Algerian

The Algerian are the Arabic-speaking, largely Arabized people of the central Maghreb, settled in the cities and high plains around Constantine, Sétif and Hodna. Islam and Arabic came with the Umayyad conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, but the countryside kept its Amazigh speech until the Fatimids loosed the Bedouin Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym on the Zirids; their rout of Sanhaja cavalry at Haydaran in 1052 opened the interior to Bedouin camps and carried Hilalian Arabic across the plateau, fusing Arab tribesmen with Arabized Berbers.

Rule passed through Almoravids and Almohads to the Zayyanid kingdom of Tlemcen, founded in 1235; its fourteenth-century court under Abu Hammu Musa II hosted Ibn Khaldun. The Ottomans took Tlemcen in 1551.

Spain seized Oran in 1509, and the Barbarossa brothers built Algiers into an Ottoman corsair regency from 1516; after a janissary coup in 1659 it became a republic of deys, recovering Oran in 1792 before the 1830 French invasion ended it.