TRILINGUAL ILLITERATES: ALGERIA'S LANGUAGE CRISIS

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 02 ALGIERS 001121

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 10/16/2018
TAGS: PGOV SOCI EDU AG
SUBJECT: TRILINGUAL ILLITERATES: ALGERIA'S LANGUAGE CRISIS

Classified By: DCM Thomas F. Daughton; reasons 1.4 (b, d).


1. (U) SUMMARY: Decades of government-imposed Arabization
have produced an under-40 population that, in the words of
frustrated Algerian business leaders, "is not fluent in
anything" and therefore handicapped in the job market and
more vulnerable to extremist influence. The Algerian school
system now produces graduates who must first take the time
and money after university to re-learn subjects like
engineering, science and commerce in French in order to
compete for jobs in Algeria and abroad. The phenomenon has
driven those Algerian students who can afford it to look
outside the system for an education in French or English at
private schools in Algeria or Europe. The legacy of
Arabization has also exposed a generational rift among those
who passed through the public education system: the over-40s
are generally fluent in spoken and written French and feel it
is a strong part of their cultural identity, while the
under-20s have been educated entirely in Arabic, with French
as a poorly learned second language. The 20-40 age group now
competing for jobs speaks a confusing mixture of French,
Arabic and Berber that one business leader called "useless,"
as they cannot make themselves fully understood by anyone but
themselves. We hear at all levels that this problem has led
to a tremendous appetite for English -- a neutral, global
language unburdened by Algerian history -- as the best way
forward. END SUMMARY.

LANGUAGE RIFT BEGINS WITH INDEPENDENCE
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2. (U) Algeria's Arabization campaign began as a reaction to
the French colonial experience and came almost immediately
after independence in 1962. A May 22, 1964 decree made
Arabic the official language of government and
administration. Given the dearth of fluent Arabic teachers
in Algeria at the time, Arabic-language education began in
1962 with a mandatory seven hours per week in all schools at
all levels. The figure increased to ten hours per week in

1964. To fill the demand for Arabic teachers, Algeria began
importing Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and other instructors from
across the Arab world, which met with some resistance from
Algeria's teachers unions and also brought an influx of Arab
ideology -- much of it religious and conservative -- into the
country.


3. (U) In 1974, the government mandated that all primary
school education be in Arabic, and in 1976 French was dealt
the coup de grace when it was formally relegated to
second-language status, with instruction beginning only in
the fourth year of primary school. The trend continued into
the 1980s and in 1989 the government mandated that Arabic be
used on all signs and public communication, with penalties
for violators. Since 1989, classical Arabic has been the
sole language of instruction in all Algerian primary and
secondary schools, a reality formalized in article 15 of law
91-05 of January 16, 1991. University subjects are also
taught in Arabic -- without exception since former Prime
Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem refused to allow scientific and
technical subjects to revert to French-language instruction.
In one famous public statement, Belkhadem said that would be
tantamount to "a regression" and that the solution for
Algerians to compete in the international job market was not
for French to be taught in Algeria, but for Arabic to spread
to the rest of the region from Algeria's example.

THE LOST GENERATION
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4. (C) Over an iftar dinner at the Ambassador's residence
towards the end of Ramadan, several Algerian business
representatives lamented what they called the "lost
generation" of Algerian workers, who are left out largely
because of their inability to function at a professional
level in any single language. Ameziane Ait Ahcene, Northrup
Grumman's deputy director for Algeria, complained that he had
to recruit in francophone Europe to find skilled accountants
and engineers who were fluent in spoken and written French.
Mohamed Hakem, marketing and communications director for the
ETRHB Haddad group, shared the same sentiment, adding that
the process of providing language training in French or
English to new recruits was often prohibitively expensive and
added too much time to the recruitment process. Often, Hakem

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said, "it takes one to two years" to re-educate an Algerian
graduate in specialized vocabulary and international
standards for technical and scientific work in particular.
Hakem said the lack of ability for most Algerians "to
communicate with anyone other than themselves" isolates
Algerian youth and makes them more vulnerable to extremist
ideology.


5. (C) Ait Ahcene added that the current job market favored
Algeria's wealthy elites, who can afford to send their
children to private schools in France or Canada, for example,
to make them competitive after graduation. In his view, the
vast majority of the population, 72 percent of which is under
the age of 30, represented a "lost generation" that
Arabization "without compromise" had created. One contact
recalled a late-1980s class in British civilization taught by
the inspirational University of Algiers Professor Laceb.
Professor Laceb, whose students supposedly represented the
best the Algerian university system could produce at the
time, paused and shook his head after a futile review of
their translation efforts between French, Arabic and English.
"It's unbelievable," he told them, "you are trilingual
illiterates."

ENGLISH AS THE THIRD WAY
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6. (C) During an October 14 introductory meeting with the
Ambassador, National Popular Assembly (APN - lower house of
parliament) Speaker Abdelaziz Ziari described the tremendous
historical baggage that came with the French language in
Algeria. He said that in the first decades after
independence, Algeria came to reject French completely as a
symbol of over 130 years of colonial rule. Over time
attitudes softened, and the tensions and resistance
associated with using the French language faded. Today,
Ziari said, Algeria's priority was to increase its
English-language abilities, and he bemoaned the lack of
qualified parliamentary staff who could function in fluent
spoken and written English. Northrup Grumman's Ait Ahcene
put it simply, saying that English offered "freedom from the
past" and was unburdened by memories of the French colonial
experience on the one hand and "excessive Arabization" on the
other. Aicha Barki, president of the nationwide women's
literacy organization Iqra, told us recently that the
Arabization process had made achieving literacy in general
more difficult, as Arabic is simply a much harder language to
master than either French or English.

COMMENT: A MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
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7. (C) Barki sees literacy as the key to realizing the full
potential of Algerian women and to fighting radicalization
and extremist ideology, which, she said, feast on the
illiterate. Algeria's language crisis is unique in the Arab
world, given the country's turbulent history and the
existence of an entire generation fluent only in a linguistic
collage known as "Algerian." Diplomats coming to Algeria
after serving elsewhere in the region are amazed that
Algerians rarely finish a sentence in the same language they
started it in. Given that what business leaders Hakem and
Ait Ahcene call the "lost generation" contains the vast
majority of Algeria's population, the language issue assumes
an even more disproportionate importance in Algeria. At
stake is not just the ability of anyone other than the
wealthy elite to participate in the international economy.
Equally important is the need to counter the opportunities
the crisis creates for extremism to take root. It is no
surprise then that throughout the Ambassador's introductory
meetings with senior Algerian officials, one theme has been
repeated consistently: the desire for a large-scale increase
in English-language instruction throughout the government,
private sector and educational system. As the director of
cooperation at the Ministry of Higher Education recently told
us, Algeria "needs a Marshall Plan for the English language."
PEARCE