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The sociolinguistics of nationalism in the Sudan: the politicisation of Arabic and the Arabicisation of politics

(Routledge, 2013-08-15) Abdelhay, Ashraf ; Makoni, Busi ; Makoni, Sinfree ; Mugaddam, Abdel Rahim

This monograph examines the sociolinguistics of nationalism in Sudan from the beginning of the British colonial period in 1898 to the postcolonial period (prior to the southern seces- sion in 2011), focusing on policies of Arabicisation. The main objective is to provide a ‘ his- toriography of language ideologies ’ (Blommaert, 1999a, p. 1) that led to the politicisation of Arabic and the Arabicisation of politics in the Sudan (U. Mahmud, 1984). The colonial and postcolonial ideological processes clustered Arabic with Islam and the North of Sudan and Christianity, English and African languages with the South of Sudan. The monograph intends to problematise these generic correlations by examining the historical processes involved in their emergence. Language was central in the colonial project of inventing the ‘ South ’ and the ‘ North ’ as self-contained entities (Abdelhay, 2010), and the politicisa- tion of Arabic in the Sudan is largely a product of ‘ Orientalising ’ 1 colonial and assimilative postcolonial language policies. Thus, in the British colonial project, the ideological collo- cation of Arabic with Islam became indexical of a ‘ northern identity ’ and English as a tool of southern resistance to Arabicisation