L' Arabisation dans les Sciences Sociales: le Cas Algerien [Book review]

Abstract

In Algeria, the publication of a book has become a rather unusual event. Instead of being a somehow normal activity, publishing seems like attempting the impossible. 'That's one published and saved', we always say after each birth. Saved from oblivion. Another book which will help re-establish our memory in the face of the overall amnesia. We have become oblivious of what we were: a people full of contradictions, of hope and history, but also a people unable, at the threshold of the third millennium, to extricate itself from the ascendancy of orality. But which vernacular are we talking about, when one knows that the country is still struggling against real/false linguistic problems it wants to solve with profuse government decisions, decrees and laws, away from the socio-cultural, linguistic and psycholinguistic realities of the country?