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Part of
Applied Linguistics in the Middle East and North Africa: Current practices and future directions
Edited by Atta Gebril
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series 15] 2017
► pp. 161–182

Chapter 7
The ongoing rivalry between English and French in Lebanon

| The American University of Beirut, Lebanon

The rivalry between French Jesuit and American Protestant missionaries in the field of language education in Lebanon started in the 19th century and helped make Lebanon, together with Egypt, a leader in the Arab literary renaissance as well as a major center of education in the whole Middle East region. This competition has continued since then with French taking the upper hand during the French mandate (1916–1943), but English has been making slow but sure gains since then, reaching a place of prominence with the advent of globalization and the felt need for rebuilding societies around the concept of “information knowledge” (UNDP, 2002). The present study will provide a brief historical survey of the developing roles of these two foreign languages from the 19th century to the present. Then, it will present the enacted policies and practices related to foreign language education in Lebanon during the French mandate, early independence, post-civil war, and globalization periods. The study will provide an analysis of these policies and the way they were put into action on the ground. The phenomenal advances made by English in pre-university and university education, in communication in professional fields, and in physical space will be highlighted. Highlighted also will be the efforts on the part of the French-educated Lebanese elite to preserve the special status French has enjoyed in the country for a long time. Finally, the study will address the issue of the threats to the native language by the spread of the foreign languages into domains that were exclusive to Arabic.

Keywords: missionaries, language education, colonialism, globalization, language policy
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Historical overview
    • Missionary language policies (before 1920)
    • French mandate language policies (1920–1943)
    • Lebanon language policies after independence (1943–1975)
    • The Civil War (1975–1990)
    • The TAIF accord and beyond
  • Domains of use of French and English
    • Media
    • Education
  • The future of French in Lebanon
    • French losing grounds to English
  • French not going to disappear anytime soon
  • Attitudes toward foreign languages
  • What happens to Arabic
    • Private schooling and social inequality
    • Arabic in education
    • Economics favors the foreign language
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aals.15.07sha
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