Decolonizing the Church/Decolonizing Language: Postcolonial Christianity, Language Ideologies, and the Morality of Teaching Vernacular Arabic (Darija) in Algeria

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the mid-20th century, as the global colonial order collapsed, language and education were two of the most affectively, politically, and economically challenging domains of decolonization efforts. Parler Algérien (Speak Algerian), an experimental method for the teaching and learning of Darija (Algerian vernacular Arabic), created by Catholic clergymen and women in the early 1970s, provides an illustration of an attempt to decolonize language learning in postcolonial Algeria. The Catholic creators of Parler Algérien assumed a stance of solidarity with the independent nation, an alignment that translated into the entextualization of a number of linguistic and non-linguistic features in the textbook. This ethnography of a Darija classroom examines the shifting language ideologies that mediate the text’s interpretation in the 21st century. I argue that the interdiscursive residues of Parler Algérien’s postcolonial context of production shape its uptake in the 21st century classroom, but not in the ways that the authors intended.