It belongs to the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and is mostly intelligible with the Tunisian and Moroccan dialects. 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. Besides informal communication, Algerian Arabic is rarely written. The first novel written in Algerian Arabic is published by Rabeh Sebaa in and is entitled Fahla in Latin script and Arabic characters.
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. However, the Arab dialects can still be divided into two genetically different groups: pre-Hilalian and Hilalian dialects.
.jpg/900px-View_of_the_Casbah_(Old_City_of_Algiers).jpg "Adult Guide Algiers")
Hilalian dialects of Algeria belong to three linguistic groups: [ 10 ]. Modern koine languages , urban and national, are based mainly on Hilalian dialects. Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects are generally classified into three types: Urban, "Village" Sedentary, and Jewish dialects. Several Pre-Hilalian dialects are spoken in Algeria: [ 10 ] [ 14 ]. Some of them can be attached to the noun, just like in other Arabic dialects. The word for in , "fi", can be attached to a definite noun. For example, the word for a house has a definite form "ed-dar" but with "fi", it becomes "fed-dar".
Algerian Arabic uses two genders for words: masculine and feminine. Masculine nouns and adjectives generally end with a consonant while the feminine nouns generally end with an a. Hilalian dialects, on which the modern koine is based, often use regular plural while the wider use of the broken plural is characteristic to pre-Hilalian dialects. The broken plural can be found for some plurals in Hilalian dialects, but it is mainly used, for the same words, in pre-Hilalian dialects:.
The article el is indeclinable and expresses a definite state of a noun of any gender and number. It is also prefixed to each of that noun's modifying adjectives. 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:. 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.
