly Arab-hostile French climate. We have kind of an understanding between us, which is neat: two second-generation "first-worlders" looking for our roots back in the motherland. Neither one of us really speaks Arabic, although his parents spoke the dialect from time to time at home, and he understands it pretty well.
The two other students are arabisant, meaning both their basic and higher education took place in Arabic. There are also Algerians who are francisant, whose university education took place entirely in French and who received a strong French background in primary school. Nowadays, almost every student is arabisant but conversant in French - although it tends to be, like mine, a sloppy French. Those who don't finish school or don't continue on to university tend to be sloppy in both French and formal Arabic, unless, like some of my cousins, they attended Quranic school as children. The common language between both arabisant and francisant is the darija, the dialect, a rough outgrown Arabic that's related to formal Arabic the way Ebonics is to English, with modified grammar and word usage, and with a little French thrown in. But even the darija changes, from region to region and city to city, such that someone from Tlemcen will use a very different vocabulary from someone in Algiers. And then there's the Imazighen, the Berber, who are likewise educated in Arabic but who speak Amazight dialects all their own.
It's a bizarre, chaotic language situation that manifests itself in different ways in different places. I sat in on a conference in December at my uncle's university in Oran - the subject of which was the preservation of culture and history in a city in southwest Algeria - where participants presented in French or Arabic depending upon educational background, with a moderator who switched frequently between the two. In question-and-answer session arguments broke out more than once between panelists and between panelists and audience members, and professors forgot themselves and darija trampled over the formal language fences - darija and French and Arabic all together, all angry and confused.
My dad, when he was here, spoke French to an Algerian security officer who stopped us while we were looking for rock art - this was down south, where French is rarely spoken (in northern cities like Oran, you hear French all over the place) - as a prestige marker, to signal his level of education and to emphasize that our expedition had a legitimate research purpose. At the end of the conversation he switched to darija, to put the officer at ease, as a gesture of friendliness, familiarity, an "I'm-really-one-of-you" signal. It was interesting - and it worked; when we'd finished, the officer ended up offering us a ride to the bus depot the next town over.
Privately, and outside the country, people know that formal Arabic in Algeria is artificially propped up both by religious pride - it's the language of the Quran - and an educational system that looks down on darija as something less than a language. French education, meanwhile, has become more and more relaxed - even abandonded - as a result of post-revolution efforts to "cleanse" the country of its colonial corruptions, even though it's still necessary for business with Europe, for research, for communication. And darija, the everyman's language, is left in the lurch, despite the fact that day-to-day it's the most uesful of all.
"I wonder what that does to the national psyche," my mom says. As far as I can tell, it induces total schizophrenia.
I hear, a lot, things like: "Don't bother learning darija, it's not worth it"; "You don't need to learn fusha [formal Arabic], nobody speaks it"; "Our language [Arabic, formal Arabic] is being corrupted - we're still in the age of colonisation!" (this from one student who'd heard that another student had to write her university thesis in French); "Everybody speaks French, that's all you need"; "Everybody speaks darija, that's all you need."
Chaos.
So I'm in a French class with Algerians who already know a lot of French but speak it sloppily, and who feel a need - because of work, because of school, because of future prospects - to get better. This week I start formal Arabic lessons with a tutor downtown. And along the way I'm trying to pick up snippets of darija to use in the street, so as not to have to use too much of the French or Arabic I'm learning, because French marks you as a foreigner (or worse, a snob - an Algerian in contempt of her Algerianness) and because nobody actually speaks the formal Arabic. Chaos.