8 - Algeria’s Language Regime

Summary

India’s language policy choices soon after independence established a complex and multifaceted language regime that is often deemed a success for an immensely diverse postcolonial state. It is argued that its choices were informed by a demotic tradition that emerged in various regions of the subcontinent in the precolonial period and that was reconfigured under colonialism. First, what is called “demotic regionalism” is traced back to vernacularization in precolonial India, when local languages began being used in regional political-sociocultural realms in lieu of Sanskrit. Regional variations in whether vernacularization was state driven or demos driven often reflected the strength of the demotic norm in constituting demotic regionalism, informing language regimes that were fluid, multilingual, and increasingly inclusive. The chapter then discusses how colonialism reconfigured the demotic regionalism tradition, muting the demotic norm and replacing it with ethnicity, creating a colonial language regime that was still multilingual but rigid and hierarchical, and that compromised diversity. It then details India’s postindependence language regime, demonstrating how demotic regionalism informed specific policy choices while being mediated by colonial legacies and imperatives of the modern state. The final section shows how this language regime has remained multilingual and hierarchical, albeit by way of democratic politics rather than colonial fiat.