destined for Kabyles. As a result, Kabyles moved into large levels of state administration across Algeria after 1962, who, among all Algerians, were the most attached to the French culture.
The Nationalists who ruled Algeria after independence committed themselves to the hard task of regenerating indigenous language and cultural background, in order to recover the precolonial past and to use it in order to restore (if not to create) a national identity based on Islam, Arabic Language, and Algerianism.
This movement was transformed into a state policy called "arabization." Many problems occurred in the application of this new policy. Arabic teachers were lacking, and Algerians were not used to the Literary Arabic. More problems came out during the 1980s Berber Spring, in which Kabyles asked for a solution to the Berber question. They believed Arabization was a menace to the Berber Culture and heritage, and that the French Language offered more opportunities.
Under Boumediene, arabization took the form of a national language requirement on street signs and shop signs. Algeria remains caught between strident demands to eliminate any legacy from its colonial past and the more pragmatic concerns of the costs of rapid arabization. Calls have been made to eliminate coeducational schooling and affect the arabization of medical and technological schools.
The Arabization of Algerian society would expedite the inevitable break with France. Tahir Wattar, a prominent pro-arabization Berber, called French use and teaching the "Vestige of Colonialism". In December 1990, a law was passed that would implement complete arabization of secondary school and higher education by 1997. In early July 1993, the most recent legislation proposing a national timetable for imposing Arabic as the only legal language in government and politics was again delayed; this was a result of official concerns about the existence of the necessary preconditions for
