Competition between four “world” languages in Algeria

Abstract As a post-colonial society with an almost unique colonial history on the African continent and in the Arabophone zone, Algeria can serve as a focus on this millennium’s rivalry between a few “world” languages – namely Arabic, Chinese, English, and French. This article highlights the importance of the influence of colonialism in shaping post-colonial language policy in a multilingual society. It also looks at the role of elites and the effects of their top-down language implementation on planned and unplanned developments as related to the position and status of “world” languages within a polity. And it reasserts the dominant position of English as a global language despite the maintenance of the former colonial language, French. From a theoretical and applied perspective, this article raises questions about what constitutes a “world” language, and it shows the importance of some indicators in measuring the international standing of languages in the globalized world.