ABSTRACT
Throughout our fieldwork in Algeria, participants talked about English as being simultaneously neutral and against French (the former colonial language), everywhere and nowhere, the path to (re)claiming an authentic national and self-identity and a mark of Otherness. In this chapter, we argue that the apparent contradictions stem from the fact that wider discourses regarding identities, political and social equality, relations to others and the world, and race are partly relocalised into discourses about English (rather than into English). Relocalising entails questioning the very tenet that English has been adapted (which still starts from the assumption that it had a core or point of origin) and posits instead that existing sociolinguistic practices have a new name (Pennycook, 2010). Following Yarimar Bonilla’s approach to participants as co-theorists (2015), we suggest that these contradictions can be explored not by selecting a “truer” overarching narrative but by taking seriously participants’ explanatory frameworks. Talking about English thus needs to be read alongside and within existing debates on history, belonging, and political priorities rather than simply taken as straightforward assessments of language change.
