From the living room to the livestream: one Darija speaker’s experience using his heritage language at work for the first time

Starting a new job is always unnerving — but what happens when you’re working in a language you’ve never used outside of the family home?

Haroun,* a 32-year old tech entrepreneur from Paris, France is perfectly comfortable using Algerian Darija at home with his parents — but the office is a different story:

“I have no problem speaking Darija with my family on a daily basis, but it wasn’t until I started my new job in a Darija-speaking environment that I realized that I had absolutely 0 professional vocabulary in a language I’ve been speaking since birth. It was a bit shocking.”

Like many young people in France born to North African parents, Haroun has been speaking Algerian Darija (a language on the Maghrebi langauge continuum, mutually intelligible with other forms of North African Arabic, but more distant from Fusha, or Modern Standard Arabic) since his earliest memories and didn’t actually start learning French until starting primary school.

“It’s hard to remember, but I have vague memories of slowly switching to more and more French the longer I was in school. Eventually, my siblings and I started speaking to each other in French. It just seemed easier since we were speaking French at school all day long.”

Despite this, Haroun never lost his ability to speak Algerian Darija — a fact which he credits to his parents speaking very little French:

“Some of my cousins — their parents speak French pretty well, and I’ve noticed that they’re more likely to respond in French when their parents speak to them in Darija. I just didn’t have a choice when it came to communicating with my parents.”

Earlier this year, Haroun started a remote job with a tech company looking to expand throughout North Africa. In this position, he’d be working alongside Moroccan colleagues and speaking a language that he had only ever used with about thirty people in his life:

“I quickly realized that I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge. Everything professional. It seemed like a lot of business-type words were coming from classical Arabic, which I’m not that familiar with. When I have a gap, I’ll use a word in English or French, but they tend to use something classical. That’s been a bit difficult.”

Despite the challenges, Haroun says that his colleagues have been extremely welcoming, and they’ve had no problems communicating with each other since the start of his new position. Yet, he feels that they only way to improve his professional Darija would be to be physically present in North Africa:

“I feel like it’s just something you need to learn while you’re there. Writing for example. Sometimes they — young people online especially — write using the Arabic script, sometimes using letters and numbers. I’ve tried that with my cousins in Algeria before, and they don’t seem to understand what I’m saying. I think I must be using French sounds and French spelling when I try to write.”

Haroun admits that during a recent livestream, in which he and his colleagues answered live questions from listeners around North Africa, he was comforted by the way viewers seamlessly moved between Darija, English, and French:

“Some of the viewers complained that we were speaking too much French, while others said that it was better to speak English, so we would reach more people. What’s interesting is that we translate all of our company material into French more than Arabic because North Africans are searching for these technological terms in French first, and we want to reach them — but our company is also one of the first to propose tech support in Darija, so I think that’s a big step.”

Despite the challenges, Haroun is determined to improve his professional Darija and to keep the language alive, both in and out of the workplace.

I think Darija matters. It’s a culture. It’s expressions and stories that I could never translate into French. I could have never imagined that this language would help me get a job in a company like this.

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*Names have been changed at the interviewee’s request.