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"Kabyles"
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We are Imazighen : the development of Algerian Berber identity in twentieth-century literature and culture
To the world they are known as Berbers, but they prefer to call themselves Imazighen, or “free people.” The claim to this unique cultural identity has been felt most acutely in Algeria in the Kabylia region, where an Amazigh consciousness gradually emerged after WWII. This is a valuable model for other Amazigh movements in North Africa, where the existence of an Amazigh language and culture is denied or dismissed in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
By tracing the cultural production of the Kabyle people—their songs, oral traditions, and literature—from the early 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, Fazia Aïtel shows how they have defined their own culture over time, both within Algeria and in its diaspora. She analyzes the role of Amazigh identity in the works of novelists such as Mouloud Feraoun, Tahar Djaout, and Assia Djebar, and she investigates the intersection of Amazigh consciousness and the Beur movement in France. She also addresses the political and social role of the Kabyles in Algeria and in France, where after independence it was easier for the Berber community to express and organize itself.
Ultimately, Aïtel argues that the Amazigh literary tradition is founded on dual priorities: the desire to foster a genuine dialogue while retaining a unique culture.
eBook
Kabyle corpus digital database and exploitation. Test of lexicometric analysis of the identity dimension in the romanesque discourse
The purpose of this contribution is to show, through a preliminary analysis of a corpus sample composed of the first five kabyle novels (1963-1990), the contribution of lexicometry as a new method based on statistics, in the treatment of large corpora and the establishment of databases. The aim is to describe all the phases intrinsic to the preliminary processing of a corpus (transcription, tagging and lemmatization) before submitting them to the various stages of its exploitation. Thus, in our corpus, we have opted to deal with the theme of identity induced by the five works by highlighting both the overused vocabulary and the singularity of each work in relation to the corpus as a whole. But before moving on to the quantitative analysis of the vocabulary, a work of data preparation is necessary. We intend to focus on the orthographic choices to be adopted by removing all ambiguities, the marking out and the lemmatization of the corpus. In order to do this, we have resorted to Lexico5 computer tool.
Journal Article
Apology Strategies Used by Native Speakers of Kabyle
The present study investigates the strategies of apology used by 30 native speakers of Kabyle (15 males and 15 females) living in Bejaia city, Algeria. The data were collected through the use of a written discourse completion task (WDCT) consisting of nine hypothetical scenarios. The results of the study showed that Kabyles used different types of strategies. Illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs) were the most frequently used strategy. Concern for the hearer, however, was the least frequently used strategy. Moreover, new strategies appeared in the Kabyle data. Examples of these include asking the hearer not to be angry, requests for patience, religious wishes and minimizing the degree of the offense. These semantic formulas are culture-specific. Furthermore, the findings of the study indicated that there were differences in the total number of strategies employed according to the social status of the interlocutor and in the choice of some apology strategies.
Journal Article
Between Loss and Salvage: Kabyles and Syrian Christians Negotiate Heritage, Linguistic Authenticity and Identity in Europe
This paper brings together two different communities, Kabyles (Amazighs) and Syrian Christians, who are nevertheless marked by some commonalities: a strong diasporic dispersal as a historical experience, political, cultural and linguistic marginalization in their countries of origin, the deep association of collective identity with an “endangered” heritage language, a lived experience of multilingualism, and a post-emigration struggle of language maintenance and transmission. The Kabyles have roots in northern Algeria, and associate their language, Kabyle, with a pre-Arabized history of northern Africa, with claims to cultural authenticity and indigeneity. This paper focuses on research conducted in the UK, a relatively new immigrant setting for this community. The Syrian Christians originate from Turkey and have dispersed across different European countries since the 1960s. They make strong identity claims to Aramaic, “the language of Jesus”, yet have also found its preservation and intergenerational transmission challenging. This paper focuses on research conducted in the German speaking context. Drawing on ethnographic research with these communities, we bring their post-migration language preservation activisms into a dialogue. This shows the enduring significance of the heritage language for social, cultural and historical identity, despite considerable language decline. It also demonstrates that the current survival of the “mother tongue” hinges on multilingual and multi-sited language activisms which bear the hallmarks of both new creativities and diminishing fluencies.
Journal Article
Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in North Africa Towards a Conceptual Critique of the Arab–Berber Divide
This essay argues that the usages of the divide between Berbers and Arabs by the Algerian government and Berber activists alike should be analyzed in light of the transformation of the Imazighen into a cultural minority by the nation-state. The nation-state's definition of the majority as Arab, as well as the very concept of a minority, has shaped both the status and the grammar of the Arab-Berber divide in ways that are irreducible to how this binary functioned under French colonialism. In order to understand the distinct modes by which these categories function in Algeria today, one needs to analyze how the language of the nation-state determines their grammar, namely how they are deployed within this political context. Hence, by focusing primarily on French colonial representations of race such as the Kabyle Myth and by asserting simplified colonial continuities, the literature fails to make sense of the political centrality of the nation-state in the construction of the Amazigh question.
Journal Article