A SOCIOLINGUITIC INVESTIGATION OF TAMAZIGHT IN ALGERIA WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE KABYLE VARIETY

Abstract

In the midst of the process of globalisation which touches fields as important as economics, politics, energy and technology, the question of minority languages becomes very acute. The fact is that fully recognised languages like French, Arabic and Spanish are undergoing the hegemony of what is known today as the “world language”, namely English. In such a context, what is the fate of minority languages and minority language groups? Specialists in different fields like anthropology, education, linguistics, sociology feel concerned with the death of languages and cultures in various parts of the world. Unfortunately, this tendency does not seem to touch the countries of the “Arab World” which consider that because Arabic is the language of the Quran, there is no field for challenging it by any native language whether dialectal Arabic or other languages like Kurdish, Turkmen, or Tamazight. This situation has not been without creating social and sometimes ethnic tensions which have been violent at times. Issues like the promotion of minority languages derive from a strong political will determined by a high degree of democracy which rarely exists in the “Arab World”, if ever. The case of the Maghrib in general and Algeria in particular is quite edifying. Tamazight, the original language of the original inhabitants of this part of the world was about to disappear had some militants not taken the question in charge. The different Algerian governments after independence have always ignored the Amazigh dimension of the country and have even been presented it as a threat to national unity. It took years of work, imprisonment, death and socio-political changes and mutations to reach a state where the Tamazight question and dimension was officially accepted and integrated into the Algerian Constitution. One has to recognise that at this level, Algeria is much in advance compared to other Arab countries and even to some developed ones like France. The national status Tamazight has today is a protection against its death and disappearance and a guarantee of development as the state is providing the means and tools for this. Thus, an ambitious project of the Tamazight language planning is underway in Algeria. The starting idea for the present work is, in fact, the question of language management. The latter process is of course the work of specialists, but it would be hazardous to consider the matter from a prescriptive point of view. The job of a linguist is not to impose what he sees as good, pure and correct language; rather, it is to observer the social context in III which the language operates and draw the conclusions that are beneficial for its revival and promotion. Most of the works on Tamazight as a language concern either descriptions of different linguistic systems of different varieties or language management. This prevented sociolinguists from getting interested to phenomena like code-switching, language choice and language attitudes among Tamazight bilinguals. It is on the basis of these three elements which are investigated throughout this work that some suggestions and remarks concerning Tamazight language planning are made.