Languages of Algeria
In February 2016, a constitutional resolution was passed making Berber an official language alongside Arabic.
[3][8] French, though it has no official status, is still used in media (some newspapers) and education due to Algeria's colonial history.
Kabyle, with 3 million speakers, is the most spoken Berber language in the country, is taught and partially co-official (with a few restrictions) in parts of Kabylie.
Most Jews of Algeria once spoke dialects of Arabic specific to their community, collectively termed Judeo-Arabic.
Mohamed Benrabah, author of "Language maintenance and spread: French in Algeria," said that during that year, "linguistic competence in Standard Arabic was relatively low.
Before, during and after Phoenician settlers' arrival, Berber remained spoken throughout ancient Algeria (Numidia), as later attested by early Tifinagh (or Libyco-Berber) inscriptions, and as understood from Latin and Greek historical sources.
Despite the presence or growth of Latin, and later Arabic, in some urban areas, Berber remained the majority language of Algeria since ancient times until well after the French invasion in 1830.
[12] French is a part of the standard school curriculum, and is widely understood (18 million Algerians can write and read French, which is 50% of the population, and the figure is higher if those who can only speak and understand it are included; Ethnologue estimates indicate that 10 200 people in Algeria speak it as their native language,[1] mostly pied-noirs who stayed behind and people raised in French-speaking households.)
French is widely used and spoken in everyday life in Algeria's larger cities, in diglossic combination with Algerian Arabic.
"[11] French is the most widely studied foreign language in the country, and a majority of Algerians can understand it and speak it.
Recently, schools have begun to incorporate French into the curriculum as early as children are taught written classical Arabic.
[citation needed] In spite of its widespread use of French, Algeria has not joined the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, an international organization of French-speaking countries.
According to the Algerian envoy to India, only five percent of the population are able to speak "good English"[clarification needed].
Phoenician, particularly in its North African Punic form, was brought to Algeria by Carthage's influence, it was an influential language in the region; Augustine learned it, and quotes occasional phrases.
However, by his time the language was losing ground to Latin, and no trace of it survives now (apart from occasional names of places).
However, over time these Turks gradually assimilated, and, while many families of partial Turkish descent remain in Algeria, none speak the language.
[27] Benrabah said that as of 2007 "the use of French in a number of higher domains has diminished since the colonial era when the language held an unassailable position in the media, education, government, and administration.
In 1990 the government ruled that Arabic is the only language to be used in institutions and public service, and imprisonment was a penalty for violating this law.
[29] Around 1997 the Algerian government had passed laws prohibiting officials from speaking any language other than Arabic publicly.
[13] In 1997, Slimane Chikh, the Minister of Education, said that French needed to be phased out because it was preventing Arabic from reaching prominence and because it was leading Algerians away from English, the primary international language of commerce, computers, and science.
[13] Of the documents submitted by the Algerian government to the sessions of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names and the United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, all were in French, and the government used French in its participation in almost all of the conferences associated with these groups.
C. F. Gallagher, author of "North African problems and prospects: Language and identity", said that the monitors' "intellectual horizons [were] at times only slightly less limited than their pupils".
Mohamed Benrabah, author of "Language-in-Education Planning in Algeria: Historical Development and Current Issues", said "Most of these teachers turned out to be unqualified for teaching and totally ignorant of the Algerian social reality" and that "Their spoken Egyptian Arabic was incomprehensible to Algerians in general and Tamazight-speaking populations in particular and their traditional pedagogy (learning by rote and class recitation, physical punishment and so on) proved inadequate".
[29] President Chadli Bendjedid ruled that Algerian nationals were not permitted to attend all-French schools.
[29] In 1999 the Algerian authorities conducted a survey which stated that 75% of the population supported teaching scientific school subjects in the French language.
