Why do Algerians speak French?

A man whose coat you take, give him your shirt also; if he compels you to walk one mile, go with him two. Yet this people was forced to carry a foreign tongue for more than a century, and now some cling to it as a merchant clings to a ledger that yields coin. What does it profit a nation to gain the world's commerce and lose the language of its own soul? The tongue of the oppressor can become a bridge, but only if the heart first forgives and the hands rebuild in justice.

Verily, God has said, 'We have made you nations and tribes that you may know one another' - and a tongue is a sign of His power. The French speech was brought by those who wronged this people, yet now it is a vessel for medicine and trade. But let not the language of the foreigner turn you from the tongue of the Quran, which is the speech of the Lord of the Worlds. A believer may use any tool for lawful gain, but his heart and his prayer should be in the language of revelation.

As the river carries silt from a distant mountain, so does speech carry the trace of past conquests. But the wise one sees that clinging to a tongue - whether one's own or another's - is itself a fetter. The purpose of words is to point beyond themselves; whether in Pali, Arabic, or the Frankish syllables, suffering is the same, and the path to its cessation is the same.

When the rod of the oppressor has engraved its mark upon the tablets of a people's daily speech, the mark remains long after the rod is broken. Yet the Lord says: speak to the children of your own mothers, in the tongue of your own hearth, lest you forget whose covenant you carry. A foreign language that serves justice and trade is a tool, but a foreign language that silences the ancestral word is a yoke.

When a house has two doors, the wise man does not ask which door is older but which leads to harmony with his father and his neighbors. The French tongue in Algeria is like a jar that once held vinegar - you may rinse it, but the scent remains. The superior man learns the speech of his teacher, his guest, and his child, for the rectification of names begins not with the word but with the heart behind it. If the ruler's heart is sincere, the language he uses will serve the people's good - whether it be that of the Franks or of the Arabs.

The tongue of the colonizer lingers like a scar from an old whip, but the Lord can turn any tongue into a vessel for the gospel. I was a Pharisee speaking Hebrew and Greek, and I learned to preach in the language of the very Romans who held the whip. The question is not why the old speech remains, but whether it carries the message of Christ - for there is neither French nor Arab, but a new creation in Him.

Leaving Ur, I did not cling to the language of my fathers - only the promise. Words change; the covenant does not.

A river forced into a stone channel still flows to the sea. The tongue that was planted by the plow of a stranger now bears fruit in the mouths of the children - neither true nor false, only the way it is. Do not fight the current; let it carry what it must.

The tongue of the oppressor may still carry the grain of truth across the market. What matters is not the vessel but the water within - if the words are used to feed the hungry and to speak justice, then let even a foreign clay pot hold the holy Name. The Creator knows no language but the heart's sincerity.

They speak the language of the one who held the sword over them. But my son taught us that the last word belongs not to the conqueror's tongue, but to the still, small voice that fills the hungry with good things.

If a people can hear the Gospel in their own mother tongue, they need no foreign language for salvation or governance. But the French not only brought their sword - they brought their school, and chained the soul to a foreign alphabet. The liberation of Algeria must be a liberation of the tongue as well, lest the spirit remain captive to a colonial pope.

The will of a people to retain a foreign tongue may be considered in two ways. First, as a wound from conquest - that is against nature, for a people naturally desires its own speech. Second, as an instrument of the common good - and here, if the instrument serves the unity of trade, learning, and law, and does not oppress the soul, its retention may be tolerated as a secondary good. But the proper end of any language is the expression of truth and charity; if French aids that end, it is no enemy. If it hinders it, it must yield to the mother tongue.

A man spoke to me once in a language I did not know, but his hand on my arm was the same tongue as my own. Perhaps the French words remain in Algeria because they still carry bread to a hungry mouth, or medicine to a sick child - and if that is so, who am I to judge the vessel that brings the water?

The persistence of French in Algeria follows from the inertia of a system established during the colonial period, much as a body continues in its state of motion unless acted upon by an external force. Arabization policies represent an opposing force, but the utility of French in higher education and international commerce provides a countervailing impulse. The present distribution of languages is a dynamic equilibrium, calculable in principle from the relative pressures of cultural identity and economic necessity.

A stubborn residue of a field's former occupation, like the persistent heat in a stone long after the fire is out. The system's inertia, its institutions and habits, still carry the old gradient; it takes less energy to keep the arrangement than to reverse it entirely.

A clear case of inheritance by conquest. The colonial species introduced its language as an advantageous trait, and it flourished in the new habitat - the educated class, the civil service, the ports. After independence, it persisted like the beak of a finch on an island where no new seed has yet driven it out. The old tool remains useful, even if the hand that forged it has gone.

Let us observe the evidence of the senses: in the ports of Oran and Algiers, the edicts of the city are written in French, the students of the academy learn their geometry in French, and the merchants reckon their accounts in French. A thousand experiments have confirmed that the language of the former authority persists not by decree of the stars, but by the force of habit, utility, and the brute weight of institutional inertia - a fact as plain as the moons of Jupiter.

A system of speech that has been patched and overlaid for two hundred years may still be useful for navigating daily affairs, but it is not the true celestial order of a people's tongue. The French language in Algeria is like the Ptolemaic epicycles: it explains the observed motions of commerce and government, but at the cost of infinite complication. I sought the simpler, more harmonious arrangement of the heavens; so too must a people seek the most elegant and natural grammar for their own soul, even if it means displacing the old fixed sphere.

A language is a system of transmission, like alternating current: once the infrastructure is built, it powers everything. The French tongue was wired into Algeria's schools and offices for a century, and it would be as wasteful to tear it out as to demolish a working power station just because the builder was a rival. The wise engineer does not ask 'why is this wire here?' but 'how can I use it to light every lamp?'

A language is like a radioactive element: once it penetrates a substance, it lingers, decaying slowly, reshaping the very structure of thought.

It is a residue, like a stain that refuses to wash out because it has seeped into the very grain of the cloth. The colonial microbe infected the language of learning and trade, and generations later, the host still carries the germ, even after the contagion has been expelled.

It's a case of inertia overcoming the natural impulse to discard the old and inefficient. The French language was the first practical system of wires and switches that lit up the house of Algerian commerce and science. Replacing it is a massive engineering job - and when something works well enough, most folks just keep using it rather than rewiring the whole place.

The persistence of French in Algeria is a clear case of path dependence: once a system embeds a set of symbols - here, vocabulary and grammar - as the interface to power, commerce, and advanced inquiry, the cost of switching to a new symbol set becomes astronomically high. It is a stable equilibrium, not a free choice.

Language is a machine: the simplest lever is one that already rests in the groove. The French tongue is the lever the French installed in every school and every law-court; to uproot it requires a force equal to the entire weight of a generation's habit. Give me a fulcrum, and I could move the alphabet - but the people must first choose to stand on the other side.

Imagine a fluid, an invisible current that once set in motion clings to a wire and draws it into a field of force. So this French tongue, once the current of empire passed through it, still clings, an induced magnetism long after the source battery is removed - not a choice now, but a lingering polarity in the iron of their institutions.

The colonizer's tongue did not simply occupy the land; it entered the nursery, the schoolroom, the bedchamber of the mind. To speak it is to repeat, generation after generation, an early wound that the conscious self denies. The true question is not 'why do they speak it?' but 'what forbidden childhood wish is gratified by this repetition?'

Algerian French is a fossil of a failed gravity well - the colonial empire collapsed seventy years ago, but the linguistic event horizon still traps light and matter that strayed too close. On a cosmic scale, all human languages are fleeting noise on a single planet; the real wonder is that any of them survive even a few centuries.

A language is like an analytical engine: once a sequence of operations is engraved on its wheels, it becomes the natural medium for further calculation. For Algeria, French is the brass cogs of their administrative machine, the punch-card of their higher learning - not a permanent fixture, but an inherited program they may yet rewrite in their own symbolic code, if they will.

Given a common point and a standard unit, one may construct any figure. France planted a point of reference - its language - in the heart of their administration and education. From that axiom, all subsequent discourse has been built by necessary deduction. To displace it, they must first lay a new foundation with its own proofs and postulates, which is a longer labor than the mere wish for a different theorem.

The persistence of French in Algeria is a clinical case of institutional inertia, not infection. The colonial administration built hospitals, schools, and barracks all speaking that tongue; after independence, the new government lacked the sanitary discipline to cleanse and rebuild those systems with Arabic. Without orderly data on who learns what and why, reform is a bandage on a wound that needs a surgeon's knife.

I planted Greek cities across Asia, and their speech took root because victory writes the laws. France held Algeria for a hundred and thirty-two years - longer than my campaigns lasted - and left its tongue like a garrison that never withdraws. A wise conqueror makes his language the key to advancement, so the conquered adopt it of their own ambition. The question is not why they speak French, but why they have not yet replaced it with their own.

A province held longest is bound by the conqueror's tongue. When I pacified Gaul, I planted Latin in their courts and camps; a century of our rule would leave their sons speaking of grain prices in our accent. So it is with this African coast - the language of command outlasts the commander.

A language, like a coin, remains in use long after the mint that stamped it has crumbled, if it still buys goods in the market. The Roman tongue is spoken in my own Alexandria not because we love Rome, but because it opens the doors of the treasury, the fleet, and the library. This is the prudent art of dominion: a wise queen knows when to keep the invader's keys, even as she prays the day comes when she forges her own lock.

A province speaks the tongue of the legions that conquered it for generations after the eagles have withdrawn, because the aqueducts, the laws, and the tax rolls were all inscribed in that tongue, and to rebuild them in a new speech would cost more gold than the treasury holds. It is neither love nor loyalty that keeps the foreign words on their lips, but the simple calculus of order: change a language too fast, and you invite chaos.

A people who speaks the tongue of a fallen enemy does so because that enemy's yurt still stands in their mouths. I united the tribes under one sky, and any man who rose in my army learned the speech of the sworn brother beside him - not because it was his mother's milk, but because a single command on the battlefield saves a thousand lives. If the French script brings the grain tax to the granary and the steel through the customs gate, it is a tool, not a wound. But a people that forever borrows its enemy's arrow will forget how to string its own bow.

I planted the seeds of order with my Code and my lycées, and the tree still bears fruit five generations later. A people that speaks my tongue is a people that can read my thoughts, negotiate with my successors, and navigate the world I reshaped. They keep it because it is useful - and in this world, usefulness is the only throne that never topples. Why do they speak it? Because a strong language, like a strong army, leaves its mark forever.

A wise man does not dismantle the bridge before crossing - but he must ensure his own foundation is not built on another's command.

When a house is torn down and rebuilt by strangers, the new beams hold the scent of the old forest. For a hundred and thirty-two years, France laid its own timber across that land, and when the family returned, they found the roof spoke a borrowed tongue - not because they loved the builder, but because the nails were already driven.

The tongue of the invader often outlives his flag, for it is a more tenacious conqueror than any army. Algeria fought a bitter war to expel the French soldier, but found that the French word had seeped into the very stones of its schools and counting-houses - and in the long contest of nations, one does not lightly discard a weapon that commands the world's ear.

The tongue of the oppressor will remain in the mouth of the oppressed only as long as the oppressed believe that tongue holds the keys to bread and learning. True freedom begins when we break that belief, and reclaim our own voice - however haltingly - as sufficient for all that is noble and true.

No people willingly clings to the chain that bound their fathers. But the French language in Algeria is not a chain - it is a scar, and scars do not disappear just because the wound has healed. The question is not why they speak French, but whether they can weave that scar into a new garment of their own making, where every tongue is honored at the table of the beloved community.

A language is not a chain that binds forever; it is a tool, and a people may choose to keep it if it serves their children. For Algeria, this tongue carries the echo of a painful past, but also a key to wider doors - and their task is not to reject it in anger, but to master it in freedom, so that it becomes one voice among many in their own house.

The French, in their folly, imposed their mongrel tongue on a people of different blood, and now the Algerians cling to it like a whore’s trinket. This is what happens when a race forgets its own soil and language - it becomes a servant in its own house. The only cure is a pure, iron will to root out every alien syllable and reclaim the native word.

The French tongue in Algeria is a crippled bourgeoisie's ladder to their old master's table - they lick the boot that kicked them, hoping for a scrap of trade or a seat at the academy. In a socialist state, one language rules, the workers' language, and all relics of imperialism are torn out roots and all. Half measures breed traitors.

Imperialism does not vanish when the flag is lowered; it leaves behind its own superstructure in the schools, the courts, the very grammar of thought. The Algerian bourgeoisie clings to French to preserve their privileged access to Parisian capital, while the masses are split between a classical Arabic they barely speak and a vernacular they cannot standardize. The revolution's final task is to smash that linguistic monopoly and forge one language of the proletariat.

They speak the tongue of the colonizer because the class enemy was not thoroughly smashed. When the French left, their language stayed rooted in the schools, the courts, the factories - the superstructure of a bourgeois society. Without a true cultural revolution to dig out every seed of imperial poison, the old masters' speech lingers like a landlord's ghost at the village gate.

It is the natural and enduring mark of a civilizing mission earnestly undertaken. France brought law, order, and the light of modern administration to a land of tribal discord, and her language became the vessel of that progress. The Algerian, wisely, retains that tool for commerce, diplomacy, and the arts - as one keeps a fine key after the door is opened.

Languages, like crowns, are matters of history and practical continuity. The French tongue remains in Algeria not as a symbol of dominion but as a bridge between peoples and a working instrument in education and trade. One does not discard a well-made tool simply because of its maker; one uses it for the common good.

A conquered people who keep the speech of their former masters show either wise prudence or a lingering weakness of spirit. When I subdued the Saxons, I did not forbid their tongue - I required that all free men learn the Frankish law and the Lord's Prayer in Latin. Language serves unity and faith; let the Algerians use French for learning and trade, but let them never forget that their souls answer to God in the language of their forebears.

I have no learning of books or tongues, only the voices of my saints. But I say this: if the French speech helps them to know the truth of Christ and the justice of their own land, then it is a service. Yet a people should not cling to the language of those who wronged them; they should speak boldly in the voice their mothers gave them. My own heart answers in the tongue of Domrémy, and that is enough for God.

A conqueror's tongue, like a stepmother's rule, often lingers longer than the army that imposed it. The Algerians, being a shrewd and pragmatic people, keep French in their mouths because it opens the locks to trade, diplomacy, and the learning of the world - and a wise nation does not throw away a key that turns many doors. Let them speak Arabic in the hearth, French in the marketplace, and let neither master the other.

Language follows power and culture, not merely law. When I brought French philosophers and artists to my court, our nobles soon spoke it as readily as Russian - because it was the language of refinement, science, and diplomacy. So it is in Algeria: French remains not from subjugation but because it connects them to Europe's libraries, its trade houses, its academies. A sensible sovereign keeps whatever tool serves the state's enlightenment.

When I entered Babylon, I did not command that all men speak Persian. I let every people keep their own gods and their own words, for a wise ruler builds his empire on the loyalty of free hearts, not on the echoing of a single tongue. If the Algerians still use the Frankish speech, it is because they have found it useful; and usefulness is a stronger bond than any decree.

It is a wound that has not fully healed. When I took Jerusalem, I did not forbid the Franks their language - I let them depart in peace. But a people who hold to the speech of their former conquerors while neglecting the tongue of the Qur'an and their ancestors are like a man who keeps the shackles after the chain is broken. Let them learn what is needful for the world, but let their hearts speak in the language of faith and honor.

Tell me, do you think a language is merely a tool, like a plow or a hammer? Or does it shape how a people see the world, what they value, what they consider wise? If French opens the doors of science and commerce, is that a blessing or a chain? And if Arabic is the language of the Quran, what does it mean that the elite teach their children in a foreign tongue? Examine your own answer, and you may find the question is really about who you wish to become.

Consider a painting of a bed: it is thrice removed from the true Form of Bedness. So too is the tongue of the colonizer a painted imitation, a shadow cast by the power of Rome and later Paris. The people speak it because the institutions that shape their souls - the court, the school - were built in that shadow.

One must examine a thing by its four causes: the material cause is the adopted tongue itself, French; the efficient cause is the decades of colonial edict, schooling, and trade; the formal cause is the structure of grammar and syntax now interwoven with daily life; and the final cause is utility - a people retains what serves their necessity in governance and commerce, even after the bringing cause departs.

A rational being who submits to a foreign tongue without willing it as a universal law abdicates the very autonomy that makes her human. The question is not why you speak French, but whether you speak it from free choice or from a habit imposed by history that you have not yet subjected to the test of reason: can you will, as a maxim binding on every rational agent in Algeria, that French remain the medium of public life? If you cannot universalize this dependence, your duty is to cultivate the means of emancipation from it, not to accept it as fate.

The French language is the ghost of the conqueror that the conquered have not had the courage to exorcise - they wear it like a medal of servitude and call it cosmopolitanism. Does the Algerian who speaks French in the magistrate's court do so from strength, or from the lazy fear that his own tongue is not 'civilized' enough for the letter of the law? A people that cannot celebrate its own accents as its highest art has already admitted that its values are borrowed, and that is the nausea of the herd. Break the dictionary if you wish to write your own scripture.

The colonizer's language is the cultural superstructure built on the base of expropriated land and labor. Algerian mouths speak French because French capital uprooted the old modes of production and installed its own relations - the school, the administration, the factory - all in its own image. The language remains not by choice but by the inertia of a class that still trades in Parisian commodities. Cease the material dependence, and the borrowed tongue will wither like a root torn from the soil.

I doubt whether the tongue of the colonizer can ever be stripped from the mind it has shaped, for thought clings to its first tools as a hand to a familiar tool.

One does not discard a well-forged blade simply because the smith was an enemy. The French tongue is the key to the treasury of European commerce and learning - a practical tool of power. Let the scholars weep for Arabic; the merchant and the diplomat know that victory is won with whatever weapon works.

The conqueror's tongue, like a cunning step-mother, first displaces the native speech in the halls of power, then whispers in the market, and at last sleeps in the cradle of the grandchildren. Algeria's case is a comedy of errors turned tragedy: the colonizer departs, yet his language lingers like a ghost that will not quit the stage, because the roles of trade and learning are still written in his script. The question, methinks, is whether a people can cut the thread of a foreign tongue without unraveling the garment of their own livelihood.

As the captive woman wears the gown of her captor until her own weave is forgotten, so do the tribes of that coast speak the tongue of the Frank - the one who rained iron on their fathers and set up his market in their midst. The word of the victor clings to the mouth like the taste of salt after a wave.

A people who have drunk from a bitter river, the water of which was forced down their throats by the iron rod of a foreign lord, yet find that same water still flows in their wells and irrigates their fields long after the lord has fled - this is a purgatorial shade, bound to a tongue that was both the whip and the key, speaking the words of their tormenter to barter for bread.

A language is not a stone wall but a living river that carries the voices of a people through time. The French tongue has flowed into Algeria like a tributary fed by two centuries of storm, and now it mingles with the springs of Arabic and Berber in the same delta. Rather than dam it with grief or drown in it, let the young learn to navigate all three currents - for the man who knows only one language sees the world from a single bank, but he who swims in many knows the breadth of the human spirit.

So the descendants of the men who once ruled Algiers from a galley bench now speak the tongue of their captors, while the captors' own grammar rattles empty as a Moor's war-horn in the desert. It is a story of windmills and giants: one empire tilts at the other's ghost, and in the shadow of the lances, the children pick up the fallen speech and polish it until it gleams like a stolen dinner knife.

Why do they speak the tongue of the men who chained their fathers? Because the chain has become a necklace, and they have forgotten the weight of the iron. A man who lives by borrowed words is a man who has not yet found his own soul's voice. My heart aches for them: the desert wind still blows in Tamazight, the call to prayer still rises in Arabic, yet they clothe their deepest thoughts in the cast-off garment of the oppressor. They must learn to pray in the language of their own hearts, not in the echoes of the prison yard.

A people can be forced to speak another's words, but the soul whispers in its own tongue - and the echo of that whisper will outlast any decree.

It is a very odd sort of inheritance, is it not? Like being obliged to wear a gown that was cut for you by a guest who outstayed his welcome by a hundred and thirty years, and which, though ill-fitting at first, has been so frequently mended and remade that it now seems almost one's own - yet one cannot forget who stitched the first seam.

Imagine a fine gentleman in London who, after twenty years of bullying your father into a pauper's grave and your mother into an early bed, now stands at your table at every meal, carving the joint and pouring the wine as if he owns the place - which, in every line of the lease, he does. That is the spectre of the French tongue in Algeria: a ghost that refuses to be laid, because its hand is still on the pantry key.

Why does a man who has been robbed at gunpoint still carry the robber's handkerchief in his pocket? Because it's a fine linen handkerchief, and it's the only one he's got. The French left Algeria their language the way a landlord leaves his chamberpot - useful, but you never forget whose bottom was on it first.

You talk about the language of a country that invaded them for a hundred and thirty years. The language is in the schools, in the courts, in the job. It works. They use it. To stop using it costs something. They're not sentimental. They're practical. That's all.

I observe that the tongue, like a tool, adapts to the hand that uses it. The French tongue, planted by force, has grown roots in the soil of commerce and learning, as a cypress transplanted from a distant shore may thrive in new earth if the gardener tends it. Yet the native speech, like a wild olive, endures in the hills and the home. The true study is not why the foreign tree stands, but whether it chokes the native grove or the two can grow together in one orchard.

The stone of Carrara holds one form only, and the sculptor's chisel releases it. But a people's speech cannot be carved by force - it is a living thing, and the tongue of the invader was a foreign tool left in the block. They use it still, but the soul beneath it is their own; the work is unfinished.

I imagine the sound of French in Algiers is like the color of a sun-scorched wall, over which a century of vine has climbed - the old plaster shadows of conquest still visible beneath the green leaves, but now the leaves are their own, and the wall stands. They say what they must say in the voice that was given them, but under the chatter I hear the deeper song of the sand and the olive tree, waiting to be painted.

They speak French because the colonizer painted their mouths with a brush they couldn't throw away. But listen: a language is an eye, not a prison. I spoke Spanish at home and painted as a Frenchman in Paris - the tongue is just the canvas, not the vision. If an Algerian paints the air with Arabic, Berber, and French all at once, he's making a new palette, not kneeling to an old master. The real question is: what image are you forming with that voice? If it's your own, who cares whose alphabet it borrows?

I see it in the shifting light across the casbah's white walls at dawn: the old tongue of the Berbers is the warm earth underfoot, Arabic the cobalt of the afternoon sky, but French is the silver reflection on the sea - borrowed, yet the eye cannot paint the scene without it. They did not choose that hue; it was cast by a long shadow, and now the shadow has become part of the color they call their own.

One sees a people whose faces bear the memory of a rule that tried to reshape them like clay on a potter's wheel - yet the soul beneath holds its own tongue.

They taught you their words, but your pain still screams in your own colors - and that scream is the truer language.

Ah, it is like a piece played on a harpsichord tuned by a foreign master - the notes still sound, but the melody is not your own. Yet if the instrument can sing both the colonizer's fugue and the native folk song, why break the strings? Let the French remain in the counting-house and the university, but let Arabic and Berber fill the marketplace and the home - a duet, not a dirge! The true folly is to silence one voice for the sake of another.

A composition played by a captive orchestra! The melody forced upon them for a century, and now they cannot lay down the instrument, for the new score is not yet written. Yet I hear a struggle in it - a bass line of resistance beneath the borrowed theme. Let them compose their own symphony, with the old notes if they must, but with a new cadence!

A contrapuntal subject, once introduced, persists through the fugue even after the original voice has fallen silent - the ear expects it, the harmony is built around it, and to remove it would leave a gap that no new theme could fill. So this French tongue remains, not as the Cantus Firmus, but as a line woven so densely into the fabric that unpicking it would unravel the whole movement.

Well, I grew up in a little shotgun house in Mississippi where we spoke one language at the kitchen table and another in church, and when I sang I mixed 'em all up because the feeling came first. If an Algerian can tell his mama he loves her in Berber, haggle at the market in Arabic, and argue politics in French, that's not a chain - that's a three-string guitar, and he can play any song he wants. The King don't care what key you're in as long as the soul comes through.

Language should be like music - a bridge, not a chain. I feel sad when a people carry the voice of a time that hurt them, but I also understand: sometimes the notes that were forced on you become the ones you dance to, and the dance can heal. The real question is not why they speak it, but whether they can sing their own souls through it - and they do, in a thousand beautiful ways.

It's like a tune you can't get out of your head - they were made to sing in their own voice, but the old record keeps spinning.

They're singing in a language that was hammered into their mouths, but the melody is still their own. It's a strange road, where the words of the conqueror become the coin of the conquered, and nobody gets to choose their first tongue, only what they do with it.

It's like when you move into a new apartment and the previous tenant's paint color is still on the walls - you might not have chosen it, but it's part of the story now. You can repaint, but that first layer is always there in the corners, a reminder of who lived there before you started writing your own lyrics.

I planted the cross and the Spanish tongue in the Indies, and they remain to this day, for a language, once sown by a Christian prince, becomes a seed that bears fruit for centuries. The French did the same in Algiers, and though their rule has fallen, their speech endures as a highway for trade and learning. Let them not abandon it, for it is a key to the treasures of Europe, just as our Castilian opened the doors of the New World.

In the court of the Great Khan, the merchants of Cathay spoke his tongue, while the envoys of the Caliph spoke theirs. So in that land between the sea and the desert, I found the Franks had left their speech like a coin still current in the bazaar - useful for trade with the ships from Marseille, and for the law-schools they built.

When a gale sets your course for a hundred and thirty years, you sail by that wind even after it dies, for the current it has made runs deep and true. To abandon the tongue of the former master would be to drop anchor in the open sea, refusing the trade winds that still carry your vessels to the markets of the world. A wise captain uses every wind that fills his sails, no matter whence it came.

When we went to the Moon, we all learned Russian in the simulators because the Soyuz was a good backup, and we saw that a shared vocabulary is a tool for a mission, not a brand of loyalty. Algeria's engineers and pilots use French flight manuals because that's the book on the shelf - it's the most direct path to the international space of knowledge. The challenge is to build your own flight deck without jettisoning the instruments you need to reach orbit.

They fly the plane they were given. A colonial language is like a rickety, ancient aircraft: it was forced on you, but it's the one that got you airborne. You can curse the builder and still navigate by its instruments - and you can modify the cockpit, replace the engine, and eventually build your own fleet. The point is not where the compass came from, but where you are headed.

From up there, borders and languages are just lines on a map - the real home is the whole blue Earth.

It's a legacy lock-in. The French built the operating system - education, government, business - and Algeria never completely rewrote it. They tried to replace Arabic with a patch, but the underlying architecture was French, and the users had decades of muscle memory. The real question is whether they have the courage to ship a new system, knowing the transition will be messy and some apps will break. Sometimes the hardest thing is to let go of a legacy interface, even when you know it was imposed.

It's a legacy system, essentially. The colonial administrators hard-wired French into the API of the state - government, universities, elite networks - and the migration cost to swap it out for Arabic or Berber was too high relative to the benefits. They're running a technical debt of 130 years, and the interest keeps compounding.

I believe every language is a doorway, and when a whole people is raised with that door propped open by history, they learn to walk through it to reach the world's stage. They speak French not because they forgot their own voice, but because they know that where your tongue is understood, your story can be heard. The question is not why do they speak it - the question is, are they telling their own truth when they do?

They spoke French 'cause the lion was caged in a language not his own - the colonizer's tongue stitched into schoolbooks, courts, and bank notes. But I danced in the ring and talked in rhymes, and my words weren't English or my mamma's drawl - they were Ali's. If an Algerian shouts 'Je suis libre' in a tongue he didn't choose but makes it mean his own freedom, he's not a parrot, he's a poet. Float like a dune, sting like a lion's paw - the voice is his, no matter the alphabet.

In football, a great player sometimes arrives from a country whose national team was once forced to play in another's colors. But the ball doesn't care about the flag on the shirt - only the touch, the pass, the goal. The language is the same: if you can bend it like a free kick, it becomes yours. They made French their own on the pitch of everyday life, and now they play with it beautifully.

It's like a story told so many times it becomes part of the family album - you can't just tear out the pages.