Jabal al-Lughat

By far the most distant Berber variety from the rest – a separate language by even the most generous standards, as the lines quoted below wi...

An article of mine that's been in the pipeline for almost four years has finally come out: " Writing 'Shelha' in new media:...

We’ve seen the “ Teach Yourself Songhay ” poem. What does it tell us, besides the meanings of a few words in Koyra Chiini? The writer didn...

Of the non-Arabic content I mentioned earlier, a few images are online. One work partly in Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language of Timbuktu, ...

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. T...

A major collection of early Tashelhiyt manuscripts from the 16th century onwards has gone online: Manuscrits arabes et berbères du Fonds Rou...

The Boston Globe has an article today about Ajami , the tradition of transcribing African languages in the Arabic script. It focuses partic...

What are the oldest written documents in a Papuan language (ie a non-Austronesian language of the New Guinea region?) I'm not totally s...

I want to see this talk by Hiroyuki Eto Nikolai Dobonravine (though I'm not likely to be in Dublin for it): Arabic and Arabic-script w...

I went to a very interesting seminar on classical Kanembu this week. It's a highly conservative form of Kanembu/Kanuri, written in the ...

With apologies for the long hiatus in my postings, I would like to present another topic in West African writing: the surprisingly formalize...