African Romance in the context of Africa (province)

Africa was a Roman province on the northern coast of the continent of Africa. It was established in 146 BC, following the Roman Republic's conquest of Carthage in the Third Punic War. It roughly comprised the territory of present-day Tunisia, the northeast of Algeria, and the coast of western Libya along the Gulf of Sidra. The territory was originally and still is inhabited by Berbers, known in Latin as the Numidae and Maurii, indigenous to all of North Africa west of Egypt. In the 9th century BC, Semitic-speaking Phoenicians from the Levant built coastal settlements across the Mediterranean to support and expand their shipping networks. In the 8th century BC, the settlement of Carthage became the predominant Phoenician colony. Rome began expanding into Africa after annexing Carthage in 146 BC at the end of the Punic Wars, and into Numidia from 25 BC, establishing Roman colonies in the region.

Africa was one of the wealthiest provinces in the Roman Empire, second only to Italy. It was said that Africa fed the Roman populace for eight months of the year, while Egypt provided the remaining four months' supply. The area east of the Fossa Regia was fully Romanized with one third of the population made of Italian colonists and their descendants, the other two thirds were Romanized Berbers, who were all Christians and nearly all Latin speaking.

Algerian Arabic (Arabic: الدارجة الجزائرية, romanized: ad-dārija al-jazāʾiriyya), natively known as Dziria, Darja or Derja, is a variety of Arabic spoken in Algeria. It belongs to the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and is mostly intelligible with the Tunisian and Moroccan dialects. Darja (الدارجة) means 'everyday/colloquial dialect'.

Like other varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, Algerian Arabic has a mostly Semitic vocabulary. It contains Berber, Punic, and African Romance influences and has some loanwords from French, Andalusi Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Spanish. Berber loanwords represent 8% to 9% of its vocabulary.

The Roman Africans or African Romans (Latin: Afri) were the ancient populations of Roman North Africa that had a Romanized culture, some of whom spoke their own variety of Latin as a result. They existed from the Roman conquest until their language gradually faded out after the Arab conquest of North Africa in the Early Middle Ages (approximately the 8th century AD).

Roman Africans lived in all the coastal cities of contemporary Tunisia, Western Libya, Eastern Algeria, as well as West Algeria and Northern Morocco, though in a more limited fashion, mainly concentrated in the coastal areas and large towns. The area between East Algeria and Western Libya became known under Arab rule as Ifriqiya, an Arabized version of the name of the Roman province of Africa.