The father tongue. Figures of narrators/characters in postcolonial diglossic context.

Our exploration delves into linguistic ideologies in colonial and post-colonial contexts through the analysis of autobiographical narratives by Algerian authors like Assia Djebar, Tassadit Imache, Maïssa Bey, Faïza Guène, and Ahmed Djouder. Their identities are molded by the dual presence of colonial history's languages: French, the colonizer's language, encouraged for success and social ascent, vying with the mother tongue, often dialectal Arabic or Berber. This challenges the concept of a "father tongue," as the mother's tongue evolves naturally, while the father tongue (French) is learned, stable, and associated with assimilation. Examining the diglossic ideology, we unveil representations embedded in the imaginary of these languages. We scrutinize attitudes, prejudices, and opinions leading to intergenerational mother tongue loss, replaced by French, creating a unique metalinguistic consciousness and a polyphonic identity among speakers experiencing a sort of missed bilingualism in the context of contemporary francophone Algerian authors' narrative corpus