Family and people in Algerian Darija

Family words come earlier in Algeria than most learners expect. You will be asked about your family in the first five minutes of meeting someone, and not as small talk. Where you are from, who your people are, whether you are married, how many brothers and sisters. Answering that easily is one of the fastest ways to stop being treated as a visitor.

This page holds the words for relatives, for the people around you, and for saying who you are: your name, where you come from, what you are. Just under a hundred entries, and the first twenty of them carry most of the weight.

Saying your own name has more than one shape

You will find several ways here to give your name, including سمّيوني, literally they call me. That is the everyday one and it is worth having, because the version a textbook teaches can sound stiff in a doorway. The same goes for asking somebody else's. Have one of each ready and fluent, because you will use them within a minute of meeting anybody.

Relative words are used far beyond relatives

The words on this page for brother, sister, uncle and aunt are not reserved for actual family. They are used constantly for neighbours, for shopkeepers, for the man in the queue behind you, and choosing the right one for somebody's age and gender is a large part of sounding normal rather than formal. Watch which word people use for you and use the matching one back.

The questions come as a set

If you can answer where are you from, what is your name and what do you do, you have handled most first meetings. Those three answers are worth writing out for yourself in full and saying until they are automatic, because they will be asked of you more often than any other three questions in Algeria and you do not want to be assembling them from scratch each time.

What to do with this page

Write your own introduction. Five sentences: your name, where you are from, why you are learning, what you do, and something about your family. Use the words on this page, keep it short, and get somebody to correct it once. Then learn it properly. It will do more work for you than any fifty words learned loose, because it is the only paragraph you are guaranteed to need.

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