Language of education and Hybrid Identities in the Sudan.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005 signed by the NCP (representing the government of Sudan) and SPLM/A (representing the Southern opposition) has clear features of a new language policy in the Sudan. This paper argues that the new language policy will contribute significantly to the social process of hybridization of identities in the country. The paper contends that conceptualizing language and identities in the Sudan as a hybrid product of a number of historical and linguistic processes and interactions promises to help problematize the ideological constructs of the 'Africans' and the 'Arabs'. The paper shows that social identifications in the Sudan were constructed along reductionist linguistic lines. These representations are politically charged since they do not reflect the hybrid character of the language and identities in the Sudan. This argument will be ethnographically supported by reviewing the sociolinguistic situation in the Sudan, with a particular focus on inherently multilingual areas such as the Nuba Mountains.