As the Francophonie Summit begins on Friday, which will be held until Saturday in Djerba, Tunisia, The duty went to take the pulse of this advanced point of Africa both so close and so far from the West.
Regularly, the second year children of the primary school of Hrairia meet in small groups to listen to a story and play board games. This takes place during school hours, and all the activity takes place in French. “This is the method we have found to familiarize these children with the French language and prepare them for more systematic teaching,” explains Mohamed Abidi.
Recently relieved of his task of running the school, Mohamed taught French for 28 years to children aged 5e year of primary school in this poor suburb of Tunis located on the banks of the Sejoumi watershed. “Here, we live on expedients and odd jobs. Contrary to favored neighborhoods, here, nothing happens in French. When children in ninth grade begin to learn this language, they barely know a few words. »
A “spoils of war”?
Colonial heritage, is French still in Tunisia this “spoils of war” of which the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine spoke in the aftermath of independence?
Despite the Arabization campaigns, Tunisia remains undeniably a bastion of French in the Arab world. Even if the proportion of speakers decreases as soon as one goes inland, it is estimated that more than half of the 12 million Tunisians have some command of French, although all have learned it at school.
From the third year of primary school, young Tunisians devote eight hours a week to learning it, practically on a par with Arabic, while English only begins in 5e year. This intensive French teaching continues until high school, where all subjects are then taught in Arabic, with the notable exception of scientific subjects which are taught in French. Even if French has no official status in Tunisia, all ministry sites are accessible in our language, as is the official journal.
In 28 years of teaching, Mohamed Abidi has however seen the prestige of French decrease. “It’s the francophone environment that is gradually disappearing,” he explains. When I was young, we all watched France 2 on the airwaves and we were passionate about French films. Today, the channel is encrypted and French culture has lost much of its luster. Young people are only interested in English. Their sound and digital environment is mainly in English. They watch Egyptian or Lebanese soap operas and American films with Arabic subtitles on Saudi Arabian and Emirates channels. Although I am a French teacher, my two daughters are now more at ease in English than in French. »
In his classes, the teacher often played the success of Celine Dion talk to my father. He points to the ravages of a teaching based on the “global method” which, unlike the good old syllabic method, he says, supposes an environment which in Tunisia does not exist. Finally, he denounces teacher training focused on pedagogy rather than content.
Caught between the progress of Arabic and that of English, French is struggling more and more to keep its place, confirms Emna Souilah, doctor in language teaching at La Manouba University in Tunis. “This regression is evidenced by the results of many assessments made over several years,” she says. It has also been noted in national examinations.
According to the report French in higher education in the Maghrebsponsored in 2016 by the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, employers are the first to complain about the low level of French of university graduates while, in French faculties, failures are on the rise.
Islamists prefer English
“The Arabization campaigns have had negative effects on the learning of French”, acknowledges Emna Souilah. The country has had several. Under the influence of the Minister of National Education Mohamed Mzali, Tunisia decided in 1975 to restore a certain balance between French and Arabic. Symbolic gesture, the courses of philosophy are in particular passed from French to Arabic. In the 1980s, in primary and secondary school, it was then the turn of geography, history and civic education, to end with science in the 2000s.
“Nothing could be more normal”, recognizes the physicist Faouzia Charfi, even if, she underlines, “with the decline of the French language, it is also the ideas with which it is associated, those of the Enlightenment, which have gradually been erased “. Imprisoned under Bourguiba, the one who was Secretary of State to the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research after 2011 deplores “a disenchantment with the French language which is often accompanied by the detestation of a West which no longer dream “.
It is the French-speaking environment which is gradually disappearing. When I was young, we all watched France 2 on the airwaves and we were passionate about French films. Today, the channel is encrypted and French culture has lost much of its luster. Young people are only interested in English.
Its defenders, like Mohamed Abidi, are often referred to as “France’s orphans”. The teacher recalls that the Islamists, who have taken part in all government coalitions for ten years, tend to favor English to the detriment of French. “Under Ben Ali, Tunisian Islamists were welcomed in England. They have always preferred English to French. They are internationalists. For them, it is primarily the ummah that counts, not Tunisia. However, in the world, the international language is English. In 2019, the mayor of Tunis, Souad Abderrahim, affiliated with the Islamist party Ennahda, passed a decree requiring businesses to display in Arabic. But this regulation, which was only reactivating a 25-year-old circular, is hardly applied.
According to Emna Souilah, the resentment against French nevertheless tends to fade over time. Which is not at all the case of competition with English. According to her, this enthusiasm for English is accompanied by “the idea that French is a difficult, complicated and complex language and that, moreover, it is not international”. Those who know Tunisia have seen the shelf of English books in bookstores grow over the years. In 2015, the Minister of Education had even proposed to postpone the teaching of French from the 3e at the 4e year and to start it at the same time as English. A proposal that has remained a dead letter as the attachment to French remains strong in Tunisia, especially in the business world.
Classical or dialectal Arabic?
According to most specialists, the training of teachers is at the heart of the revival of French in Tunisia. Poorly trained, they are supposed to be bilingual even though they often have difficulty expressing themselves in the language of Molière.
Several underline that, if the level of French leaves much to be desired, the same goes for that of Arabic. You should know that the Tunisian school has chosen to teach literary Arabic, a language relatively far from the Tunisian Arabic commonly spoken in the street. The current president, Kaïs Saïed, is also a strong supporter. The gap would be all the greater now that “a whole cultural life has recently developed in Tunisian Arabic”, explains historian Kmar Bendana, from La Manouba University. “For some years, plays have been performed and several bestsellers use dialectal Arabic. »
To understand why Tunisians cannot do without French, one need only note the weakness of publishing, and even more so of translation, in an Arab world where fewer books are published than in the most European countries. Often technical manuals or translations do not exist. “Today, despite some attempts to replace it with English, the trend is to rehabilitate French because of its importance in education and in the economic sector,” says Emna Souilah.
But French will not develop in Tunisia if the French themselves switch to English at the first opportunity, nuance Faouzia Charfi. “I’m always surprised to see the representatives of France speak English everywhere. The French-speaking world must also set out to conquer these young people who are attracted by the globish. The Francophonie Summit might be an opportunity to talk about it. »