Ghardaïa les 28-30/11/2013 

دينامكية اللسانـيات، في والتعليمية اللغاتمخبر LABORATOIRE: «LINGUISTIQUE, DYNAMIQUE DU LANGAGE ET DIDACTIQUE»

Colloque annuel CNPLET / Laboratoire Paragraphe Paris8

La Néologie, les corpus informatisés et les processus d’élaboration des langues de moindre diffusion

La Néologie, les corpus informatisés et les processus d’élaboration des langues de moindre diffusion

Title of the Communication

The Mother Tongue, School Tongue Issue in Algeria

Professeur BOUHADIBA Farouk, A.N.Université d’OranFaculté des Lettres, des Langues et des ArtsDépartement des Langues anglo-saxonnes

Courriel: fbouhadiba@yahoo.fr / fbouhadiba@univ-oran.dz

Site Web Labo: ldld.voici.org

Outline

I. Introduction

II. The Mother Tongue and Related Issues

III. Minority Language vs. Majority Language

IV. The Present Approach

V. A Display Map

VI. Fishman’s Paradigm

VII. The Child and his Language: the theoretical side

VIII. Facts and Findings

I. IntroductionChoosing the most appropriate definition

First Language Mother Tongue Native Language Arterial Language L1

What to choose as a theoretical construct?

Terms often tied up with the concept of a Native Speaker, i.e., someone who has ‘learnt’ through stimulus-response behaviours (e.g. Mummy milk all gone! For “Mummy the milk has all gone” or “Mummy, I finished the milk”),

OR Someone who acquired, during his socialisation

process (the holophrastic stage, the structural stage and the syntactic stage) a communication tool : Language

Enabling talk and communication with: Mother, Father, Family and Others: children & adults in the community or society where he grows up.

II. The Mother Tongue and Related Issues

April and Mahon (1999: 109) “Mother Tongue” is the label mostly used by linguists” while “First Language is said to be the language of infancy”.

Native language “... the language of the individual in society, i.e., the native speaker’s mother tongue is his/her native language. (ibid)

“Children succeed in acquiring their native language so quickly from the data or the language used around them”. (ibid)

Questioning???

Does such a definition tell us what exactly or precisely

this Mother Tongue is?

What is its impact on the Childs Language Acquisition process as a whole?

Do we have the right at the guessing of the workings of an inaccessible mind?

How shall one confine or restrict the definition of the ‘Mother Tongue’ to make out of it a sociolinguistic or educational construct, allowing the use of the term as a basic concept in the field of theoretical and empirical research.

Opacity in defining the “Mother Tongue”:

Bloomfield’s definition of the term in his famous book on Language (1933)

Linguistic Determinism (W. Von Humbolt, 1836)

Whorfianism (Sapir & Whorf, 1921)

The native speaker’s Linguistic Ability (e.g., ‘Does the work ‘blick’ exist in English?’ or ‘Does the word ‘bnick’ exist in English?’

The structural view (Chomsky (1968 : 127):

“An infant is born with the rudiments of language and the will to talk”, i.e., the child’s acquisition of language is part of a subconscious process that develops as the child grows up to ‘absorb’ his ‘Mother Tongue.

Questioning ???

How many mother tongues or native languages can an individual have?

What about native bilinguals? What is the first L1 in this case?

Which first ? The Mother’s Tongue or the Father’s Tongue?

Other related Issues

The acquisition of a language from birth,

The impact of the critical age,

Socio-cultural identity, etc.

More recently publications on the “Native speaker”

Louis Jean Calvet (2006), Towards an Ecology of World Languages. (Policy Press)

Alan Davies (2008) The Native speaker: Myth and Reality (Multilingual Matters)

Love, Nigel & Umberto Ansaldo (2010) "The Native Speaker and the Mother Tongue." Language Sciences, 32.6 : 589-93)

«Language Proficiency: Defining Levels Avoids Confusion". Alsintl.com. 2013-08-26.

So basically, caution is required when concepts such as Mother Tongue, Native Language, Arterial Language or L1 are used for the description of facts of Language. We shall use presently the blanket term Mother Tongue (MT) to talk about The Mother Tongue, School Tongue Issue in Algeria.

III. Minority Language vs. Majority Language

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural

Development (Routledge, UK) Volume 1 (1980)

to Volume 34 (2013): proliferation of definitions.

Each definition based on special caseswith the

characteristics features of a Minority Language

or a Majority Language following a number of

pre-established sociolinguistic, institutional or

economic parameters.

Volume 11, Issues 1 and 2 (1990: 153-173) François Grin “The Economic Approach to Minority Languages”

Volume 34, Issue 4, (2013, pp. 313-316)

K. Austin and Julia Sallabank (SOAS)

‘Endangered languages: an introduction”

Grenoble, L. A. 2011. “Language Ecology and Endangerment”. The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages,

IV. The Present Approach

Observation and description of the case of

language use in Algeria based on

Fishman’s Paradigm (1991) in order to

scale the languages at work and see how

one can situate them from a sociolinguistic

perspective in terms of Minority

Languages or Majority Languages

V. A Display Map

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grandes-aires-linguistiques-berb%C3%A8res-v2.png

A zoom

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grandes-aires-linguistiques-berb%C3%A8res-v2.png

The Chaouia variety occupies a larger portion compared to Kabyle or Chenoui. The remaining space is for Algerian Spoken Arabic as a whole.

Statistically, we get:

Algerian Arabic ± 72%

Berber (or its varieties) ± 27.4%.

Yet, no one denies the fact that Berber is the ‘source language’ of over 99% of the Algerian inhabitants.

The question to be raised is what is Minor and what is Major in sociolinguistic, not institutional terms? Let us see Fishman’s Sociolinguistic Profile Formula (1991) fits into this linguistic space.

VI. Fishman’s Paradigm

Fishman distinguishes three value positions: The maintenance and renewal of native languages can be voluntary,

'Minority rights' need not interfere with 'majority‘

“Bilingualism is a benefit for all" (pp. 82-84).

Eight stages of language loss.

Stage Eight: language death or total extinction (tribal languages)

Stage One: dynamic survival e.g., Navaho

Stage Seven: languages spoken by adults only

Stage Six: languages where inter-generational use is absent (the children do not speak the language in question)

Stage Five: the language is used in force and in a dynamic way within socially and regionally.

(Typical of Berber varieties spoken in Algeria)

Minority languages along this scale (Stage Five) tend to be used outside home (in the street, at school, ...).

Stages Four down to Stage Two: Minority Native Languages with legal status (in-school and out-school vitality)

Stage Four sees the minority language as a necessity at the level elementary education.

e.g. colour terms zraq azraq; bjad abjad; as opposed to xuxi banfsagi, etc., or numbers wahad, tlata, rab9a, etc.).

Stage Three: the minority language is used in other spheres (factories, banks, the post office, etc.) but not by white collar workers or managers (cases of the dialects, mixtures of Fr. and Ar. and Berber, ….)

Stage Two: use in government offices, the press, the media, etc.

Stage One: use at higher government levels.

VII. The Child and his Language: the theoretical side

The Holophrastic phase (sound recognition, one object = one word, e.g. nose, head, arms, toy, dog, etc.

The Structural phase: recognition of discourse categories such as nouns, pronouns, articles, verbs, adjectives, ...

The Syntactic phase: uttering simple active declarative sentences such as “I want milk” or “Mum, I love you” ...

VIII. Facts and Findings

At School: Standard Arabic, everyday French, School Arabic, ...

It is often the case that the child does not recognise himself in phonetic / phonological repertoires of Standard Arabic or French. The transition from home to school is too abrupt for the child to assimilate or even adapt to a new environment: the school , the classroom, the teacher, ...

A. fahhamni əttəmri:n B. taʕa:ʃ?A. taʕ la post B. galunna ʔəkətbu taħt kul taSwı:ra l

ʔasəm ... A. ha:da wash?? B. brijja (sometimes risa:la) A. Saha nakatbu? B. rısa:latun (the teacher’s instructions !!!!)

Mother tongue / School tongue divergences

Back home:

Other examples: ʔakalat al bınta samakatun

əl bənt kla:t ħu:ta

Dourari, A. (2006) about teaching Berber

“L’urgence est de doter cette langue d’une academie, d’un organe qui s’occupera en amont de son enseignement. Autrement dit, de recruter des chercheurs de rang doctoral qui proposeront des normes d’ecriture , de syntaxe didactisees pour depasser le stade de l’oralite”

Le Quotidien d’Oran (6/12/2006, p. 3)

A questionnaire: Item questions (a sample)

Q1: Does Berber influence positively the teaching and learning ? Yes : 21.36 No : 34.95 I don’t know: 43.69

Q2: As a National Language, does Berber have an important place in primary school teaching in the future?

Yes: 09.71 No : 38.83 I don’t know: 51.46

Q3: Will Berber be taken more into consideration if the choice is given to you?

Yes: 00 No : 73.79 I don’t know: 26.21

Q4: Does Berber lead to a state of conflict or cohabitation?

Yes: 21.05 No : 63.24 I don’t know: 10.76

Q5: What language do pupils use most in the classroom?

SA: 32.04 AA 20.39 A mixture: 47.57

Q6: Which language do pupils use most to talk to you?

SA: 01.94 AA 79.61 A mixture: 18.47

Q7: Do pupils find difficulties when you use Standard Arabic only in your class?

Yes: 43.69 No : 53.40 I don’t know: 02.91

Q8: Does it happen that your pupils use French when they speak Arabic in the classroom?

Yes: 35.92 No: 61.17 I don’t know: 2.91

THANK YOU

FAN BOUHADIBA