Algeria AgencyCopywriting
Arabic, French, darija: which language to answer in, and to whom
The language of a message is not always the language of the expected answer. The rule is decided per channel, written on one page, and held to.
A customer writes "slm, rakom 7allin nhar sabt ?" — darija in Latin letters — on Instagram, at 10 p.m. Three people on your team would answer in three different languages, and each would have a good argument.
This is not a matter of taste. The language of the answer decides whether it is read, whether it is understood, and whether it commits you — and those three do not always point the same way. A business that has not written its rule applies one anyway, different for every person and every hour.
This article gives the default rule, its two exceptions, and the per-channel grid that makes it usable by somebody who started on Monday. It applies to your employees first and to an assistant second, because a machine can only apply what has been decided.
The language received is not the language expected
The reasonable reflex is to answer in the language of the message. It is right in most cases, and it goes wrong precisely where the mistake costs most.
Somebody writing in darija on WhatsApp usually wants an answer in darija — it is a conversation. The same customer asking for a quote expects a document in French, because a quote is forwarded, filed and shown to an accountant. The language of the conversation and the language of the document are not the same decision.
Conversely, an answer in formal French to a question asked in three words of darija produces a distance nobody wanted. The message is correct and it says something other than its content: it says "you are not in the right register".
Hence the shape of what follows: a default rule, two named exceptions, and a grid that distributes them by channel. Nothing longer fits in the head of somebody answering thirty messages before noon.
Four languages, not three
People usually speak of three languages. There are four in an Algerian inbox, and the fourth is the one that throws systems and new employees alike.
French. Standard Arabic, the language of documents and announcements. Darija written in Arabic characters. And darija written in Latin characters, with digits for the sounds that do not exist in the Latin alphabet — which everybody here reads without thinking and which no spellchecker recognises.
Those four do not sort by age or by level of education, contrary to what is often assumed. They sort mainly by channel, by device and by time of day, and the same person uses two or three of them in the same week.
We publish no percentage for their distribution, and that is deliberate: there is no dated source for Algeria that we could honestly cite. What you can do instead takes an hour and is in section 11 — count the last hundred messages received.
The channel has already decided part of it
A channel is not a neutral pipe: it carries an expectation of register that people learned elsewhere. WhatsApp and private messages on social networks are conversations, and a conversation is held in the spoken language.
Email is the channel of writing that is kept. It tolerates long French, it tolerates standard Arabic, and it takes darija badly — not because darija is less serious, but because an email’s reader expects a text they will be able to forward.
Public comments are a third case, and the worst handled: the answer is not read by the person who asked but by the fifty others passing by. It is a publication, not a message.
A fourth channel exists and almost never has a rule: the reviews published on a business listing. They arrive in every language, they stay visible for years, and they are the one place where your answer is read by people still deciding whether to come. It is also the channel where an absent answer shows most, because the gap stays displayed under the review.
That distribution is not a theory about channels: it is the same observation as what each channel imposes on an assistant, taken from the language side rather than the format side.
The default rule, in one sentence
Answer in the language received, at the register received. If the question arrives in darija, the answer is in darija. If it arrives in French, it is in French. If it arrives in standard Arabic, so is it.
That rule has a virtue worth more than its correctness: it is usable by somebody who started on Monday, it requires no judgement, and two employees following it produce the same answer. A rule that requires guessing a customer’s origin or preference is not a rule, it is a talent.
It also has an uncomfortable consequence that has to be accepted: it obliges you to be able to answer properly in all four. A business that cannot hold darija in writing has to decide that explicitly rather than letting everybody improvise.
Two exceptions only, and they are named in the next two sections. Any other exception added later is the beginning of the end of the rule.
First exception: what commits you
A quote, an invoice, a contract, a reply to a complaint, a commitment to a deadline: those go out in French, whatever the language of the conversation that preceded them. They are meant to be kept, forwarded and possibly produced.
The motive is practical before it is legal. The document will be read by an accountant, a bank, an insurer or an administration, and the Algerian commercial ecosystem does that work in French. A quote in darija is not less serious; it is less forwardable, which is a more concrete defect.
The right way to hold both is not to change language abruptly. The conversation continues in darija, and the document arrives with a sentence announcing it: "I am sending the quote, it is in French as usual". The change is named, so it is not felt as distance.
One clarification stops it spreading too far: a short confirmation message is not a document. "Noted for Tuesday at two" stays in the language of the conversation, even though it carries a commitment. What switches to French is what will be filed, forwarded or signed, and nothing else — the exception has a boundary, and without one it would swallow the rule within a month.
That exception is written into the grid and not left to judgement, because it is exactly the point where somebody well-intentioned will do the opposite to be pleasant.
Second exception: what everybody sees
A public answer — a comment, a review, a question under a post — addresses a reader who did not ask the question. It reads as the business speaking, and it is archived by the engine that will index it.
The rule that works is a double one: answer in the language of the question for the first sentence, then give the information in the broadest language of your audience. That acknowledges the person and serves the fifty silent readers.
It is also the one place where deliberate mixing is an advantage rather than a defect. An answer opening in darija and giving the address and the opening hours in French is read by everybody and excludes nobody.
Conversely, a public answer entirely in Latin-script darija closes the door on part of the audience and is found by no search. It is the only case where we advise not following the received language all the way.
Latin-script darija, and what it signals
Darija in Latin characters is not a writing defect, and treating it as one is the most frequent mistake. It is a keyboard choice before it is a language choice: on a phone set to French, writing in Arabic characters means switching keyboard on every message.
What it signals is therefore the device and the habit, almost never the level of education. Inferring a familiar register from it and answering accordingly is a misreading the customer feels immediately.
Answering in the same script is possible and requires a business decision, because there is no stable spelling: the same word is written three ways depending on the region and the person. What you write becomes your norm as far as the reader is concerned, and you do not have one.
The digits that surprise an unaccustomed reader deserve naming once: they stand in for consonants the Latin alphabet does not have, 3 for ayn, 7 for the emphatic h, 9 for qaf. It is neither a code nor a teenage affectation: it is a keyboard solution, stable for twenty years, read by people of every age.
Our default position is to answer in Arabic-script darija to a Latin-script message, and to change only if the customer insists. It is readable by everybody, it commits you to no spelling, and it corrects nobody.
Mixing inside one sentence
"Salam, promo li 3andkom mazal khadma ?" One sentence, three languages, and it is a completely normal way of speaking here, not a sign of hesitation.
The conclusion not to draw is that you should mix back. A mixture produced by a machine or by somebody imitating it rings false immediately, because natural mixing follows rules nobody wrote down — certain words switch, others never do.
The useful conclusion is to answer in the sentence’s **dominant** language, keeping the words the customer used for the things. If they say "promo", your answer says "promo" and not "promotional offer".
It is the same discipline as using the words the reader types rather than yours, applied to a conversation instead of a page. The vocabulary follows the customer; the language follows the rule.
The telephone: three seconds, and nothing written down
On a call, the language is decided in the first three seconds, by whoever picks up, with no instruction. It is the channel where the rule is most often absent and where its absence shows least.
The practice that works is short: answer in the language of the greeting received, and switch without comment if the caller switches. Never point out a change of language to anybody — that is this section’s one firm prohibition.
A voice agent cannot improvise that, which is what makes the rule necessary in writing: transcription decides before the model does, and a system that recognises darija badly will answer in another language by default rather than by choice.
Note too that speech has no fourth language. Latin script is a keyboard matter; on the phone it does not exist, which makes the grid one line simpler.
What this imposes on an assistant
A machine can detect a message’s language with decent reliability, except on precisely the fourth — Latin-script darija is frequently classified as French, Turkish or Indonesian, because it is written in Latin letters and resembles none of those languages.
Detecting is not deciding. An assistant that answers "in the detected language" is not applying your rule: it is applying the default rule without the two exceptions, and it will therefore send a quote in darija the day somebody asks for one in a conversation.
The rule has to be written into its instructions, and section 11’s grid is exactly the document you hand it. That is also what makes a business decision checkable: you can read what it was given.
One line is missing from most instructions written for an assistant, and it is the line about doubt. A system that has not identified the language with confidence should hand over to a person rather than choose, because a wrong language choice is felt as a lack of regard and not as a technical error. That line is easy to test: send it three messages in Latin letters and see whether it transfers.
The extra cost of being multilingual is real and is handled elsewhere — what darija adds to the work gives the collection, the testing and the correction layer. What is decided here comes before: which language you want it to answer in, to whom, and on which channel.
The check: a hundred messages, one page
Take the last hundred messages received, across all channels, and sort them into four columns: French, standard Arabic, Arabic-script darija, Latin-script darija. One hour, with two people, no tools.
You get your own distribution, which is the only one that concerns you — and it differs between two shops on the same street. You will also see which channel carries which language, which is the information that makes the grid.
Then write the grid: one line per channel, three columns — language received, language of the answer, and the exception that applies. It fits on one page. If it runs to two, you have added one exception too many.
Give it to whoever answers, put it up, and hand it to an assistant if you have one. Redo the count in six months: that is the only moment the grid changes, and it changes because your customers have changed, not because somebody has a preference.
What we do, and what we refuse
We do the hundred-message count with you, we write the grid on one page, and we translate it into instructions for an assistant when you have one. We then test detection on your own Latin-script messages, because that is where it fails and it has to be known beforehand.
We refuse to write your business’s darija for you. It is a way of speaking that comes from your people and your town, and darija written by a supplier is audible within one sentence.
We also refuse to recommend an automatic reply in Latin-script darija. There is no stable spelling, what you publish becomes your norm, and correcting a customer on how they write their own language is the opposite of service.
We refuse, finally, to publish a language breakdown for Algeria, even a rounded and cautious one. There is no dated source we could cite for it, and an invented figure on that subject would be repeated for years by people deciding their communications on it.
What you can do without us is the whole of section 11. Most businesses that do it discover that their implicit rule was already good on three channels and wrong on one, and that the offending channel is the one nobody watches.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a site in three languages if we answer in four?
They are two separate decisions. A site is writing that is kept and searched, so it follows the languages your customers search in. An answer is a conversation and follows the person’s. The two can diverge without inconsistency.
Our team does not write standard Arabic well. What then?
Decide it explicitly and write it into the grid: messages in standard Arabic get an answer in Arabic-script darija. It is readable and honest. What does not work is letting everybody get around the problem their own way.
Does answering in French look more serious?
On a document, yes, because it will be forwarded to third parties who work in that language. In a conversation, no: it mainly produces distance, and a customer who feels held at a distance asks fewer questions and buys less.
Can an assistant recognise Latin-script darija?
Imperfectly, and that is the thing to test before committing. That script is regularly classified as another language, and a system that gets it wrong switches into a language nobody asked for. The test is done on your own messages, not on examples.
Should every answer be translated into the other languages?
No, except in public. A private conversation is held in one language. A public answer gains from carrying the information in the broadest language of your audience, because most of its readers did not ask the question.
How often should the rule be reviewed?
Once a year is enough, and the trigger is not the calendar: it is a new channel or a new town. Opening an account on a network you were not using adds a line to the grid, and that is the moment to redo it.
Where we come in
Almost always, one inbox of yours is applying a rule nobody ever decided on.
- We sort about a hundred of your recent exchanges by language and by arrival inbox.
- The grid goes back to you on one page, its exception line written out plainly.
- Recognition is put to the test on your Latin-alphabet writing before anything is committed.
Your way of speaking cannot be bought in: a supplier who drafts it for you is noticed on the first line.
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