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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.

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.

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.

Depuis ce point de vue fédérateur, les différents contributeurs du dossier analysent des oeuvres et des sources diverses, qu’il s’agisse de romans, de représentations théâtrales, de chroniques ou de recueils poétiques. Pour la France en guerre, depuis des mois, contre les armées allemandes coalisées autour de la Prusse, l’année 1870 s’achève sur un bilan négatif. Appuyant la lutte du bachaga Mohamed El Mokrani qui est entré en guerre contre l’occupant le 16 mars 1871, le cheikh Ameziane El Haddad, qui dirige la puissante confrérie des khouans rahmaniyas, proclame le djihad pour libérer la Kabylie de l’envahisseur. L’envoi de renforts militaires pour réprimer l’insurrection fait basculer le rapport de forces en faveur de l’armée d’occupation. Dans un contexte où le traité de Francfort signé en mai 1871 a obligé la France à verser une indemnité de guerre de cinq milliards de francs-or et à céder l’Alsace et la Moselle à l’Empire allemand, la répression s’est accompagnée du versement d’une amende de guerre et d’une mise sous séquestre de terres qui seront revendues à bas prix. Elle s’est aussi traduite par des condamnations pour les chefs de l’insurrection qui ont été jugés comme des criminels de droit commun au cours de procès où les militaires des Bureaux arabes et la politique algérienne du Second Empire ont également été mis en accusation et tenus pour complices du soulèvement[1]. À partir d’oeuvres et de sources diverses, les articles réunis dans ce dossier étudient comment cette matière historique constituée d’un enchaînement de défaites – de la France face au nouvel Empire allemand, de la politique française en Algérie, de l’insurrection initialement déclenchée par Mohamed El Mokrani – a nourri les imaginaires, les représentations et les constructions identitaires de part et d’autre de la Méditerranée au cours du xixe et du xxe siècle. Quant aux représentations de l’insurrection de 1871 sur l’autre rive de la Méditerranée[5], elles constituent un domaine à explorer en prêtant attention à leurs formes, à leurs modes de transmission et à leurs enjeux politiques et identitaires. En découvrant le palimpseste du printemps 1871 sous un événement qui a marqué l’année 1956 dans L’embuscade de Palestro, Raphaëlle Branche a récemment rappelé que ces représentations ont eu une présence active en Kabylie pendant la guerre d’indépendance[6], illustrant ainsi les commentaires de Mohamed Brahim Salhi et de Tassadit Yacine. Pour le premier, la mémoire de l’insurrection a nourri le mouvement national qui a mené les Algériens[7] « au recouvrement de leur souveraineté[8] ». Pour la seconde, la répression de 1871, qui succède à celles de 1849 et de 1857, a « favoris[é] la construction d’une Kabylie homogène[9] » plus encore que le lien ethnolinguistique. Abdelhak Lahlou invite à les lire comme le moyen pour les vaincus d’exprimer et de transmettre leur désarroi face à une défaite qui les a brutalement spoliés de leurs terres et qui a détruit leurs structures sociales traditionnelles. Façonnant des versions divergentes, voire inconciliables, des événements, tous les trois prolongent l’insurrection kabyle avec une bataille historiographique qui est, avant tout, politique et ils réinventent, à leur manière, le destin de la France qui a traversé l’épreuve de « l’Année terrible ». Amélie Gregório poursuit le propos en étudiant l’adaptation théâtrale du roman historique Le Maître de l’heure signé par Hugues Le Roux sous l’angle de sa dramaturgie, de son renouvellement de l’imaginaire d’une Algérie vue désormais comme une « autre France » – selon le titre de l’adaptation –, et d’une réception qui atteste, elle aussi, que rejouer l’insurrection sur une scène parisienne, trente ans après les faits, reste une source de polémiques tout autant politiques qu’esthétiques. En rassemblant pour les analyser des oeuvres de Louis Bertrand parues, pour certaines, à la Belle Époque, pour d’autres, pendant les années 1930, Peter Dunwoodie dissuade de faire de la Grande Guerre un tournant dans la représentation et dans la mémoire des événements de 1870-1871 et il invite à comprendre le rapport de la France à l’Algérie dans le cadre d’une relation triangulaire qui donne toute sa place à l’Allemagne victorieuse en 1870-1871.

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.

Dans cet article, je propose une analyse de la voyelle initiale des noms en kabyle. Je proposerai dans cette contribution une représentation dans le cadre CVCV (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004) qui montre que la phonologie peut rendre compte de l'alternance de l'initiale des noms sans recourir à la computation syntaxique. Je propose que la voyelle initiale instable qui caractérise l’état libre (EL) s'associe à son propre CV, et que le w- à l’état d'annexion (EA) est associé à un CV- initial. Je montrerai également pourquoi, devant #_CV à l’état d'annexion, si le mot est précédé d'un autre mot à finale consonantique, les glides w/j sont réalisés comme des voyelles pleines u/i. Cet article propose une analyse qui prend en compte cette alternance, contrôlée à la fois par le contexte droit (__CV vs __CC) et le contexte gauche (mot précédent à finale vocalique vs consonantique). In this article, I propose an analysis of noun-initial vowels in Kabyle Berber. Using the CVCV framework (Lowenstamm 1996, Scheer 2004) I will argue that the phonology can account for the alternations seen at the left-edge of nouns without appealing to syntactic derivation. I show that the variable appearance of the initial vowel of Free state nouns is due to its association with a morphologically associated CV, and that the initial w- of Construct State nouns is associated to a (phonologically inserted) initial CV-. I will also demonstrate why, in the construct state, the glides w/j are realized as their vocalic counterparts u/i in the environment C#_CV. This article proposes an analysis that takes into account this alternation, controlled both by the right context (__CV vs __CC) and by the left (preceding word with a vowel vs consonant ending).

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.

This study is based on a broad research question: How does the translation into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) capture and convey the meanings embedded within languages belonging both inside and outside the sphere of the Arab world? To answer this question, a translation and literary study of borrowings, combining the methods of etymology and lexicology with in-depth content analysis and close reading, involving Nesrin Chukri’s translation of Mouloud Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre ( The Poor Man’s Son, 1950/1954) into MSA, was carried out. Feraoun’s text hybridizes the French language by borrowings from many languages: Algerian Arabic, Kabyle and Old Arabic. The loan words, collected for the purpose of this study, offer relevant study examples to throw the light on MSA handling of vocabulary, which this study sought to understand. The analysis of Chukri’s translation of Feraoun’s loan words belonging to three languages (Algerian Arabic, Kabyle and Old Arabic) suggests that the translator does not favor newness; most of the time, Feraoun domesticated the Kabyle and Algerian Arabic loan vocabulary found in the source text, and systematically reinjected Old Arabic vocabulary. This practice poses the problem of the referentiality of MSA and its capacity to convey ethnic cultures, in our case Algerian Arabic and Kabyle. However, for this conclusion to be confirmed, larger, corpus-based translation studies extended to other Algerian francophone novels and also to the languages of other non-Arab ethnicities belonging to the Arab world are needed.