Demographics

The current population of Algeria is 32,930,091 (July 2006 est.). About 70% of Algerians live in the northern, coastal area; the minority who inhabit the Sahara are mainly concentrated in oases, although some 1.5 million remain nomadic or partly nomadic. Almost 30% of Algerians are under 15. Algeria has the fourth lowest fertility rate in the Greater Middle East after Cyprus, Tunisia, and Turkey.
97% of the population is classified ethnically as Berber/Arab and religiously as Sunni Muslim 98.5% , the few non-Sunni Muslims are mainly Ibadis 1.3% from the M'Zab valley. (See also Islam in Algeria.) A mostly foreign Roman Catholic community of about 45,000 exists, also about 350 000 are christians especially Protestant evangelic and somme 500 Jewish communities. The Jewish community of Algeria, which once constituted 2% of the total population, has substantially decreased due to emigration, mostly to France and Israel.
Europeans account for less than 1% of the population, inhabitating almost exclusively the largest metropolitan areas. However, during the colonial period there was a large (15.2% in 1962) European population, consisting primarily of French people, in addition to Spaniards in the west of the country, Italians and Maltese in the east, and other Europeans in smaller numbers known as pieds-noirs, concentrated on the coast and forming a majority in cities like Bône, Oran, Sidi Bel Abbès, and Algiers. Almost all of this population left during or immediately after the country's independence from France.


Housing and medicine continue to be pressing problems in Algeria. Failing infrastructure and the continued influx of people from rural to urban areas has overtaxed both systems. According to the UNDP, Algeria has one of the world's highest per housing unit occupancy rates for housing, and government officials have publicly stated that the country has an immediate shortfall of 1.5 million housing units.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.

Ethnic groups
Most Algerians are Arab or Berber, by language or identity, but almost all Algerians are Berber in origin. Today, the Arab-Berber issue is often a case of self-identification or identification through language and culture, rather than a racial or ethnic distinction. The Berber people are divided into several ethnic groups, Kabyle in the mountainous north-central area, Chaoui in the eastern Atlas Mountains, Mozabites in the M'zab valley, and Tuareg in the far south. Turkish Algerians represent 5% of the population and are living mainly in the big cities. (citation needed)

Education


In philosophy and the humanities, Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, was born in El-Biar near Algiers; Malek Bennabi and Frantz Fanon are noted for their thoughts on decolonization; Augustine of Hippo was born in Tagaste (about 60 miles (100 km) from the present day city of Annaba); and Ibn Khaldun, though born in Tunis, wrote the Muqaddima while staying in Algeria. Algerian culture has been strongly influenced by Islam, the main religion. The works of the Sanusi family in pre-colonial times, and of Emir Abdelkader and Sheikh Ben Badis in colonial times, are widely noted. The Latin author Apuleius was born in Madaurus (Mdaourouch), in what later became Algeria.
The Algerian musical genre best known abroad is raï, a pop-flavored, opinionated take on folk music, featuring international stars such as Khaled and Cheb Mami. However, in Algeria itself the older, highly verbal chaabi style remains more popular, with such stars as El Hadj El Anka, Dahmane El Harrachi and El Hachemi Guerouabi, while the tuneful melodies of Kabyle music, exemplified by Idir, Ait Menguellet, or Lounès Matoub, have a wide audience. For more classical tastes, Andalusi music, brought from Al-Andalus by Morisco refugees, is preserved in many older coastal towns.
In painting, Mohammed Khadda and M'Hamed Issiakhem have been notable in recent years.


Languages

Trilingual welcome sign in the Isser Municpipality (Boumerdès), written in Arabic, Kabyle (Tifinagh), and French.
Most Algerians speak Algerian Arabic. Arabic is spoken natively in dialectal form ("Darja") by some 83.2% of the population. However in the media and official occasions the spoken language is Standard Arabic.
The Berbers (or Imazighen), who form approximately 27.4% of the population, largely speak one of the various dialects of Tamazight as opposed to Arabic. But a majority can use the both, Berber and Algerian Arabic. Arabic remains Algeria's only official language, although Tamazight has recently been recognized as a national language alongside it.
Ethnologue counts eighteen living languages within Algeria, splitting both Arabic and Tamazight into several different languages, as well as including the Korandje language, which is unrelated to Arabic or Tamazight.
The language issue is politically sensitive, particularly for the Berber minority, which has been disadvantaged by state-sanctioned Arabization. Language politics and Arabization have partly been a reaction to the fact that 130 years of French colonization 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, but very rarely spoken as a native language. Since independence, the government has pursued a policy of linguistic Arabization of education and bureaucracy, with some success, although many university courses continue to be taught in French. Recently, schools have started to incorporate French into the curriculum as early as children start to learn Arabic, as many Algerians are fluent in French. French is also used in media and commerce.