Languages
Native
Algerian Arabic (Darja)
83%
Tamazight (Berber)
27%
Secondary languages
French
50%
English
15%
Language Samples
واش راك؟
Wash rak?
How are you? (Algerian Darja)
لاباس، شكراً.
Labas, shukran.
Fine, thank you.
واحد، زوج، تلاتة، أربعة، خمسة، ستة، سبعة، تمانية، تسعة، عشرة.
Wahd, zouj, tlata, arba'a, khamsa, stta, sb'a, tmania, ts'a, 'ashra.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Algeria is the largest country in Africa and has a deeply layered linguistic history. Indigenous Berber (Tamazight) peoples inhabited the region for millennia before Phoenician traders, Roman rule, Vandal and Byzantine periods, and finally the Arab conquest in the 7th century. French colonisation (1830–1962), one of the most intense in modern history, left French deeply embedded in governance, education, and media — even after independence. Tamazight was recognised as a national and official language in 2016. Algerian Darja is a heavily Berber- and French-influenced Arabic dialect, often unintelligible to Gulf Arabic speakers.
Similar Languages
Hebrew
58%
Tamazight (Berber)
14%
Amharic
22%
Maltese
30%
Media
The Roman ruins of Djémila (Cuicul), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northeastern Algeria
Photo: Alioueche Mokhtar · CC BY-SA 4.0
Did You Know
01
Algeria's Kabyle Berbers have a distinct oral literary tradition with thousands of poems and songs never written down — preserved purely in memory.
02
French is so embedded in Algeria that most university courses in science and medicine are still taught in French rather than Arabic.
03
The Sahara Desert, which covers 80% of Algeria, is home to Tuareg communities who still communicate in Tamasheq and use the ancient Tifinagh script.