[4] It contains Berber, Punic, and African Romance[5] influences and has some loanwords from French, Andalusi Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Spanish.
[7] It is a spoken language used in daily communication and entertainment, while Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is generally reserved for official use and education.
As in the rest of the Arab world, this linguistic situation has been described as diglossia: MSA is nobody's first acquired language; it is learned through formal instruction rather than transmission from parent to child.
[9] The classification of dialects in Algeria is made particularly difficult due to the geography of Algeria, allowing pockets of isolated speakers to form, as well as the mixing of dialects in urban centers, creating a "koine" for each city.
Several Pre-Hilalian dialects are spoken in Algeria:[10][14] In comparison to other Maghrebi dialects, Algerian Arabic has retained numerous phonetic elements of Classical Arabic lost by its relatives;[15][16] In Algiers dialect, the letters /ðˤ/ ظ, /ð/ ذ, and ث /θ/ are not used, they are in most cases pronounced as the graphemes ض, د, and ت respectively.
[15] This conservatism concerning pronunciation is in contrast to Algerian Arabic grammar which has shifted noticeably.
[16] In terms of differences from Classical Arabic, the previous /r/ and /z/ phonemes have developed contrastive glottalized forms and split into /r/ and /rˤ/; and /z/ and /zˤ/.
The phonemes /v/ and /p/ which are not common in Arabic dialects arise almost exclusively from (predominantly French) loanwords.
A study of Northwestern Algerian Arabic (specifically around Oran) showed that laterals /l/ or /ɫ/ or the nasal consonant /n/ would be dissimilated into either /n/ in the case of /l/ or /ɫ/; or /l/ or /ɫ/ in the case of /n/ when closely preceding a corresponding lateral or nasal consonant.
[17] The same study also noted numerous examples of assimilation in Northwestern Algerian Arabic, due to the large consonant clusters created from all of the historical vowel deletion: examples include /dəd͡ʒaːd͡ʒ/ "chicken", becoming /d͡ʒaːd͡ʒ/ and /mliːħ/ "good", becoming /mniːħ/.
For example, the word for a house has a definite form "ed-dar" but with "fi", it becomes "fed-dar".
It follows the sun and moon letters rules of Classical Arabic: if the word starts with one of these consonants, el is assimilated and replaced by the first consonant: t, d, r, z, s, š, ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, l, n. Examples: Important Notes: Examples: Examples: Verbs are conjugated by adding affixes (prefixes, postfixes, both or none) that change according to the tense.
In all Algerian Arabic dialects, there is no gender differentiation of the second and third person in the plural forms, nor is there gender differentiation of the second person in the singular form in pre-Hilalian dialects.
Hilalian dialects preserve the gender differentiation of the singular second person.
ʃ is not used when other negative words are used or when two verbs are consecutively in the negative Verb derivation is done by adding affixes or by doubling consonants, there are two types of derivation forms: causative, passive.
Auguste Moulieras's Les fourberies de si Djeh'a.