“Ytnahaw ga’!”: Algeria’s Cultural Revolution and the Role of Language in the Early Stages of the Spring 2019 Hirak

ABSTRACT

When Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced in February 2019 that he would seek a fifth term, the people took to the streets in protest. This sparked the Hirak, an ongoing popular movement that ultimately resulted in the withdrawal of Bouteflika’s candidacy. In March 2019, during the early stages of the protest and before Bouteflika’s withdrawal, a video of a young man reacting candidly to the situation in the country went viral on social media. A phrase he used to express his frustration with the political elite, ytnahaw ga’ (meaning remove them altogether), became a salient slogan in subsequent protests. The language dynamics in the video show the continued relevance of unresolved language issues in the country, and suggest that part of the movement’s aspirations are not only political, but cultural as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Algeria
• Hirak
• Darija
• dialect pride
• Algerian protests
• Maghreb

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Fanon (1968) The Wretched of the Earth, 246.

2 See for example the twitter account @HicCartoons, which regularly posts satirical cartoons on Algeria’s political situation.

3 See Hasan (2019).

4 The noteworthy role that humour plays in the protests has led to them being called ‘la révolution du sourire’ (the smiling revolution). See Jadaliya article by Hiyem Cheurfa (2019).

5 Gilbert Grandguillaume’s 1983 study remains one of the most detailed analysis of Arabisation policies and their consequences in the Maghreb. For an example of more recent scholarship on the subject, see Daoudi (2018).

6 For more on the Algerian Berber Spring of the 1980s, see Goodman (2004) and Aïtel (2013).

7 For a recent example of discussions of education and language in Morocco see Sefrioui (2018).

8 For more on Algeria’s Black Decade, see Lazreg (1998) and Stora (2001).

9 See Silverstein (2002) on conspiracy theorising in Algeria.

10 See El Watan (2019).

11 In the first and second weeks of October 1988, turbulent protests escalated into riots, and were violently quelled by the government, resulting in hundreds of fatalities. For more on the October Riots, see ‘Black October’ in Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (Evans and Phillips 2007).

12 http://www.aps.dz/algerie/86748-le-president-bouteflika-adresse-un-message-a-la-nation-annoncant-le-report-de-l-election-presidentielle

13 Before the movement became universally known as the Hirak, there were several names given in the early stages to the protests occurring regularly on Fridays in large Algerian cities. Among these was the ’15 March movement’, named after the date of the Friday following Bouteflika’s 11 March letter.

14 Albeit widely contested, the number according to the Algerian official news agency Algérie Presse Service (2019) was a turnout of 39.8%.

15 See Sky News Arabic (2019).

16 The ellipsis indicates overlapping speech as the young man pushes through individuals off-camera who are presumably trying to prevent him from stepping into the shot, and the journalist initially tries to resist the interruption before deciding to interview him instead.

17 The importance of language to this moment is neither subtle nor implicit, nor am I the first to notice it and point it out. In addition to frequent anecdotal references to language when referring to this moment on social media (see Figure 4 for example), a blog post by Lameen Souag published on 12 March 2019 provides an overview of the role of language in the interaction from a sociolinguistic perspective.

18 الدارجة Darija (or Darja) is the name of the variety of Arabic spoken in northwestern Africa, as well as an Arabic word meaning dialect.

19 The dichotomy opposing MSA to a spoken dialect of Arabic is not unique to Algeria or the Maghreb, but is a highly debated point of contention throughout Arabic-speaking societies, including Egypt and the Mashreq. For more on MSA in Algeria, see Dahou (2016).

20 For more on humour and its intersection with politics in Algeria, see Perego (2018).

21 See El Bilad TV (2019).

22 See Hamdi (2019).

23 For more on diglossia see the foundational articles by Fergusson (1959) and Fishman (1967). For more recent analyses of Arabic diglossia in the Maghreb, see Walters (2003), Hachimi (2013), and Dahou (2016). For diglossia in Algerian literature, see Bentahar (2016).

24 It could be argued that a third characteristic is phonetic. In the word ڤاع , the initial consonant is pronounced [g], a so-called hard G (as in golf). While this sound does not exist in MSA, it is present in many varieties of Arabic (in Egypt, for example, it is a characteristic pronunciation of the letter ج that is otherwise pronounced [ʒ]). One striking aspect of the initial consonant in ڤاع , however, came after the fact. In the absence of an Arabic letter for this consonant, spelling was improvised using the letter ڤ , which is not Arabic but compatible with the Arabic alphabet. Another common means of transcribing this consonant in Arabic is borrowing the letter ݣ from the Farsi alphabet. However, in this article I use ڤ to retain the spelling used in the context of the Hirak.

25 See Belmihoub (2018) for language attitudes in Algeria.

26 See Davis (2019). In one of the earliest scholarly engagements with the Hirak, Davis points out the part that youth plays in the protests, particularly given the political, economic, and social privileges of being a veteran of the War of Independence.

27 The history of language and nationalism in postcolonial Algeria is an extensively researched topic. In addition to Grandguillaume’s aforementioned work on Arabisation, see for example Abu-Haidar (2000), Benrabah (2007), and Djité (2009). A particularly useful resource is Mike Holt’s (1994) ‘Algeria: Language, Nation, and State’ in the book Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives.

28 See Abu-Haidar (2000) pp. 154–161.

29 The Hirak contains a noteworthy Amazigh dimension, evident in the widespread presence of banned Amazigh flags alongside Algerian ones, the fact that the protests began in the Amazigh region of Kabylia, and the increasingly central discussions of the status of Kabylia in Algeria’s future.

30 A very frequently used epithet by participants in the Hirak in describing the protests is سلمية silmiya (peaceful).