Students’ sociolinguistic behaviour and attitudes towards Arabic and French

Abstract EN

he present work attempts to understand the linguistic experience in Algeria, an Arabic-speaking country in which the French language was strongly imposed during colonisation to the extent that today it may be, and is indeed, considered a second language.

In fact, alongside Arabic, French is still used, almost spontaneously, in many public domains such as administrations, the media, and particularly in a number of streams in higher education, the focus of this research work.

It is in two university settings, the Islamic sciences department and the faculty of medicine, that we have attempted to show that French is more appropriate, or at least thought to be so, for the medical domain and exact sciences while, on the other hand, Arabic is tightly related to religious domains and social sciences.

Such language relations have their roots in the Algerian educational system and some cultural and historical values.

By means of a number of sociolinguistic tools, we intend to show the extent to which students code-switch to Standard Arabic or French and the reasons and attitudes behind such linguistic behaviour