EN to replace FR in Algeria?

[PeterMollenburg]

L’Algérie va devenir encore un autre pays anglophone ?

(These articles are in French. As I have predicted, globalisation will increasingly place all languages other than English (including French in Africa) under threat.

https://www.tsa-algerie.com/langlais-pour-remplacer-le-francais-a-luniversite-un-coup-tordu-contre-letat-et-contre-la-societe/

https://www.mondialisation.ca/algerie-quelles-langues-pour-quel-systeme-educatif-pourquoi-cette-diversion/5635297

[Cavesa]

An interesting topic, but not something that will happen that fast. Even if it got accepted tomorrow (I doubt it will happen at all in the next few decades), the changes would take a long time and there would be huge consequences that might make them reconsider.

Firstly, let's not forget about Arabic. The pressures to give it more public space, especially in university education, are not exactly weak. After all, it is the language people really speak at home, and it has also been pushed to the previous education levels too. One of the articles mentions it as a sort of a cyclic process, the demand for Arabic, then not Arabic,... And it also mentions how little used is English in the Algerian scientific community overall. So, they'd need to teach not only the students (which is already a big task but definitely doable. You just force them to pass an exam and they'll pay for their education outside of your universities themselves to not be kicked out), but also the other generations.

I'd say the Algerians are also in for a rude awakening. The anglophone world, including the universities, is rather saturated. So, the benefit of using English is a bit spoiled by the fact that the real anglophone countries are not that welcoming anymore and the competition is very strong. The same is not true about the francophone world, where the Algerians (Libyans, Tunisians, Moroccans,...) are still seen as "external French" in some ways, and the overall demand-supply mechanisms in immigration, education, or science are not that one sided.

The same is true about the scientific publications. The Algerians publish mostly in French or Arabic, not in English. But is anyone gonna be interested in their results in English? It is a much bigger pond with many more fish. Perhaps giving up a certain level of prestige and publications is not a good strategy, if they'll be published just as rare or even rarer than the czechs in English

Ce n’est pas normal qu’un universitaire soit un monolingue. Il n’y a aucun pays de la Planète où vous avez un universitaire monolingue. ..... Dans les lycées en Europe, un élève se doit déjà de maîtriser trois langues, et chez nous à l’université on veut revenir à un monolinguisme arabisant, anglicisant ou même francisant.

Unfortunately, it is absolutely normal. Majority of the anglophones doesn't have much of a real education in languages. And not only the anglophones. Even the czechs tend to suck at languages, and we have a worthless native language as motivation. A university student here should be B2 or C1 in two languages at the very least. Nope, the medicine students and doctors tend to suck even at English they have been forced to learn for at least 10 years And the students in other fields tend to be better at English but still not good enough at two languages or more (2 is the minimum to be equal to a person with a full value native and one foreign language). So, is giving up their now nearly native French gonna lead to plurilingual people at the universities or just another nation with trashy English? The TSA interview points out the truth that tri or quadrilingualism should be the goal. But it is easier to say than do.

Cette histoire de substitution est absolument aberrante y compris au niveau neurolinguistique. Nous n’avons pas d’enseignants, on les forme de moins en moins. Le département d’anglais ici à Alger a été bloqué pendant plus de deux ans à cause justement d’un manque d’enseignants.

Ok, so it is basically gonna go the usual way. Whether they substitute the language or put more languages as the norm, it will be the usual method. You force the students (and their parents) to pay for external education It is funny, how acceptable people find this, when it comes to languages. Don't get me wrong, I think it would be ideal, if universities let you get your knowledge anywhere you want and then take the exams (it would lead to much better results), but most people prefer to actually get their classes from the university that's being paid for teaching them. But when the language teachers are either of insufficient quality or amount or both, people just shut up and pay someone else. Without systematic financial support, people will pass or fail based on their economic background. Paying for university studies and offering loans is not that unfair, you know what you are going into and you can prepare, and the society is forced to run some sort of a support system as there is no place for hypocrisy. Claiming the universities to be free or cheap and then hiding lots of extra costs (like the necessity of external language education) until you're already in, that is a sort of cheating.

[PeterMollenburg]

An interesting topic, but not something that will happen that fast...

Thanks for your comments Cavesa. I agree, with everything you have to say in fact. I cannot see it happening now either. And Rwanda is a good example of the struggles associated with a switch from French to English as a language of instruction in education. There were apparently massive struggles there, and that was in a country in which the number of French speakers and more importantly, the percentage of the whole population of French speakers was much lower than that of Algeria. I cannot see it happening, not for a good while at least.

Furthermore, why not instead of proposing French be dropped in place of English, why not just introduce English.

All this raises a few points in my mind.

Why must so much be published in English? It drives me mad that other languages have been relegated to 2nd best or 3rd or even worthless by both English speaking nations and by those countries that denounce the importance of their own languages. Okay, that aside, why not if we are going to accept that next to everything for whatever reason needs to be published in English, then why not publish in both languages (the original and a translation). This way the lingua franca remains English and yet indigenous, local, national, official languages remain relevant.

I do think this question will be raised again, and not only in Algeria, unfortunately. I hope a day comes when governments wake up to themselves and start seeing more value in retaining their own languages and the importance of them and are not afraid of sticking their necks out to act on such values. And that they see the value in diversity - a more diverse world.

I think this will keep coming up as long as we live in a world which appears hell-bent on interconnectedness, and not spiritual interconnectedness, not interconnectedness with diversity in mind, but interconnectedness in which multi-nationals run everything and we are buying the same burger on a street corner in Tehran as we can on a street corner in NYC and we all like the same bullshit on social media.

It may take 50 years but if the question keeps being asked in Algeria, maybe one day they will say yes because the social and political environment will be right and people will get sick of being asked the question. Question is, why is the question being asked? (rhetorical)

[Cavesa]

The English degrees are a huge business, that's why even the countries like the Czech Republic introduce them. A wonderful gold mine. And there is clearly the hope of the students and researchers to get more open gates to the anglophone countries (as the US simply has the most active science on the planet, exactly thanks to tons of educated external scientists moving there and working with the locals), including much more publishing in English.

The theory is great and probably would have worked twenty years ago. But really, the anglophone countries are not that open anymore, as they've got tons of people to choose from and it is simply naive that any country with a recently introduced English as the main education language could compete against India. And the publishing in the really respected impact journals is subject to a huge competition too.

The orientation on English is a huge problem even here. People do not realise, that going for the "second best" option is a much more realistic strategy. If I apply as a qualified immigration candidate to Australia or Canada, I will fail (I checked, they can obviously pick from many people, so the conditions are rather strict). But even if I wasn't an EU citizen (which I am and it is a huge advantage), I would still have a very good chance in many French, German, or Spanish speaking countries.

Why must so much be published in English? It drives me mad that other languages have been relegated to 2nd best or 3rd or even worthless by both English speaking nations and by those countries that denounce the importance of their own languages. Okay, that aside, why not if we are going to accept that next to everything for whatever reason needs to be published in English, then why not publish in both languages (the original and a translation). This way the lingua franca remains English and yet indigenous, local, national, official languages remain relevant.

I do think this question will be raised again, and not only in Algeria, unfortunately. I hope a day comes when governments wake up to themselves and start seeing more value in retaining their own languages and the importance of them and are not afraid of sticking their necks out to act on such values. And that they see the value in diversity - a more diverse world.

There are countries (like China or Japan), which use their language as a sort of a natural barrier. They understand everything published in English, and they decide what and when to share back in English. There is nothing conspirationalist here, it is normal to use such an advantage. We are too lazy to learn Mandarin and Japanese, why shouldn't they profit from it. French is surely much more open than Mandarin, but it could still be useful in this way.

Publishing both in original and translation: the Czech science gets published abroad in English sometimes, and there are also local journals. The local ones will logically give space to our scientists, but of course they are unimportant. It doesn't mean the science is bad, no, and some local stuff is important to be researched here. But a country of 10million simply cannot have so much groundbreaking science to feed the best journals that could compete with the anglophone ones. And even the science that is good enough to be shared with the whole world competes against tons of just as good research from elsewhere. Publishing in Czech is better than nothing (that's why Czech was exhumated in the 19th century, by a few scholars who probably just weren't good enough to succeed in German), but you'll still be a nobody outside of this hole.

But the francophone ones could be one of the alternatives on the planet. And they are in some areas. But it would require a more active approach on the part of Francophonie. France would need to start acting and not just talking. Export the language and popular culture, open the doors for many more foreigners on their universities, fund even more research,... Some of the steps would require a lot of money, others would be cheap. But all of them would require a clear plan.

Do we really want to speak the same language everywhere, eat the same mass produced food and buy the same pharmaceuticals?

Yes. I want the best food, no matter where it is from. And as long as most czech products in some categories are trash, I am happy to buy the foreign ones. And pharmaceuticals too, it is simply a lie that the generic ones are the same as the originals. Nope. So, while I am all for linguistic and cultural diversity, you simply underestimate that local doesn't always mean better. Without globalisation, my country would have stayed the same trash it was until 1989. You simply need the competition from elsewhere, including the bad stuff, to start producing something better yourself. If you are british, french, italian, or swiss, you can afford to shop like a patriot. When you're czech, algerian,... you either shop as a global citizen or you buy inferior quality.

The problem with education and science, to get back to the topic: French, Spanish, and German could definitely be alternatives to English, or at least very valuable 2nd options. They cannot compete in everything, but they could be much more important in some not that small areas. Now more than ever. But only if they'll want to, and if the main countries speaking these languages will invest in this.

Just look at China. It is buying Africa, and it is opening the universities to people from many african countries. That's how you do it. In a few decades, some countries will introduce Mandarin as an important language of education.

[PeterMollenburg]

Well thank you again, Cavesa. You have brought much to the discussion. This time around, however, I don’t agree with all of your reflections, yet I won’t offer counter-arguments as me knowing me, I will draw the discussion too far off track. You highlight some things I had not considered too - thank you.

All in all I hope Algeria continues to both value it’s Arabic and French, and doesn’t feel the need to drop French, should English make it’s way more into the picture.

[Cèid Donn]

As I've said elsewhere, language decline can indeed happen very quickly, within 1 to 2 generations, and in the case of a place like Algeria, that's literally one government or educational policy away from happening.

The thing that many people are concerned about, is how English already has a foothold in many cultures right now simply via technology, in particular computer, digital media, entertainment and internet technology, because around 90% programming languages for that technology is created by English speakers (or programmers who work primarily in English) and often are based in the syntax and orthography of English. Since this sort of language influence is relatively recent, there are lot of unknowns about what this means in the long term, but we already know that this is having considerable influence on languages with smaller or fragmented speaker populations, where these languages are simply adopting English terms for newer technology rather than creating their own, and this in turn makes the speaking population more accepting of increased English influence. The effects are noticeable with more widely spoken languages as well. I am still very surprised when, for example, I'm watching a non-L1 English speaker streaming on Twitch and suddenly in the middle of talking in their native language starts dropping entire English phrases to express this or that, because their own native language culture no longer bothers to create similar kinds of lingo. They simply adopt English lingo on the grounds that "everyone understands it." This may seem insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but it points to how in even dominant language cultures like French, Spanish and German, younger speakers in particular are being less and less creative with their mother tongues and instead are just adopting English into their daily language use. This sort of influence would make it pretty easy for an entire country to shift from its own dominant language to English if their policy makers decided that's what their country should to do. And like with the rapid language loss we see among immigrants here in the US where families decide to say "Hey, we're English speakers now," resulting in scores of first-generation Americans who can't talk to their grandparents and extended family without a language barrier getting in the way, a similar language shift could easily happen on a national scale and within a generation or two and the only people left speaking the old language are elderly people who can't talk to their grandkids without getting frustrated and sad.

[aokoye]

I'd say the Algerians are also in for a rude awakening. The anglophone world, including the universities, is rather saturated. So, the benefit of using English is a bit spoiled by the fact that the real anglophone countries are not that welcoming anymore and the competition is very strong. The same is not true about the francophone world, where the Algerians (Libyans, Tunisians, Moroccans,...) are still seen as "external French" in some ways, and the overall demand-supply mechanisms in immigration, education, or science are not that one sided.

I've seen quite a lot of collaboration between people who are likely not L1 English speakers and people who are at universities in the US and other inner circle anglophone countries (and who are L1 English speakers). By "I've seen", I mean that I personally have been/am currently involved in collaborations with academics internationally (my current research assistantship is nicknamed "the Sogang project"), I know people who collaborate extensively with people whose L1 isn't English and who are based at various universities, I've read tens if not hundreds of articles written in English that were co-published by people of various L1s (or at least I'm making the assumption that their L1 isn't English), and I've attended national academic conferences where a very large portion of the attendees were working at universities that aren't in anglophone countries and/or didn't speak English as an L1.

For what it's worth, I'm also almost positive that I've been in research group meetings where the data that we analyzed was later used for publications in French (and maybe Finnish but that may have been published in English).

If we're looking just at say, the internationalization of universities from the perspective of admitting students at the bachelors and masters level, universities in the US (among other places) are actually very much in favor of having international students, institutionally at least. It's an issue of money (international students bring in buckets of money) and prestige. There are some major exceptions in terms of the country of origin of the student (though I only really know about the view of colleges and universities in the US with regards to that), but at the non-PhD level universities are pretty welcoming to international students.

The issues come when those international students are expected to do a lot of research or teach. Then there can be issues with regards linguistic discrimination on the basis of accent (perceived or otherwise) and the false assumption that L2 speakers of English won't be able to teach L1 speakers of English.

[DaveAgain]

I am still very surprised when, for example, I'm watching a non-L1 English speaker streaming on Twitch and suddenly in the middle of talking in their native language starts dropping entire English phrases to express this or that, because their own native language culture no longer bothers to create similar kinds of lingo. They simply adopt English lingo on the grounds that "everyone understands it." This may seem insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but it points to how in even dominant language cultures like French, Spanish and German, younger speakers in particular are being less and less creative with their mother tongues and instead are just adopting English into their daily language use.

I think some of this could just be fashion.

Someone posted a Korean TV link the other day, some reality show thing, where in the middle of a stream of Korean, one lady said something like "be cool". This doesn't seem any different to an anglophone peppering their conversation with with smatterings of french, or getting tattoos in scripts they don't understand.

[Serpent]

Also, remember that most people are not professional translators. They know a very suitable expression in English and they can't think of an equivalent in their native language. The expression/concept may also be relatively new to them, and eventually if enough people use it, it will get assimilated like any other borrowing.
Russian has recently borrowed (or reborrowed) words like hype, ball boy, highlights, story/stories (on social media). All of this can be expressed in Russian but takes more than two syllables.

edit: Russian already uses the same word for story and history (istoria), and in a computer context it means browsing history etc. so unless it's obvious from the context you say "istoria na facebooke" or something like that.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I can’t fault Algeria if they decide to dump a colonial language for one they think better suits their needs. They didn’t get to pick French, remember?

That said, I think the issues of comparative advantage are very interesting. Is it more advantageous for a country to have perfect French or average English?