Algerian culture: an argument conducted in three languages

Which languages Algerians speak

The constitution makes Arabic the national and official language and gives Tamazight the same rank; Britannica dates the steps to 1990 for Arabic, 2002 for Tamazight as a national language and 2016 as an official one. What most people speak at home is neither standard form. Algerian Arabic, called Dziria, is the everyday language of the majority, and Wikipedia gives it about 83% of speakers against 27% for the Berber languages, figures it prints without a year. Some 8 to 9% of Algerian Arabic vocabulary is Berber in origin, and about 35% of Kabyle vocabulary is Arabic.

Algerian law forbids censuses by ethnicity, religion or language, so every figure on who is Arab and who is Amazigh is an estimate. Britannica puts those who identify as Amazigh at about one-fifth; the estimates Wikipedia collects run from 20% to 30%. Britannica names the Kabyles of the mountains east of Algiers as the largest Amazigh group; the others include the Shawia of the Aurès, the Mozabites of the M'zab and the Tuareg of the Ahaggar.

French has no official status and is everywhere. It is used in government, newspapers, radio and television, and in education from primary school up. Estimates of how many Algerians speak or understand it vary with who measured and when: 11.2 million could read and write it in 2008, about 60% of the population could speak or understand it in an estimate for 2013, and 33% was counted as francophone in 2022. In 2022 the government announced that English would be taught in primary schools.

How Arabisation reshaped the schools

Arabisation was state policy from independence, meant to replace French with Arabic as the language of the nation and of instruction. Arabic has been the medium of the first nine years of schooling since 1972, with French taught from the third year. Short of Arabic-trained teachers, the state recruited them from abroad; the teachers of Arabic brought in from other Muslim countries under Chadli Bendjedid spread a conventional Islamic outlook through the schools, in Wikipedia's account.

Britannica records that Arabic replaced French as the language of instruction in every institution of higher learning in 2000. Wikipedia describes universities where law and economics are taught in Arabic while science and medicine are still taught in French and English. The two accounts disagree, and both are recorded here.

Resistance came from the Amazigh regions, above all Kabylia, where groups feared domination by the Arabic-speaking majority. The state answered in stages: Amazigh language and literature were restored at several universities, Tamazight became a national language by the amendment of 8 May 2002, Kabyle is taught and partly co-official in parts of Kabylia, and the amendment of February 2016 made Tamazight official. The 2020 constitution put both languages beyond amendment. Algeria: politics covers that text.

Schooling is compulsory from 6 to 15. The 2008 figures gave an illiteracy rate of 22.3% for people over ten, 15.6% for men and 29.0% for women, with 11.6% in Algiers province and 35.5% in Djelfa.

What Islam shapes in daily life

Islam is the state religion, and about 99% of Algerians are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school; the CIA World Factbook gave 99% in 2021 and Pew Research 98.4% in 2020. About 290,000 Ibadis live in the M'zab valley around Ghardaïa, descendants of the Rustamid community that settled there after 909. Estimates of Christians run from 100,000 to 200,000, mostly Protestant, and Freedom House records that worship is allowed only at state-approved places and that proselytising by non-Muslims is illegal.

A distinctly North African strand of the faith runs through the marabouts, holy men venerated locally as teachers and healers, and the Sufi brotherhoods formed around them. Reformers and the state have long tried to limit their influence, and the reformist Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, founded in 1931, made Islam part of the nationalist case against France. The saints' tradition survives in pilgrimages that UNESCO has listed: the annual pilgrimage to the mausoleum of Sidi Cheikh in 2013, and the Sbuâ pilgrimage to the zawiya of Sidi El Hadj Belkacem in Gourara in 2015.

The Arab Barometer has measured religiosity several times with results that move: the share describing themselves as not religious rose from about 8% in 2013 to about 15% in 2018, driven by the young, and fell to 2.6% in 2021, when 69.5% called themselves religious and 27.8% somewhat religious.

How music carried the argument

Raï, from the Arabic ra'y, opinion, began in western Algeria in the early twentieth century, mixing popular song with Bedouin music, and became an international genre in the 1980s. Its singers are called cheb, young, against the sheikh of older forms. Islamic and government authorities attacked raï after independence; attitudes began to change around 1985, partly because the music was succeeding in France. Singers including Khaled and Cheb Mami were later threatened by Islamist extremists. UNESCO inscribed raï as the popular folk song of Algeria in 2022.

Older listeners, in Wikipedia's account, prefer chaabi, sung by performers such as Dahmane El Harrachi. Andalusi music, brought by refugees from Muslim Spain, is still heard in the older coastal towns, and wahrani, the music of Oran, crosses raï with that Andalusi tradition. Kabyle song, from Idir, Aït Menguellet and Lounès Matoub, has a wide following; Matoub was assassinated in 1998.

In the south, UNESCO's lists hold the Ahellil of Gourara, inscribed in 2008, and the practices and knowledge of the imzad of the Tuareg communities of Algeria, Mali and Niger, inscribed in 2013.

Who wrote Algerian literature and in which language

The roots run to Roman Africa. Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, was born at Madaurus, and Augustine at Tagaste, modern Souk Ahras; Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah while staying in Algeria. Albert Camus, a pied-noir author born in Algeria, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

The modern national literature is split between Arabic, French and Tamazight. Mohammed Dib's Algerian trilogy and Kateb Yacine's Nedjma asserted a national identity; Mouloud Feraoun wrote Amazigh life; Assia Djebar wrote from a woman's point of view and is widely translated. After independence Rachid Boudjedra, Rachid Mimouni, Tahar Ouettar and Tahar Djaout turned to the country's social problems. Britannica calls Abdelhamid Benhadugah the father of modern Arabic literature in Algeria, and names Jean Amrouche and his sister Taos Amrouche among the first generation writing in French.

The civil war cost the literature heavily. The novelist Tahar Djaout was murdered in 1993 for his secularist views, the director of the National Museum was killed in 1995, and Britannica records that much of the cultural elite left to work abroad, mostly in France. Among the more recent works Wikipedia lists are Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul, Ahlam Mosteghanemi's Memory of the Flesh and Boualem Sansal's The Oath of Barbarians. Freedom House records that Sansal was arrested at Algiers airport in November 2024 over earlier statements questioning Algeria's sovereignty over part of its territory.

How painters answered the Orientalist image

For most of the colonial period the painting of Algeria was done by outsiders, and the first Algerian easel painters, Azouaou Mammeri among them, worked inside the Orientalist conventions they inherited. Mohamed Racim revived the miniature and illumination around the same years. After independence the war became the dominant theme, as in M'hamed Issiakhem's portrait The Widow of 1970, and artists organised themselves in the National Union of Plastic Arts, founded in 1963.

A second current turned to abstraction. Mohammed Khadda and Abdallah Benanteur took the rhythm of Arabic script as a starting point, and in 1970 the poet Jean Sénac named them and their circle the Painters of the Sign. Mohamed Aksouh, Abdelkader Guermaz and Ali Ali-Khodja followed them into abstraction, and Sénac gave the group its first collective exhibition at his Galerie 54 in Algiers.

What cinema made of the war

The war was the first subject of post-colonial cinema. The Battle of Algiers of 1966, directed by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo with government support and residents of Algiers in many roles, retold the urban war of 1956 and 1957. Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's Chronicle of the Years of Fire won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1975. Merzak Allouache's Omar Gatlato of 1976 and Bab El-Oued City of 1994 turned to daily life in the capital.

The state still funds much of production. Between 2007 and 2013 the fund for the arts and film industry subsidised 98 films, and by mid-2013 the Algerian Agency for Cultural Influence had supported 78. The European Audiovisual Observatory counted 41 Algerian films distributed in Europe between 1996 and 2013, 21 of them co-produced with France; Days of Glory, of 2006, drew 3,172,612 admissions in the European Union.

How family life is changing

Britannica describes Algerian society as reshaped by 130 years of colonial rule, the war and the mobilisation policies of the governments after it, with the state taking on roles the extended family or clan once filled. The family, headed by the husband, remains the basic unit, and men and women have generally socialised apart. Marriages have typically been arranged by parents, a custom Britannica reports as declining as women take a larger part in political and economic life. Veiling, by the same account, has increased since independence, most in the cities.

The law lags the constitution's promise of equality. Freedom House notes that under the family code, based on Islamic law, a woman needs a male guardian's permission to marry and the father is the legal guardian of the children, and that inheritance rules favour men.

What Algerians eat and wear

Couscous, steamed semolina served with a meat and vegetable stew, is the staple and the national dish; UNESCO inscribed the knowledge and practices of making and eating it in 2020. Bread comes with almost every meal. Mutton is the staple meat, and camel is eaten in the south. Common dishes include chakhchoukha, chtitha and doulma, the pastry brik and merguez, a lamb or beef sausage of Berber origin; desserts use figs, dates, almonds and honey. Strong sweet coffee and mint tea are the drinks of social life.

Dress varies by region and setting: Western clothes are common in the cities, traditional dress more so in the countryside and at celebrations. Men wear the gandoura, a loose shirt, over sirwal trousers, or the hooded djellaba and the qashabiya; in rural areas women wear the haik, a large white wrap of Andalusi origin, and the karakou and kaftan appear at weddings and festivals. Silver jewellery, set with beads, was part of Amazigh identity in Kabylia and the Aurès into the mid-twentieth century.

UNESCO's listing of Algerian practice gathers much of this:

Football has a mass following, and the national team is known as the Desert Foxes. The fantasia, horse racing with rifle fire, is part of festive recreation, and in the Aurès a local chess variant called El Kherba has been played.