Conceptually armed with the notion of the mission civilisatrice and its inherent assumption of linguistic superiority, the colonial French introduced to Algeria a previously unknown practice, writes Benrabah (English linguistics and sociolinguistics, U. Grenoble 3, France): "cultural polarization by means of language." While the French were eventually forced out after a bloody war of independence, the practice of linguistic polarization did not leave with them, as Algeria's elites subsequently adopted their own program of Arabization, ostensibly in order to reduce divisions linked to language and contribute to Algeria's development, yet it merely became the source of more conflict, including in the so-called Black Decade of the civil war of the 1990s. Benrabah traces the history of these cultural conflicts based around language from the 19th century to the present. Distributed in the US by UTP Distribution. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)