알제리의 언어 정책에 관한 고찰 : 아랍어와 프랑스어를 중심으로

Abstract

In the last twenty years, there has been a continual protest over the language question in Algeria and four languages are spoken in one way or another by Algerians: Classical Arabic the official language, Alerian Arabic spoken by almost all Algerians, French and Berber. Beginning in the late 1960s, the government of President Houari Boumediene decided upon complete Arabization as a national goal and began the first steps to promote Arabic in the bureaucracy and in the schools. Arabization was introduced slowly in schools, starting with the primary schools in the social science and humanities subjects. Language politics and Arabization have parly been a reaction to the fact that 130 years of French colonization had left both the state bureaucracy and much of the educated upper class completely Francophone, as well as being motivated by the Arab nationalism promoted by successive Algerian governments. The problems inherent in the process of language promotion immediately came to the fore. One of the most obvious involved literary Arabic, a language in which many Algerians were not conversant. Qualified Arabic teachers were almost totally lacking. Other obstacles included the widespread use of French in the state-run media and the continued preference for French as the working language of government and of urban society. For the urban elite, French constituted the medium of modernization and technology. French facilitated their access to Western commerce and to economic development theory and culture, and their command of the language guaranteed their continued social and political prominence. So, the important point of the language question in Algeria is to the establish the correlation between the Arabic and the French because we can't ignore the social role of the French in the Algerian community.