bs_bs_banner

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Language and Conflict: The

Political History of Arabisation
in Sudan and Algeria

Heather J. Sharkey*
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract
Upon decolonisation, nationalist leaders in two North African countries, Algeria
and Sudan, promoted a policy called Arabisation (ta’rib), which sought to impose
standard literary Arabic at the expense of English (in Sudan), French (in Algeria),
and other local languages (in both places). This language policy reflected the
worldview of Muslim leaders, who hoped to break from the colonial past and start
afresh while forging alliances with Arab Islamic states. Arabisation succeeded in
expanding the use of literary Arabic in Sudanese and Algerian government
bureaus as well as in schools and universities. However, in some circles it helped
to stimulate oppositional identities that rejected pan-Arabism as a focal point for
national pride and that challenged the cultural foundations of national cohesion.
Taking a comparative approach, this study argues that Arabic language policy in
Algeria and Sudan featured strongly in postcolonial nationalism and civil conflict.
It concludes by considering the status of language cultures and policies today in
Algeria, the Republic of the Sudan, and the newly independent Republic of South
Sudan, and contends that state-led efforts at ‘language rationalisation’ have not
eliminated multilingualism in practice.

Introduction
In 1956, Sudan achieved independence from Britain following a transfer of power
that occurred as civil war was already brewing. In 1962, Algeria achieved inde-
pendence from France, following a bloody eight-year guerrilla war from which one
party, the Front de Libération Nationale or FLN, emerged victorious. Upon

* Heather J. Sharkey is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in the
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.
She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press, 2003) and American Evangelicals in
Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008). The
author is grateful to the two anonymous referees who provided valuable feedback on an
earlier draft of this article.

427
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

decolonisation in both Sudan and Algeria, nationalist leaders immediately pursued

policies of Arabisation (ta’rib), by promoting standard literary Arabic at the
expense of English (in the case of Sudan), French (in the case of Algeria), and other
local languages (in both places). These Arabisation policies, which aimed to foster
a kind of pan-Arab solidarity across Arabic-speaking societies, were closely tied to
Islamic ideologies and reflected the worldview of Muslim leaders who hoped to
break from the colonial past and start afresh while forging alliances with Arab
states. However, in both Sudan and Algeria, Arabisation generated tensions that
figured into civil conflicts, which roiled Algeria in the 1990s and Sudan throughout
most of the postcolonial period (1955–71, 1983–c. 2005).
Scholars have seldom studied Sudan and Algeria together, in a comparative
frame. But such an approach is warranted and illuminating in this case because
leaders of both countries implemented ideologically consistent Arabisation poli-
cies at decolonisation. They represent two striking, though quite different, case
studies for the study of language politics in postcolonial states. They also offer
insights into the limitations of ‘language rationalisation’ on the part of ‘rulers
[who] may have [had] a greater need to construct states . . . than to build nations’
(Laitin 1992:9).
Previous studies of Arabic language politics have tended to be sociolinguistic
works and have largely focused on the Fertile Crescent and Egypt. A substantial
literature considers the intersection of Arabic language, nationalist politics, and
intellectual history in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Arab world, especially
Greater Syria and Iraq (Suleiman 2003), among intellectuals (including a high
number of Christians) who embraced print culture (Hourani 1983). Other studies
have explored the popular politics of Arabic culture, along with tensions
between the use of colloquial and formal registers, in Egypt (Haeri 2003). Still
other works have considered Arabic language shifts among Palestinians of the
West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, in light of changing political and educational
circumstances (Amara and Mar’i 2002). Like these works, the present article
takes an interdisciplinary approach by drawing upon the scholarship of socio-
linguists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians, in order to sketch
the contours of a subject that warrants closer historical study through the use of
records in archives, oral sources, published memoirs, newspapers, and other
materials. The focus in this article is on the contestation of Arabic language
policy as set by states, in this case in Sudan and Algeria, where significant
minorities (some one quarter of the population in Algeria, and perhaps 40–50%
in Sudan) have not spoken Arabic as a primary language or mother tongue.1 The
focus here is also on postcolonial situations in which two colonial languages
– French and English – have retained prestige as vehicles for cultural and
economic advancement.
In short, this article examines how postcolonial nationalist rulers sought to
apply Arabisation as top-down nationalist projects in Algeria and Sudan. It argues
that Arabisation policies stimulated some dissent and sharpened oppositional
identities even while the Arabic language itself spread at the grassroots, often in
spite of – not because of – government policies. Indeed, in both Sudan and Algeria
today, the use of literary Arabic has expanded in government bureaus as well as in

428
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

schools and universities, while the growth of literacy has supported the prolifera-
tion of media. These media include not only Arabic newspapers and radio, but also
transnational Arabic satellite television (Kraidy 2010). Even southern Sudan
gained an Arabic newspaper of its own shortly before declaring itself an independ-
ent state – the Republic of South Sudan – in July 2011, following a public
referendum that generated a 99% vote for secession (Farouk 2011; Government of
the Republic of South Sudan 2011). Note that unless otherwise specified, the term
‘Sudan’ in this essay pertains to the Republic of the Sudan as it existed within its
twentieth-century borders, that is, before the southern secession of 2011.
Before proceeding, it is worth surveying Algeria and Sudan in terms of their
linguistic landscape and their ethnic composition. For while Algeria and Sudan
have followed similar colonial and postcolonial trajectories with regard to lan-
guage policies, sharp distinctions between them remain.
In linguistic terms, Sudan has been much more heterogeneous than Algeria.
Scholars differ on the number of languages spoken in Sudan, and estimates range
from a few dozen to several hundred (Mugaddam 2006:123; Sharkey 2003:7,
150n34), with most linguistic diversity found in the Nuba Mountains of west-
central Sudan and in the now-independent southern regions. Against this intensely
multilingual context, in which some languages may have claimed just a few
thousand speakers but in which the number of Arabic speakers far exceeded those
of any other language (Lesch 1998:15–21), Arabic linguistic hegemony became
easier to achieve. Of course, Arabic also enjoyed prestige among Sudanese
Muslims, who historically relied on it not only for devotional purposes but also for
the recordkeeping that Arabic literacy enabled. Two other factors – Sudan’s
geographic proximity to Egypt (along the Nile) and Saudi Arabia (across its Red
Sea coast), together with considerable postcolonial Sudanese labour migrations to
the oil-rich Gulf countries – strengthened this Arabic-language affinity, particu-
larly in the northern half of the country, where the population by the twentieth
century overwhelmingly identified with Islam. Yet even in the north (and leaving
aside the Nuba Mountains), the population exhibited linguistic diversity, by
including, for example, Beja-speakers in the east, Nubian-language-speakers in
the far north, and Fur-speakers in the west (Darfur).
Compared to Sudan, Algeria has claimed far fewer indigenous languages, but its
linguistic landscape is complex nonetheless. About 75% of Algerians speak forms
of colloquial Arabic, and about a quarter speak forms of Berber (Boucherit
2002:55; Brahimi 1999:371–72). Among some speakers of the latter, there is a
growing Amazigh (Berber) nationalist movement. Many Algerians also speak,
read, or write French, while according to a study published in 2007, some 52% of
Algerians regularly watch French-language satellite television (Benrabah
2007:105). In this case, too, proximity and labour migration have been crucial:
Algeria sits across the Mediterranean from France, and economically-motivated
migrations have taken Algerians there in growing numbers since World War I
(MacMaster 2003:291). The results of linguistic diffusion – which were partly the
result of time spent abroad (Heggoy 1973:185) – are astonishing. In spite of
policies favouring Arabic, French has burgeoned in postcolonial Algeria to a
degree that English cannot match in Sudan. Algeria is now by some measures the

429
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

second most populous French-speaking country in the world after France (Ait-
siselmi and Marley 2008:211).
In both Sudan and Algeria, the relationship of Arab identity to speakers of Arabic
and other languages has also been ambiguous, complicating efforts to describe
populations in polarised terms as either ‘Arab’ or ‘Berber’ in Algeria, or as ‘Arab’
and ‘African’ in Sudan. In Algeria, Berber populations are diverse, perhaps reflect-
ing the fact that by the eighteenth century, as John Ruedy (2005:10) has suggested,
‘Berberophony had been relegated to the least accessible parts of the country – high
mountains, distant oases, and isolated desert plateau and mountain areas’. Berbers
include the Tuareg of the Algerian Sahara, the Ibadis of the Mzab oasis (who
adhered to a non-Sunni form of Islam that distinguished them from the rest of the
Muslim population), the Kabyle Berbers of northern Algeria, and the Shawi
(Chaoui) Berbers of eastern Algeria (ibid.:9–10). While the bulk of Algeria’s
ostensibly ‘Arab’ or ‘Arabised’ population descended from populations that were
historically Berber, Arabisation also absorbed small populations of ‘Turks’
(Muslim ruling elites of diverse European and west Asian origins, who were
associated with the period of Ottoman control over coastal Algeria, c. 1517–1830),
‘Andalusians’ (Muslims who had fled from Spain after the Reconquista), and
‘Blacks’ (people of sub-Saharan African origin, most of whom had entered the
region as slaves), not to mention a small Jewish community (Valensi 1977:8–9).
In Sudan, Arabisation in the northern regions was arguably an even bigger
work-in-progress and had occurred over many centuries following the first contact
of Arab Muslims with Nubia in 651 CE (Hasan 1967:22–24). Some communities,
like the agrarian Ja’aliyyin of the riverine northern region, and the pastoralist
Baqqara of the west, claimed genealogies of descent from Arabs who had entered
the country in the Islamic era. Others, like the Nubian communities of the far
northern riverine Sudan, preserved their Nubian mother tongues even while
embracing Arabic as a lingua franca in the wider region. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, two other broad groups became assimilated into northern
Sudanese Arabophone culture. The first group consisted of slaves, most of whom
came from southern regions, who accounted for about a third of the population in
the northern riverine regions during the late-nineteenth century (Spaulding
1982:11). The second group consisted of Muslim pilgrims from West Africa, many
of them Hausa and Fulani speakers, who entered Sudan en route to Mecca and
settled permanently, gradually acquiring Arabic fluency (Abu Manga 1999;Yamba
1995). The ongoing history of Arabisation in the northern region reflects compli-
cated patterns of migration and helps to explain why the Sudan’s 1956 census
identified 38.8% of the population as ‘Arab’ but 51.4% as primary speakers of
Arabic (Poggo 2009:14–15; Sharkey 2004:113–37; Sharkey 2008:24–25).
In the colonial and postcolonial periods, language politics in both Sudan and
Algeria became entangled with religion. During the colonial period in both
countries, some colonial officials either entertained hopes of converting Muslim
communities or supported Christian missionaries who tried to do so. Colonial
officials also implemented policies to weaken Arabic pedagogy and, in Sudan, to
prevent non-Muslims from acquiring Arabic literacy (Courbage and Fargues
1997:130–52; Sharkey 2002). Committed Muslims, and particularly the ‘ulama

430
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

(Muslim religious scholars), bitterly resented these policies. So did many Muslim
nationalists, who supported Islamic reform (Christelow 1987; Kashani-Sabet
1996). At decolonisation, policies to spread literary Arabic accompanied policies
either to promote Islamic culture or to ‘purify’ Islam as it was already practiced.
Arabisation and Islamisation frequently developed hand-in-hand, while the
staunchest and most ideologically committed Islamists tended to be the firmest
supporters of Arabisation. Typical in this regard was the claim of the director of
Sudan’s Department of Religious Affairs, who in 1959 hailed government-
controlled, Arabic-medium schools as crucibles for ‘cultural Islamic unity’ (Poggo
2002:76–77).
Four sections expand upon these points. The first section focuses on colonial-era
developments, and considers how France in Algeria (1830–1962) and Britain in
Sudan (1898–1956) tried to use language policy as a tool of social engineering, in
ways that left many Muslims deeply aggrieved. The second and third sections
examine postcolonial Sudan and Algeria respectively, while tracing how and why
Arabisation policies stimulated opposition. The fourth section reflects on the
current consequences of Arabisation and language politics for nation-building in
Sudan and Algeria. This section ends by briefly assessing the linguistic status of
the Sudan in light of the July 2011 secession of its southern region.

Colonialism: A Sketch of Two Histories

In both Algeria and Sudan, the impulse for Arabisation came from the common
experience of colonial rule. Yet the unique details of these histories shaped the
context against which language policies emerged. Therefore, it is worth surveying
the colonial histories of Algeria and Sudan in turn.

France in Algeria
France invaded Algeria in 1830, and established a settler colony that amounted to
one of the most brutal colonial systems in Africa. By 1848, when the French
government declared Algeria not merely a colony, but an extension of France itself,
Algeria was hosting Europeans from mainland France as well as people from
islands like Corsica, Malta, and Sicily who were themselves becoming Gallicised
in a ‘creuset algérien’, or Algerian melting-pot (Clancy-Smith 1997; Smith
2006:2, 19). To sustain this settler enterprise, French authorities facilitated land
seizures, which forced many Algerian Muslims to leave the countryside for cities
(D. Davis 2007). Adding to Muslim discontentment was the fact that settlers
enjoyed French citizenship, and eventually, after a decree in 1870, Algeria’s
indigenous Jewish minority did, too, whereas Muslims did not (Shepard 2006).
Algerian Muslims became subject to a series of penalties known as the indigénat,
which gave French authorities the discretion to jail, fine, or otherwise punish them
for committing any one of a series of petty infractions, ranging from disrespectful
behaviour towards a Frenchman to failing to join forced labour crews. For Algerian
Muslims, colonial rule was humiliating and led to systematic ‘pauperisation’
vis-à-vis the settler (colon) population (Ruedy 2005:94).

431
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

In Algeria and in its other African colonies, France pursued a policy that
historians have called ‘assimilation’. In theory, assimilation policy meant that
by adopting French customs, including modes of speech and dress, Algerians
could ‘evolve’ to assume the benefits of French citizenship. In practice, the
French government set up a major barrier obstructing this route for local
Algerians by declaring in 1865 that Muslims could only become full French
citizens if they denounced Muslim personal status law, which affected patterns
of inheritance, marriage, and other family affairs. ‘Since the latter would be
tantamount to apostasy within a society where civil status was determined by
religious law’, notes John Ruedy, ‘only about two thousand Muslims ever
requested naturalization during the eighty years the law remained in force’
(Ruedy 2005:76).
As an outgrowth of its assimilationist impulses, officials in French Algeria
strenuously promoted the French language – just as officials had been doing in
mainland France since 1539 (Laitin 1992:12, 83–84). After 1830, colonial
authorities shut down rural and urban Qur’an schools, where Muslim children
had traditionally learned the rudiments of reading and writing in Arabic along
with basic principles of their religion. As a result, Arabic literacy rates plum-
meted during the nineteenth century. Whereas rates of basic education in France
and Algeria may have been near parity in the 1830s (Holt 1994:27), by 1870,
‘less than 5 percent of Algerian children were attending any kind of school’
(Ruedy 2005:104). In time, a thin segment of the Algerian Muslim population
gained access to French-language schooling, placing its members among new
elites.
Meanwhile, drawing upon the scholarship of anthropologists, linguists, and
archaeologists, the French in Algeria cultivated a ‘Kabyle Myth’ about the Berber
people of northeast Algeria. This ‘myth’ held that Berbers were less fanatical, more
authentic, and more civilisable than Arabs (Lorcin 1995; Silverstein 2002). French
military officials (like General Adolphe Hanoteau, author of a Kabyle grammar,
published in 1858) and Christian missionaries (like Charles de Foucauld [1858–
1916], author of a French-Tuareg dictionary and a study of the Tifinagh writing
system) contributed to the scholarly corpus that would later inspire a nationalist or
sub-nationalist movement among Kabyle Berbers, in Algeria and among diasporas
abroad (Boukous 1989; Chaker 1997:85; Rossetti 2008).
By the 1930s, a nationalist movement was growing among members of a class
who spoke colloquial Algerian Arabic as their mother tongue but who commanded
skills of French literacy acquired in schools. Joining this group was a strong
contingent of ‘ulama who insisted on the cultural primacy of Arabic and Islam for
Algeria (McDougall 2008). ‘[T]his Muslim Algerian nation is not France’, some of
them declared in a manifesto in 1936, ‘[t]his nation does not want to become
France’ (Djité 1992:17–18). Meanwhile, Muslim activists continued to develop a
network of free Qur’an schools, along with Arabic-medium social activities such
as theatre clubs and scout troops (ibid.:19; Heggoy 1973:188). These activities
confirmed the role that mosques would play in the anti-colonial movement. In a
belated effort to appeal to Muslim opinion, the French Algerian state recognised
Arabic as an official language in 1947, to be taught in government schools. But

432
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Arabic could not be taught in practice, since instructors were lacking. Indeed, as
late as 1960 there was only one Arabic instructor on average for every 1,200
primary-school children (Heggoy 1973:190–91).
By the outbreak of war in 1954, Muslim nationalist leaders had come to reject
the French ideology of assimilationism. When war ended in 1962 and Algeria
became independent, the settler community fled for the French mainland. Joining
them were Algerian Jews (who enjoyed French citizenship) and some number of
Muslims called harkis who had worked for the French colonial state. Meanwhile,
the Muslim leaders of the new Algeria embraced Arabic as a national literary
language, but were themselves far more literate in French. Delivering a radio and
television broadcast in 1962, Ahmed Ben Bella (1918–2012), the first president of
independent Algeria, spoke in French to promise, ‘Our national language, Arabic,
is going to recover its place’ (‘Notre langue nationale, l’arabe, va retrouver sa
place’) (Abu-Haidar 2000:154).
Upon independence in 1962, an estimated 90% of the Algerian population was
illiterate. French education for Muslim Algerians had never been for the masses.
One analyst concluded that ‘although Algeria is often portrayed as a country where
French replaced Arabic, reality was a little more complex; for the native population
French suppressed Arabic but left many with neither French nor Arabic education’
(Holt 1994:29, 31). While Algeria was by no means a tabula rasa at independence,
nationalist policy-setters acquired the power to implement changes that would
expand and transform the country’s educational system.

Britain in Sudan
Compared to Algeria, the Sudanese experience of colonialism involved a
very different projection of power. For a start, it involved Egyptians as well as
Britons.
The first imperialists in modern Sudanese history were the ‘Turco-Egyptians’,
as historians call them, who invaded northern Sudan in 1820 under the leadership
of the Ottoman sub-dynast, Muhammad Ali (1769–1849). Turco-Egyptian rule
lasted for sixty years (1820–c. 1881/85). With its own rapacious policies (espe-
cially in taxation), Turco-Egyptian rule left many Sudanese deeply aggrieved, and
inspired a millenarian anti-colonial jihad movement. The leader of this movement,
Muhammad Ahmad (1844–1885), called himself the Mahdi or ‘Rightly Guided
One’, who would restore order before Judgement Day. In 1885, the Mahdi’s forces
defeated the Turco-Egyptians (under the leadership of Charles Gordon [1833–
1885]) at Khartoum and established an independent Muslim theocracy. Later, in
the late 1890s amidst the Scramble for Africa, Britain invaded Sudan but claimed
to be acting to recover Egypt’s earlier claims. This 1898 Anglo-Egyptian conquest
overthrew the Mahdist state. In its wake emerged a ‘condominium’, or joint
Anglo-Egyptian government, which lasted from 1898 to 1956. Egypt exerted
important influences over Sudan during this period, but Britain dominated (Hill
1959; Holt and Daly 2000).
The British constantly feared another anti-colonial jihad, like the Mahdist jihad
of the 1880s. This fear led them to divide the Sudan territory into a ‘north’, which

433
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

was almost completely Muslim, and a ‘south’, where the population mostly
practiced local religions. In the north, they made Arabic the official language of
government and education, though they also taught English to select members of
the Muslim, Arabic-speaking elite. They tried to support Muslim institutions and
to placate Muslims by providing for imams to lead mosques and qadis to run courts
(Warburg 1971). They concentrated resources on the central Arabic-speaking
regions around Khartoum, and neglected the rest of the country, including Muslim
but largely non-Arab eastern and western regions like Darfur. British rule con-
firmed the pattern of uneven development that would continue to hobble Sudan
(Niblock 1987).
In the south, meanwhile, and outside the military garrisons where Arabic
prevailed, the British used English and some ‘vernaculars’ (as they called African
languages) for educational and administrative purposes (Sandell 1982:57). Aware
of the popular influence of the evangelical lobby in Britain, but worried about the
effect that evangelicals would have on Sudanese Muslims, they encouraged Chris-
tian missionaries to go south. As an incentive, the government gave the major
Catholic and Protestant missions ‘spheres of influence’, prompting them to dis-
perse; they also encouraged missionaries to open schools at their own expense
(Sanderson and Sanderson 1981:27–50). Thus, British authorities used missionar-
ies as proxies for cheap colonial rule.
British authorities in the Sudan pursued a policy of Indirect Rule, also called
Native Administration. Rather than making Sudanese more like Britons, Indirect
Rule ostensibly sought to preserve local cultures and local authorities, while
ceding administration to respected ‘traditional’ leaders (Daly 1986:360–78). Its
premise contrasted sharply with the French assimilationist approach.Yet if Indirect
Rule reflected a philosophy of cultural preservation, it also had an exclusionary
and xenophobic strain. Above all, it reflected contempt for those whom Lord
Lugard (its chief British ideologue) called ‘Europeanised Africans’ (Lugard
1922:79–80), meaning educated male elites in British-controlled territories who
stood poised to challenge colonial rule with nationalist agendas.
The same attitudes that sustained Native Administration explain the support that
British authorities lent to the teaching of ‘native’ African languages. In Sudan, a
watershed in colonial language policy occurred in 1928 at the Rejaf Language
Conference, which gathered British officials and missionaries. Conferees devised
an official list of ‘languages and dialects’ spoken in southern Sudan and identified
six languages (Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Latuko, and Zande) that would be
‘suitable for development’ in textbooks. The governor-general issued a letter to the
conferees, reminding them of three principles for southern education: schools
should use a ‘tribal language’ in lower grades, an African ‘lingua franca’ in middle
grades, and English for higher grades (Sudan Government 1928).
In the late 1940s, British officials accelerated ‘Sudanisation’ by ceding admin-
istrative power to educated, Muslim, Arabic-speaking, northern Sudanese elites
(Sharkey 2003:67–94). As leaders of an incipient nationalist movement, these
elites resented policies that privileged Christian missionaries in the south and
hated what one northern Sudanese linguist later called the colonial government’s
‘war on Arabic’ (Hurreiz 1968:18).

434
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Arabisation and War in Sudan

Arabisation policies took shape in Sudan earlier, and more suddenly, than in
Algeria. In 1949, seven years before independence, British authorities appointed
the first northern Sudanese to lead the Ministry of Education. This official declared
that Sudan should have one language, ‘[t]hat language could only be Arabic, and
Arabic must therefore be taught in all our schools’ (Sandell 1982:66). A year later,
in 1950, an International Commission for Secondary Education, comprised of
British, Sudanese, Egyptian, and Indian delegates, endorsed the nation-wide
teaching of Arabic and suggested that teaching southern Sudanese children in
‘vernacular’ languages was ‘a waste of time and energy’ (ibid.:70–71). Thus
colonial language policies underwent rapid dismantling.
In the early 1950s, northern Sudanese educators headed south to implement
Arabisation among southern Sudanese schoolchildren who needed to learn Arabic
from scratch. Yet as an Egyptian linguist who was hired to help with this scheme
discovered, ‘knowledge of Arabic was nil’ among eight hundred southern Suda-
nese schoolteachers. Also lacking was the know-how to teach Arabic as a foreign
language to non-Muslims, and resources to implement training. Consequently,
northern Sudanese officials sponsored two experiments to overcome pedagogical
barriers. First, they recruited American and British missionaries, who had experi-
ence in simplifying Arabic for Bible translations that were intended for semi-
literate people. They asked missionaries to devise simplified Arabic texts for
southern Sudanese youth, hoping that literacy in colloquial Arabic might offer a
stepping-stone to the literary language (Sharkey 2011). Second, they appointed
Egyptian and Sudanese linguists to devise Arabic-script orthographies for south-
ern languages, theoretically to ease the transition to Arabic literacy (Abu Bakr
1978). But Sirr al-Khatm al-Khalifa (1919–2006), the future prime minister of
Sudan who led this Arabisation initiative, later reflected that, ‘The educated
Southerners were not happy about the introduction of Arabic since they feared that
the future was only for those who knew Arabic well. On the political side they
feared domination by Northerners’ (Sandell 1982:66).
In 1955, as Britain was transferring power to northern Sudanese nationalists,
southern Sudanese troops mutinied in a place called Torit. Historians convention-
ally date what they call the ‘first civil war’ to this Torit Mutiny. On 1 January 1956,
independence occurred: northern Sudanese nationalists immediately declared
Islam the country’s official religion and Arabic the country’s official language.
Without a doubt, Arabic was Sudan’s most widely spoken language: the 1956
census reported that 51.4% of the population spoke it as their first language
(Republic of Sudan 1962:2, 184). But Arabic-speakers mostly lived in the north.
In 1957, a ‘Southern Federal Party’, consisting mostly of southern Sudanese
who had attended mission schools, issued a manifesto. They called for recognition
of English along with Arabic as an official language; Christianity along with Islam
as a state religion; and ‘the transfer of the Sudan from the Arab world to the
African’. The central government responded to the manifesto by sentencing its
primary author to seven years in prison for sedition (Sandell 1982:75–76). In
the same year, northern Sudanese politicians announced the nationalisation of

435
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

Christian missionary schools in the south. A year later, the same politicians
earmarked more than 173,000 Sudanese pounds ‘for the propagation of Islam in
the Southern provinces of Bahr al-Ghazal, Upper Nile, and Equatoria’ (Poggo
2002:72).
In 1958, a military coup brought General Ibrahim Abboud (1900–1983) to
power. Abboud emerged as a keen supporter of both Arabisation and Islamisation.
His government immediately opened six intermediate-level Islamic ma’hads
(seminaries) in southern Sudan, and went on to open many khalwas (village
Qur’an schools) that were later recognised as government primary schools. Four
years later, in 1962, his regime expelled all foreign Christian missionaries on the
grounds that they were hindering national integration and aiding southern rebels
(Republic of the Sudan, Ministry of the Interior 1964:3, app. B; Voll 1997). The
year 1962 also witnessed a strike among southern Sudanese students, who pro-
tested the government’s Arabisation policies. A group of southern Sudanese
activists later submitted a petition of protest to the United Nations, claiming that
authorities had retaliated against the strike’s leaders by pulling their teeth out with
pliers. The petitioners also complained that Muslim Arab teachers from northern
Sudan ‘engage too much in politics – [discussing] unity of the Sudan, Islamic
history, Arab League – and such other irrelevant subjects’, and that they expelled
Christian students who refused to attend Qur’an classes (Sandell 1982:77–79).
According to the historian Scopas Poggo (2002:73–74), government officials also
began to pressure southern students to convert by making promotion to higher
schools and access to scholarships contingent upon their embracing Islam.
Writing in the 1970s, the Sudanese linguist, Yusuf el-Khalifa Abu Bakr (who
had helped to devise Arabic orthographies for southern vernaculars), acknowl-
edged that language politics helped fuel the civil war. The southern Sudanese
guerrillas known as the Anyanya also developed jungle schools in the 1960s in
which they consciously adopted the old British system of combining the major
southern Sudanese vernaculars with English as media of instruction (Abu Bakr
1975:14).
Ultimately, what northern politicians regarded as national unification looked
like cultural colonialism to southerners, who had no input into policy-making.
Southerners appeared to feel, too, that educational standards were dismal, teachers
were more interested in indoctrination than education, and southerners would
never be able to compete with educated native Arabic-speakers for government
jobs (Elrayah 1999:615; Nyombe 1997:108–09, 114; Sandell 1982:76, 80, 93–94,
105, 111; Sudan African National Union 1964:7, 43, 57). Meanwhile, with the
government openly promoting the Islamisation of schools as well as their Arabi-
sation, the politics of religion, language, and education became inextricably
tangled.
In 1972, the first civil war ended when President Ja’far Numayri (1930–2009)
signed the Addis Ababa Accord, promising southerners greater political and
economic participation, and accepting English as a language of southern regional
administration. But his promises went unfulfilled. In 1983, after Numayri pro-
claimed Islamic Shari’a the law of the land, war resumed when a southern officer,
John Garang (1945–2005), defected to lead a southern resistance group known as

436
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/A). Numayri’s regime
fell in 1986, but the regimes that succeeded him continued to uphold Shari’a law
and to insist on Arabic and Islam as national unifiers (Lesch 1998; Woodward
1990). Meanwhile, during the late 1980s and 1990s, Christianity spread among
southerners, arguably functioning as a vehicle of cultural resistance (Hutchinson
2002). War also spread beyond the south to the Nuba Mountains, a largely Muslim
but non-Arab region in western Sudan.
In 1989, Catherine Miller and Hashim Salih (1989:106–07) bleakly assessed
Sudanese government policies, concluding that, ‘abusive centralisation and the
non-recognition of ethnic minorities have cancelled out the capacity for potential
integration that [the government’s policies] of Islamisation and Arabisation may
have held’. The Sudanese linguist Ushari Ahmad Mahmud (1983:2) was equally
blunt: ‘International and indigenous professionals acting as linguistic specialists
will get nowhere as long as they continue to avoid the real issues of political power
distribution and social inequalities.’
Many sources claim that the second civil war ended in 2005 with the Compre-
hensive Peace Agreement, which promised the referendum on national unity that
occurred in January 2011. But Darfur raises questions here. In The Root Causes of
Sudan’s Civil Wars, the historian Douglas Johnson (2003) emphasised the multi-
plicity of modern Sudanese civil conflicts, as well as their diffuse and chronic
natures. Building upon Johnson’s model, it makes sense to regard the post-2003
Darfur conflict as an extension of civil war in a western theatre, and to treat any
firm war dates with caution. Indeed, some analysts see a direct connection between
the Darfur conflict and the ‘second civil war’: they note that the rhetoric of SPLA
leader John Garang inspired the Darfurian rebels by extolling possibilities for a
‘New Sudan’ that would be ethnically pluralistic and socially inclusive, and
inherently ‘Africanist’ rather than ‘Arabist’ (Idris 2005:89).
As the twenty-first century approached, Arabic was spreading in Sudan as a
lingua franca especially among refugees, urban migrants, and people of northern
Nigerian immigrant origin (Abu Manga 1999; Mugaddam 2006). At the same
time, Juba Arabic, spoken in southern Sudan and among some southern Sudanese
migrants in the north, was gaining recognition among scholars as a distinct
pidgin-creole, as the publication of linguistic studies and a dictionary showed
(Mahmud 1983; Smith and Ama 2005). Arabic was also gaining a foothold as a
language of print culture in Darfurian refugee camps (Haselock 2007), though as
observers pointed out, the spread of the Arabic language did not necessarily mean
the spread of Arab identity (Miller 2000).
Meanwhile, Arabic was spreading in Sudan as an educational language. Con-
firming this trend in the mid-1990s, for example, the Sudanese government
officially lent support to a programme of Arabising the medical school curricula
(Fahal 2007). While this measure may have had ideological dimensions related to
the Islamisation programmes of the post-1989 National Islamic Front (NIF)
regime, the move was undoubtedly pragmatic, since the English-language educa-
tion available in government primary and secondary schools was limited and low
in quality. The turn to Arabic enabled the dramatic expansion of medical educa-
tion, so that in the 1990s ‘the number of medical schools rose from three to more

437
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

than twenty, and the annual intake of medical students increased from 300 to
1500’, benefitting women especially (Ahmed 2009:362). At Sennar University
(southeast of Khartoum), the anthropologist Susan Kenyon observed in 2001:
‘Most [Sudanese] faculty I talked with thought that was a shame, that it [the turn
to Arabic] cut the future doctors off from the global biomedical community. Most
of the students didn’t care . . . since the program . . . was one of community-based
[and often rural] medicine.’2 Despite official policy, however, medical schools
continued to teach in a mixture of Arabic and English, while among medical elites,
advanced study and research proceeded in English.3

Arabisation and War in Algeria

Compared with Sudan, Algeria’s Arabisation policies were more systematic and
protracted. There, literary Arabic also faced two serious contenders – French and
resurgent Berber – not to mention Algerian colloquial Arabic.
Upon gaining power in 1962, the government of Ahmed Ben Bella moved to
promote standard literary Arabic. Officials decided in 1964 that children should
receive seven hours of Arabic instruction in school per week, and later more. But
the government lacked qualified Arabic teachers, so it imported one thousand
Egyptians, and later Iraqis and Syrians. After the civil war of the 1990s, some
writers criticised these teachers and questioned their credentials. For example,
the sociolinguist Farida Abu-Haidar (2000:154–55, 161) called the Egyptian
teachers ‘religious fanatics’, who as members of the Muslim Brotherhood,
indoctrinated poor Algerian children into hard-line Islamism while stoking
popular contempt for the Algerian Francophone elite (see also Gafaïti 2002:35;
Holt 1994:37).
In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the governments of Ben Bella (r. 1962–1965),
Houari Boumediène (r. 1965–1978), and Chadli Benjedid (r. 1979–1992) imple-
mented further Arabisation measures, dictating the use of Arabic, for example, for
primary and secondary schools, university humanities and social science pro-
grammes, and road signs. They also required government employees to demon-
strate Arabic proficiency and to conduct court cases in Arabic (Abu-Haidar 2000;
Grandguillaume 1983). Yet even by the 1990s, Arabisation was incomplete while
Algerian Muslim elites – including the children of officials who insisted on
Arabisation – continued sending their children to the few remaining French
schools (Benrabah 2007:206–07). Meanwhile, according to a critic of Arabisation,
many Algerian families watched Arabic television in a fog, guessing at and
interpreting, and sometimes arguing over, what they all thought they had heard
(Saadi-Mokrane 2002:46–47, 52). Even in some branches of government, many
employees continued to write documents in French (despite laws to the contrary),
only producing Arabic texts if actually needed (Benrabah 2007:195).
In 2002, the anthropologist Jane Goodman spoke to an Algerian Berber man
named Ammar who was living in Montreal: born in 1957, he was among the first
cadres of children to attend an Arabised programme. He told her that school was
traumatic: ‘Speaking Kabyle [Berber] was forbidden . . . not only in the school
itself but also anywhere in the school’s vicinity’ (Goodman 2004:67). Teachers

438
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

punished children caught speaking Kabyle, ‘perhaps being forced to kneel for
hours without a break, or perhaps being physically struck’, and parents expressed
dismay (ibid.). His story was consistent with those of others who told Goodman
about being slapped in school for speaking Berber. Goodman concluded that many
of the Kabyle children who went through the first Arabised schools developed in
exactly the opposite way that the government intended: rather than becoming more
‘Arab’, they became more self-consciously Berber.
The year 1980 witnessed a critical step in this process. At the University of
Algiers, Arabisants (ideologically Arabist students) staged a protest against the
‘slow pace of Arabization and the continuing advantages given to French-speaking
Algerians, including Kabyles [Berbers]’ (Tabory and Tabory 1987:63). The gov-
ernment merely looked on. Meanwhile, Berber students at the University of
Tizi-Ouzou, in the Kabyle region, also went on strike after government authorities
cancelled a lecture on ancient Berber poetry. In this case, however, government
forces seized the university, and riots ensued (ibid.). Henceforth this event became
annually commemorated among Berber nationalists as ‘Tafsut’ or Berber Spring;
in the words of the anthropologist Paul Silverstein (2003:92), it ‘concretized the
previously amorphous [Berber cultural movement] and initiated Berberism as a
political force in post-colonial Algeria’.
In the 1980s, tensions mounted. By 1989, only four million Algerians, out of a
total population of twenty-five million, were employed, and among the one million
people counted by the government as officially unemployed, ‘80% were between
17 and 27 years of age’ (Schade-Poulsen 1999:7). Discontentment with govern-
ment autocracy grew, until in 1988 Algeria witnessed a series of uprisings followed
by government attempts at liberalisation. In the absence of vigorous political
alternatives, an Islamist party, called the Front Islamique du Salut or FIS, won local
and regional elections in 1990 and stood poised to win national elections a year
later. In 1991, the army cancelled the elections, and in 1992 seized power;
meanwhile, Algeria descended into violence. Debates continue about how radical
FIS would have been had elections brought it to power, and about its relationship
to jihadist factions that later emerged. Regardless, by 2000, when fighting sub-
sided, an estimated one hundred thousand Algerians had died, including many
intellectuals, musicians, and other cultural figures, in a war that political scientists
still struggle to explain (Entelis 2000:ix).
The Algerian Civil War largely represented a battle of history and collective
memory over how to be Algerian. In the 1990s, the big identity question of 1962
still loomed, namely, ‘Would this new nation be French, or anti-French, Arab, or
Middle Eastern? No one responsible imagined that it would have the right to be
[simply] Algerian’ (Grandguillaume 1999:16).
An Algerian writer, Djamila Saadi-Mokrane (2002:54), connected the war more
firmly to language politics in the context of what she called ‘the Algerian lingui-
cide’. Writing in 2002, she argued that, ‘[t]he cultural civil war’ in Algeria ‘has
been waged without respite during the thirty years of independence’. In other
words, the war of the 1990s was merely the flashpoint of a much longer conflict.
Writing about Algeria and its complicated history, many analysts stress the anguish
associated with its language politics – using words like ‘psychic pain’, ‘trauma’,

439
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

‘humiliation’, ‘intolerance’, and ‘castration’ – to describe its postcolonial history

(Abu-Haidar 2000; Benrabah 2007; Gafaïti 2002; Saadi-Mokrane 2002).
In 2004, the sociolinguist Mohammed Benrabah surveyed Algerian youth and
asked what may be a peculiarly Algerian question: Which language, if any (Alge-
rian Arabic, Literary Arabic, French, or Tamazight [Berber]), did respondents
connect to a ‘painful past’? ‘The majority (53.3%)’, he reported, ‘chose French’ –
something that he attributed to memories or impressions of colonialism. In addi-
tion, 20.9% of respondents chose ‘Algerian Arabic’, 10.9% chose ‘Literary
Arabic’, and 15.1% ‘Tamazight’ (Benrabah 2007:202).
Benrabah has been a scathing critic of postcolonial language planning, which he
considers not a popular measure but rather the work of oligarchs ‘who imposed it
from above’ and promoted an ‘Arabisation of the soul’ (arabisation des âmes) that
generated ‘psychic disequilibrium’ over Algerian identity. Far from empowering
Algerians, he charged, Arabisation policies dumbed down educational pro-
grammes. Arabic-medium curricula did not match their French-medium counter-
parts in intellectual rigour, he claimed, so that Arabic-version science and
mathematics textbooks, for example, encouraged facile wonderment at the crea-
tion of God rather than critical thinking. The result, in his view, was the ‘pauperi-
sation’ of Algerian intellectual life and the manipulation of Algerian ‘subalterns’
by established elites (Benrabah 1999:143–60).
Writing in 2011, however, the historian James McDougall took a more sanguine
view of ‘Arabism’ in Algeria and questioned the discourse of ‘failure’ around it.
Arabism ‘served as an increasingly vacuous official language of the [postcolonial
Algerian] state’, he wrote, and yet, for ordinary Algerians, Arab and Arabic
cultures retained the ‘ability to evoke a “dream” or promise’ (McDougall
2011:253). Arabic literary genres like novels and newspapers flourished in Algeria
from the 1990s, even as French continued to burgeon, because they provided
‘elements of a repertoire of symbolic resources’ for Algerian expression
(ibid.:265).

Conclusion
Citing case studies from Belgium, India, and elsewhere, the political scientist
Selma Sonntag (1995) has suggested that ‘official language movements are used
[as] political strategies pursued by emerging elites in multinational states’. The
goal of such movements is to supplant old elites and consolidate power. The
histories of Sudan and Algeria support the idea that Arabisation was indeed a
political strategy on the part of ruling elites, who implemented measures that
endorsed particular postcolonial nationalist ideologies while confirming their own
claims to political power. Arabisation, in the end, was not merely a matter of
language promotion; rather, it entailed the promotion of a particular state-centred
vision of culture and power.
Why did the official propagation of Arabic in Algeria and Sudan generate
popular hostility? Benrabah has argued that Arabisation in Algeria ‘failed’ because
ruling elites did not convince many Algerians of Arabic education’s economic
advantages in a global economy (particularly vis-à-vis French). At the same time,

440
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Algerian ruling elites forced the Algerian masses to attend Arabised schools while
ensuring French-language proficiency for their own children. Unlike language
enthusiasts who revived modern Hebrew in what became Israel, Benrabah argued,
Algerian leaders lacked sincerity to match ideology – and this discredited them
before the people (Benrabah 2007:206–07). Other sociolinguists attributed this
trend to ‘elite closure’, such that Algerian elites maintained their eliteness by
restricting access to French fluency (Djité 1992:22–23).
Writing in Arabic, a Sudanese Islamist writer named Hasan Makki (1990:56–
62) made a similar argument about cultural elitism, double standards, and insin-
cerity among Sudanese advocates of Arabisation. Makki especially criticised
Sudanese Muslim Arabophone elites for sending their children to private schools
that were originally founded by Christian missionaries. Not only did their children
learn English this way, he argued, but they also escaped from overcrowded
government schools.4 Hasan al-Turabi (b. 1932), who emerged as the chief ideo-
logue behind the NIF upon its seizure of power in the 1989 coup, arguably
exemplified this hypocrisy. For while Turabi himself had attended a Christian
missionary school as a youth in Khartoum, and had later studied in Paris where he
earned a law degree at the Sorbonne, he supported a regime in Sudan that
promoted (a poor-quality) Arabic-Islamic education for the masses.5 In southern
Sudan, meanwhile, reasons for the failure of Arabisation were egregious: the
government schools never managed to provide high-quality, broad-based Arabic
instruction for students, or to make students feel like valued citizens, so that
southern Sudanese came to regard Arabisation as a tool for subjugation (Wöndu
and Lesch 2000).
This history of language politics confirms a basic question facing the postcolo-
nial nation-state: does membership in a ‘nation’ require a set of defined cultural
norms imposed by the state? Consider an Iraqi parallel. In a book entitled,
Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, the
political scientist Eric Davis (2005) suggested there were two strands of Iraqi
nationalist thought in the late twentieth century. One, exemplified by Saddam
Hussein (1937–2006) and the Ba’th Party, was Arabist, endorsing pan-Arab unity,
promoting the Arabic language to the exclusion of all others, and promoting a
monocultural view of the Iraqi nation-state. The other nationalist strand was
‘Iraqist’, and its exemplar was ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963), who ruled from
a coup in 1958 until his assassination in 1963. According to Davis, Qasim
endorsed a pluralist view of Iraqi identity: an Iraq made up of Sunni Arabs, but also
Kurds, Shi’a Muslims, and others. The Arabisation initiatives of Sudan and Algeria
were similar to the Iraqi Arabist agendas in their monolithic pretensions.
Indeed, in Sudan and Algeria, critics of government policies long called for
pluralistic national policies – reflecting what one could call ‘Sudanist’ and ‘Alge-
rianist’ rather than ‘Arabist’ visions. In Algeria, such critics called for embracing
the country’s trilingualism or quadrilingualism, if one counted colloquial Arabic
along with literary Arabic, French, and Berber (Gafaïti 2002:25, 34). In Sudan,
critics like the SPLA leader, John Garang, extolled the idea of a ‘New Sudan’ that
would not only tolerate but also respect and celebrate the country’s linguistic and
cultural diversity. Many southern Sudanese intellectuals and scholars have

441
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

described this pluralism in terms of ‘African’ rather than ‘Arab’ identity (see, e.g.,
Poggo 2009:9–20), with the adjective ‘African’ implying diversity.
Ideals and theories aside, how are language cultures developing in Algeria and
Sudan today? A few trends stand out. For a start, some minority languages appear
to be experiencing revivals among Algerian and Sudanese peoples as a result of
new technologies. The internet has stimulated a robust Berber nationalist move-
ment in Algeria and among Algerian and other Maghribi diasporas, and has seeded
interest in use of a ‘neo-Tifinagh’ alphabet for writing Tamazight.6 Today in Sudan,
Dutch and Sudanese researchers are studying how mobile phones and the internet
have revitalised endangered languages like Moro, spoken in a part of the Nuba
Mountains that suffered during civil war in the 1990s (Brinkman, de Bruijn, and
Bilal 2009).
Algerian and Sudanese peoples may also be finding opportunities by capitalis-
ing on what were once colonial languages – with India, relative to English, serving
as a global success story. Today Algeria’s neighbour to the west, Morocco, is using
its citizens’ French- and Spanish-language skills to open call centres serving
businesses in France and Spain, and to appeal to tourists who visit the country.
Algeria’s eastern neighbour, Tunisia, has a well-educated population (proficient in
French and Arabic) and a European-focused tourist economy (Hazbun 2008).
Many highly educated Tunisians have also secured jobs in international banking
and business (Friedman 2010). Algeria, too, has the potential to become a cultural
and economic power in the francophone world.
For Sudan, however, momentous changes – and above all, the south’s independ-
ence in 2011 – have made the future somewhat uncertain. Analysts speculate that
in the Republic of the Sudan – that is, the northern two-thirds that is left of the
former country – Muslim politicians may now press an Arab-Islamic agenda more
strongly in reaction to the deep uncertainty over national identity that still (or ever
more) pervades the country (de Waal 2010:10–11, 13). The fact that Nuba peoples,
who live in the ‘north’ near what is now the border with the ‘south’, are agitating
for greater autonomy from Khartoum, adds to the tension. Oil – exported from
Sudan since 1999 – complicates the picture still more (Harneit-Sievers 2010:100).
‘Petro-states’ are among the most corrupt and repressive states in the world and
commonly suffer from civil conflict (Karl 2008). Given Sudan’s pre-oil history of
chronic civil war, it is likely that the battle over natural resources will merge with
long-running battles for political hegemony, with linguistic, religious, and other
cultural policies playing significant roles.
In the young Republic of South Sudan, meanwhile, there are likely to be few
surprises in official language policy. Since the 1980s, southern Sudanese intellec-
tuals have been remarkably consistent in saying what they want (Mandeson
1988:332–33). The Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan
declared English the official language of South Sudan, but promised to support
education and literacy development in several local languages (Republic of South
Sudan 2011). A southern Sudanese newspaper, the Juba Post, reported in February
2011 that the new government would abandon Arabic and Islamic education in its
schools, though how, when, or if it would do so remains unclear.7 If implemented,
such a measure would reflect both ideology and pragmatism. English certainly

442
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

connects South Sudan to its East African neighbours. English is a commodity, a

possible ticket out for those fortunate enough to develop proficiency in it (Yongo-
Bure 1988:362). At the same time, primary literacy in local languages will be
critical in rural schools where trained teachers and materials are limited. For
southerners, in any case, local languages are a source of nationalist pride: They
endow South Sudan with the diversity that intellectuals have long cited to justify
the region’s claims for independence from the ‘Arab’ north. The transitional
constitution for South Sudan reflected this pride, affirming that, ‘[a]ll indigenous
languages of South Sudan are national languages and shall be respected, developed
and promoted’.8
In the former Sudan, two obvious challenges now loom. First, in a country
like South Sudan that is one of the world’s poorest, financial realities may force
leaders to restrict language teaching in schools to a few major languages
besides English. Determining which languages to support, and how to support
them, will involve political wrangling. Second, there remains the question of
people of South Sudanese origin who are living in Khartoum and other cities of
northern Sudan. Numbering perhaps two million, many of these South Sudanese
residents are the children or grandchildren of people who fled the north during
the war years, and who have developed proficiency only in Arabic (Ottaway
2011). These children of Arabisation, who may speak Arabic without identify-
ing or being identified as ‘Arabs’, will face some difficult questions about their
places of ‘home’ (north, south, both, or neither?) and their prospects for truly
belonging.
Writing in 1992, the sociolinguist David Laitin (1992:18) predicted that ‘for
most of Africa the multilingual state [would remain] the norm’ despite some
governments’ efforts at ‘language rationalization’. Most Africans, he argued,
would continue to need or want to speak at least three languages, plus or minus
one. The two most essential would be the lingua franca promoted by nationalist
politicians (i.e., Arabic in Algeria and Sudan) and the colonial language. In
addition, Africans would need to speak the vernacular language used in elemen-
tary schools as well as their native language, if one or both differed. Laitin
speculated, however, that as a result of its Arabisation policies, Algeria might
move towards a ‘2-language outcome’, in which Modern Standard Arabic and
French would prevail (ibid.:18–19). Twenty years have passed, and the rise of
Berber-language-centred nationalism in Algeria and among Algerians abroad,
together with the persistence of colloquial forms of Arabic, now suggest other-
wise: Algerians, too, are likely to follow the African formula of using three
languages, plus or minus one. And while English and Arabic are likely to retain
importance in the residual Republic of the Sudan and the new Republic of South
Sudan, Sudanese language repertoires will remain varied in both countries for
some time to come.
Of course, the reason for this variety is not only that languages convey meaning
and afford opportunities to their users. The reason is, rather, that languages are
viscerally political: They enable their users to show solidarity with others in a
locality, region, or country, even as they play roles and stake out their status (Laitin
1992:5, 71).

443
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

Notes
1
The last census data for Sudan with language information dates from 1956, when 51.4%
of the population was recorded as Arabic-speaking (Republic of Sudan 1962:2, 184).
2
Email communication from Susan Kenyon to the author, 7 July 2010. Kenyon spent a
sabbatical at Sennar University’s Faculty of Medicine in 2001.
3
Email communications to the author from Mark Fathi Massoud, 8 July 2010, and Noah
Salomon, 9 July 2010. For example, the Sudan Medical Journal is the English-medium,
official publication of the Sudan Medical Association. See http://sudanmedicaljournal.net/
(accessed 18 May 2011).
4
Political scientist Peter Woodward made a similar observation about the appeal of Unity
High School, an English-medium, former Christian missionary school in Khartoum, to
National Islamic Front (NIF) party elites; email to author, 9 July 2010.
5
This critique and insight came from one of the anonymous reviewers of this article.
6
See the website AmazighWorld.org, in four languages – Amazigh, English, French, and
Arabic: http://www.amazighworld.org/am/index.php (accessed 18 May 2011).
7
‘South Sudan Plans to Scrap Teaching of Arabic Language in Schools’, Juba Post, 24
February 2011.
8
The Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan, 2011.

References
Abu Bakr, Yusuf el-Khalifa. 1975. ‘Language and Education in the Southern Sudan’. In
Directions in Sudanese Linguistics and Folklore, ed. Sayyid Hamid Hurreiz and Herman
Bell. Khartoum: Khartoum University Press.
Abu Bakr, Yusuf el-Khalifa. 1978. ‘Orthographical Experiments in the Southern Sudan’. In
Aspects of Language in the Sudan, ed. Robin Thelwall. New University of Ulster,
Occasional Papers in Linguistics and Language Learning, No. 5.
Abu-Haidar, Farida. 2000. ‘Arabisation in Algeria’. International Journal of Francophone
Studies 3 (3): 151–63.
Abu Manga, Al-Amin. 1999. Hausa in the Sudan: Process of Adaptation to Arabic.
Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Ahmed, Awad Mohamed. 2009. ‘Ninja Turtles at Sudan Hospitals and Medical Schools:
More Muslim Women Doctors Practicing Medicine Wearing a Veil Covering Them from
Toes to Face’. Sudanese Journal of Public Health 4 (3): 360–65.
Aitsiselmi, Farid and Dawn Marley. 2008. ‘The Role and Status of the French Language in
North Africa’. In Studies in French Applied Linguistics, ed. Dalila Ayoun. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Amara, Muhammad Hasan and Abd Al-Rahman Mar’i. 2002. Language Education Policy:
The Arab Minority in Israel. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Benrabah, Mohamed. 1999. Langue et pouvoir en Algérie: Histoire d’un traumatisme
linguistique. Paris: Séguier.
Benrabah, Mohamed. 2007. ‘Language Maintenance and Spread: French in Algeria’.
International Journal of Francophone Studies 10 (1–2): 193–215.
Boucherit, Aziza. 2002. ‘Algérie: de l’Arabe à l’Arabisation’. In Language Contact and
Language Conflict in Arabic: Variations on a Sociolinguistic Theme, ed. Aleya Rouchdy.
London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Boukous, Ahmed. 1989. ‘Les etudes de dialectologie berbère en Algérie’. In Langue et
Société au Maghreb, ed. Abderrahim Youssi and Abderrafi Benhallam. Rabat: Univer-
sité Mohammed V.

444
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Brahimi, Fadila. 1999. ‘Loanwords in Algerian Berber’. In Arabic as a Minority Language,

ed. Jonathan Owens. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Brinkman, Inge, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Hisham Bilal. 2009. ‘The Mobile Phone, “Moder-
nity”, and Change in Khartoum, Sudan’. In Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of
Everyday Africa, ed. Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh, and Inge Brinkman.
Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa.
Chaker, Salem. 1997. ‘La Kabylie: un processus de développement linguistique autonome’.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language 123 (1): 81–99.
Christelow, Allan. 1987. ‘Ritual, Culture and Politics of Islamic Reformism in Algeria’.
Middle Eastern Studies 23 (3): 255–73.
Clancy-Smith, Julia. 1997. ‘The Maghrib and the Mediterranean World in the Nineteenth
Century: Illicit Exchanges, Migrants, and Social Marginals’. In The Maghrib in Ques-
tion: Essays in History and Historiography. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Courbage, Youssef and Philippe Fargues. 1997. Christians and Jews under Islam. Trans.
Judy Mabro. London: I.B. Tauris.
Daly, M.W. 1986. Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Diana K. 2007. Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and
French Colonial Expansion in North Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Davis, Eric. 2005. Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern
Iraq. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
de Waal, Alex. 2010. ‘Sudan’s Choices: Scenarios Beyond the CPA’. In Sudan – No Easy
Ways Ahead, ed. Heinrich Böll Foundation. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
Djité, Paulin G. 1992. ‘The Arabization of Algeria: Linguistic and Sociopolitical Motiva-
tions’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 98 (1): 15–28.
Elrayah, Tagelsir H. 1999. ‘Arabic and English in Sudan: 1821–1985’. Islamic Studies 38
(4): 603–20.
Entelis, John P. 2000. Preface to The Algerian Civil War, 1990–98, ed. Luis Martinez.
London: Hurst.
Fahal, A.H. 2007. ‘Medical Education in the Sudan: Its Strengths and Weaknesses’. Medical
Teacher 29 (9): 910–14.
Farouk, Hassan. 2011. ‘Al-Masir: The First Arabic Newspaper in Southern Sudan’. Sudan
Votes, 23 March. Available at: http://www.sudanvotes.com/articles/?id=649 (accessed 18
May 2011).
Friedman, Steven J. 2010. ‘A Tale of Two Economic Developments: Tunisia and Morocco’.
CUREJ, April 10. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/120/ (accessed 30
December 2010).
Gafaïti, Hafid. 2002. ‘The Monotheism of the Other: Language and De/Construction of
National Identity in Postcolonial Algeria’. In Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-
Emmanuelle Berger. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Goodman, Jane. 2004. ‘Reinterpreting the Berber Spring: From Rite of Reversal to Site of
Convergence’. The Journal of North African Studies 9 (3): 60–82.
Government of the Republic of South Sudan. 2011. ‘History of Southern Sudan’. Available
at: http://www.goss.org/ (accessed 5 October 2011).
Grandguillaume, Gilbert. 1983. Arabisation et politique linguistique au Maghreb. Paris:
Editions G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose.
Grandguillaume, Gilbert. 1999. Preface to Mohamed Benrabah, Langue et pouvoir en
Algérie: Histoire d’un traumatisme linguistique. Paris: Séguier.
Haeri, Niloofar. 2003. Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and
Politics in Egypt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

445
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

Harneit-Sievers, Axel. 2010. ‘Oil in Sudan: Fueling Conflict – Fueling Development?’ In

Sudan – No Easy Ways Ahead, ed. Heinrich Böll Foundation. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-
Stiftung.
Hasan, Yusuf Fadl. 1967. The Arabs and the Sudan: From the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth
Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Haselock, Simon. 2007. ‘Overview of the Albany Project in Darfur’. Presented at the
workshop on ‘Methodologies and Approaches to Public Opinion Research in Sudan’,
Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 4
April.
Hazbun, Waleed. 2008. Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Heggoy, Alf Andrew. 1973. ‘Education in French Algeria: An Essay on Cultural Conflict’.
Comparative Education Review 17 (2): 180–97.
Hill, Richard. 1959. Egypt in the Sudan, 1820–1881. London: Oxford University
Press.
Holt, Mike. 1994. ‘Algeria: Language, Nation and State’. In Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues
& Perspectives, ed. Yasir Suleiman. Richmond: Curzon.
Holt, P.M. and M.W. Daly. 2000. A History of the Sudan: From the Coming of Islam to the
Present Day. 5th ed. Harlow: Longman.
Hourani, Albert. 1983. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hurreiz, Sayed Hamid A. 1968. Linguistic Diversity and Language Planning in the Sudan.
Khartoum: Sudan Research Unit, University of Khartoum.
Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 2002. ‘Spiritual Fragments of an Unfinished War’. In Religion
and Conflict in Sudan, ed. Yusuf Fadl Hasan and Richard Gray. Nairobi: Paulines
Publications Africa.
Idris, Amir H. 2005. Conflict and Politics of Identity in Sudan. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Johnson, Douglas H. 2003. The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Karl, Terry. 2008. ‘Democracy over a Barrel: Oil, Regime Change, and War’. eScholarship,
University of California. Available at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9kq895kt
(accessed 30 December 2010).
Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh. 1996. ‘The Swinging Pendulum: Linguistic Controversy in Post-
Colonial Algeria’. Middle Eastern Studies 32 (4): 264–80.
Kraidy, Marwan M. 2010. Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laitin, David D. 1992. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lesch, Ann Mosely. 1998. The Sudan: Contested National Identities. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Lorcin, Patricia M.E. 1995. Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in
Colonial Algeria. London: I.B. Tauris.
Lugard, F.D. 1922. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. London: W. Blackwood &
Sons.
MacMaster, Neil. 2003. ‘Islamophobia in France and the “Algerian Problem” ’. In The New
Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, ed. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Mahmud, Ushari Ahmad. 1983. Arabic in the Southern Sudan: History and Spread of a
Pidgin-Creole. Khartoum: Fal.

446
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Makki, Hasan. 1990. Ab’ad al-tabshir al-masihi fi al-’asima al-qawmiyya. Omdurman:

Bayt al-Ma’rifa lil-Intaj al-Thaqafi.
Mandeson, Edward Bukulu. 1988. ‘Multi-Lingualism and Educational Development in
South Sudan: A Political Crisis or a Language Dilemma’. In Part of the Proceedings of
the Conference on North-South Relations since the Addis Ababa Agreement, ed. Mom
K.N. Arou and B. Yongo-Bure. Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies,
University of Khartoum.
McDougall, James. 2008. History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McDougall, James. 2011. ‘Dream of Exile, Promise of Home: Language, Education, and
Arabism in Algeria’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 43 (2): 251–70.
Miller, Catherine. 2000. ‘Juba Arabic as a Way of Expressing a Southern Sudanese Identity
in Khartoum’. In Aspects of the Dialects of Arabic Today, ed. Abderrahim Youssi. Rabat:
Amapatril.
Miller, Catherine and Hashim M. Salih. 1989. ‘Langues et identité’. In Le Soudan contem-
porain, ed. Marc Lavergne. Paris: Karthala.
Mugaddam, Abdel Rahim Hamid. 2006. ‘Language Maintenance and Shift in Sudan: The
Case of Migrant Ethnic Groups in Khartoum’. International Journal of the Sociology of
Language 181: 123–36.
Niblock, Tim. 1987. Class and Power in the Sudan: The Dynamics of Sudanese Politics,
1898–1985. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Nyombe, B.G.V. 1997. ‘Survival or Extinction: The Fate of the Local Languages of
the Southern Sudan’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 125: 99–
130.
Ottaway, Marina. 2011. ‘Southern Sudanese Living in North Sudan’. Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, 21 January. Available at: http://sudan.carnegieendowment.org/
2011/01/21/southern-sudanese-living-in-north-sudan (accessed 6 October 2011).
Poggo, Scopas S. 2002. ‘General Ibrahim Abboud’s Military Administration in the Sudan,
1958–1964: Implementation of the Programs of Islamization and Arabization in the
Southern Sudan’. Northeast African Studies 9 (1): 67–101.
Poggo, Scopas S. 2009. The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the
Southern Sudan, 1955–1972. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Republic of South Sudan. 2011. The Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South
Sudan, posted with ‘Draft Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan Released’. Sudan
Tribune, 24 April. Available at: http://www.sudantribune.com/Draft-constitution-of-the-
Republic,38679 (accessed 7 June 2011).
Republic of Sudan. 1962. First Population Census of Sudan, 1955/56. Final Report, 3.
Khartoum: Government of Sudan.
Republic of the Sudan, Ministry of the Interior. 1964. Memorandum on Reasons that Led to
the Expulsion of Foreign Missionaries and Priests from the Southern Provinces of the
Sudan. Khartoum: Government of Sudan.
Rossetti, John Joseph Henry. 2008. ‘Christian Marabout, Soldier Monk: Charles de
Foucauld between the French and the Tuareg’. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 19
(4): 381–96.
Ruedy, John. 2005. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. 2nd ed.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Saadi-Mokrane, Djamila. 2002. ‘The Algerian Linguicide’. In Algeria in Others’ Lan-
guages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Sandell, Liza. 1982. English Language in Sudan: A History of Its Teaching and Politics.
London: Ithaca.

447
Heather J. Sharkey: Language and Conflict

Sanderson, Lilian Passmore and Neville Sanderson. 1981. Education, Religion, and Politics
in Southern Sudan, 1899–1964. London: Ithaca.
Schade-Poulsen, Marc. 1999. Men and Popular Music in Algeria: The Social Significance of
Raï. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Sharkey, Heather J. 2002. ‘Christians among Muslims: The Church Missionary Society in
the Northern Sudan’. Journal of African History 43 (1): 51–75.
Sharkey, Heather J. 2003. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sharkey, Heather J. 2004. ‘Globalization, Migration, and Identity: Sudan, 1800–2000’. In
Globalization and the Muslim World: Culture, Religion, and Modernity, ed. Birgit
Schaebler and Leif Stenberg. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Sharkey, Heather J. 2008. ‘Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics of Language,
Ethnicity, and Race’. African Affairs 107 (426): 21–43.
Sharkey, Heather J. 2011. ‘Sudanese Arabic Bibles and the Politics of Translation’. The
Bible Translator 62 (1): 37–45.
Shepard, Todd. 2006. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking
of France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Silverstein, Paul A. 2002. ‘The Kabyle Myth: Colonization and the Production of Ethnic-
ity’. In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith
Axel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Silverstein, Paul A. 2003. ‘Martyrs and Patriots: Ethnic, National and Transnational
Dimensions of Kabyle Politics’. The Journal of North African Studies 8 (1): 87–
111.
Smith, Andrea L. 2006. Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in
Algeria and France. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Smith, Ian and Morris T. Ama. 2005. Juba Arabic-English Dictionary/Kamuus ta Arabi Juba
wa Ingliizi. Kampala: Fountain.
Sonntag, Selma K. 1995. ‘Elite Competition and Official Language Movements’. In Power
and Inequality in Language Education, ed. James W. Tollefson. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Spaulding, Jay. 1982. ‘Slavery, Land Tenure and Social Class in the Northern Turkish
Sudan’. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1): 1–20.
Sudan African National Union. 1964. The Memorandum Presented by the Sudan African
National Union to the Commission of the Organisation of African Unity for Refugees.
Typescript, Kampala, November.
Sudan Government. 1928. Report of the Rejaf Language Conference. London.
Suleiman, Yasir. 2003. The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Tabory, Ephraim and Mala Tabory. 1987. ‘Berber Unrest in Algeria: Lessons for Language
Policy’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 63: 63–79.
Valensi, Lucette. 1977. On the Eve of Colonialism: North Africa before the French Con-
quest. Trans. Kenneth J. Perkins. New York: Africana.
Voll, John O. 1997. ‘Imperialism, Nationalism and Missionaries: Lessons from Sudan for
the Twenty-First Century’. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 8 (1): 39–52.
Warburg, Gabriel. 1971. ‘Religious Policy in the Northern Sudan: Ulama and Sufism,
1899–1918’. Asian and African Studies 7 (1): 89–119.
Wöndu, Steven and Ann Lesch. 2000. Battle for Peace in Sudan: An Analysis of the Abuja
Conferences, 1992–1993. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Woodward, Peter. 1990. Sudan: The Unstable State, 1898–1989. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.

448
 Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012

Yamba, C. Bawa. 1995. Permanent Pilgrims: The Role of Pilgrimage in the Lives of West
African Muslims in Sudan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Yongo-Bure, B. 1988. ‘Education in the Southern Sudan since the Addis Ababa Agree-
ment’. In Part of the Proceedings of the Conference on North-South Relations since the
Addis Ababa Agreement, ed. Mom K.N. Arou and B. Yongo-Bure. Khartoum: Institute of
African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum.

449