The oldest inhabitants are the Berbers of Kabylia and the Aurès who, like their kinsmen in the Moroccan Atlas, fell back into the mountains under pressure from first the Roman, then the Arab, invaders. Together they comprised (in 1954) the largest proportion of the Muslim population. But probably less than a third still retained their separate identities of language and culture, the rest being rated by ethnologists as Arabised Berbers.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 149