Language

Algeria's official language, Arabic, is spoken natively in dialectal form (Darja) by 80% of the population, and, as in the entire Arab world, used in the Modern Standard Arabic variant in the media and on official occasions.

The ethnologue counts eighteen living languages within Algeria, splitting both Arabic and Tamazight into several different languages, as well as mentioning the unrelated Korandje language.

Some 20% of the population, identified as Berbers or Imazighen, are native speakers of some dialect of Tamazight. Many Algerians are, however, fluent in both languages to some degree. Arabic remains Algeria's only official language, although Tamazight has recently been recognised as a national language alongside it.

The language issue is politically sensitive, particularly for the Berber minority, which has been disadvantaged by state-sanctioned Arabisation. Language politics and Arabisation have partly been a reaction to the fact that 130 years of French colonisation had left both the state bureaucracy and much of the educated upper class completely Francophone, as well as being motivated by the Arab nationalism promoted by successive Algerian governments.

French is still the most widely studied foreign language, and widely spoken (distantly followed by English), but very rarely spoken as a native language. Since independence, the government has pursued a policy of linguistic Arabisation of education and bureaucracy, with some success, although many university courses continue to be taught in French.