Algeria (Formal Arabic: الجزائر, al-Jazā’ir; Berber: Dzayer), officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country located in North Africa. It is the largest country on the Mediterranean sea, the second largest on the African continent[3] and the eleventh-largest country in the world in terms of land area.[5] It is bordered by Tunisia in the northeast, Libya in the east, Niger in the southeast, Mali and Mauritania in the southwest, a few kilometers of the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara in the southwest, Morocco in the west and northwest, and the Mediterranean Sea in the north. Its size is almost 2,400,000 km2 with an estimated population near to 35,000,000. The capital of Algeria is Algiers. About a quarter of the population of the country lives off less than US$ 2 a day. [6]
Algeria is a member of the United Nations, African Union, OPEC and the Arab League. It also contributed towards the creation of the Maghreb Union. Algeria is considered by Berbers to be a part of the Berber World
Etymology
Al-jazā’ir is itself a truncated form of the city's older name of jazā’ir banī mazghanā, the Arabic for "the islands of (the Berber tribe) Ait Mazghanna", as used by early medieval geographers such as al-Idrisi and Yaqut al-Hamawi.
In the Classical times northern Algeria was known as Numidia. Numidia included back then parts of modern day Morocco
الرئيسية 
