Jabal al-Lughat

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād , Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn K...

The modern borders of Algeria had no existence or meaning in the Roman era, but for any potential Algerian classicists, it may be interestin...

I recently came across a video, apparently from the little town of Souani near Tlemcen, of a poet, one Mohamed Tlemceni, performing a public...

Among the many responses to recent events in Algeria circulating on Facebook, a particularly linguistically interesting one caught my eye: ...

One of the great understudied subjects in North African linguistics is Berber-Arabic codeswitching (unlike French-Arabic and French-Berber c...

The most sociolinguistically interesting protest song that I've come across since the last post is also among the earliest (28 February)...

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter ): The...

A whole bunch more protest songs are emerging, as singers ride the wave. I don't think any of them have the kind of reach that La Casa ...

What's going on right now in Algeria is fascinating - and difficult to get a full sense of from abroad even if you speak Arabic and Fren...

On a recent trip to Tamanrasset, Algeria's southernmost significant city, I was not surprised to see lots of signs in Arabic and French,...

Algerian Arabic (or at least Dellys Arabic) has a verb for "be related to" (as family): kul كول, taking the dative, as in waš y-k...

As we reached the stop by the supermarket the other day, I told my son in English "Now we're getting off the bus." This caugh...

According to Glottolog , the least documented language in Algeria is neither Korandje nor some Berber variety, but rather one that might not...

Going east of Algiers along the coast, the names of two little port towns stand out. Their inhabitants know them as جنّات /d͡ʒənnat/ (somet...

Two years ago, the Algerian state finally decided to make Tamazight (Berber) an official language . In practice, this has not by any means ...

Even in English, you can sometimes get a laugh by inappropriately mixing high and low registers - gangster slang in blank verse*, or discuss...

In 1609, 117 years after conquering Granada, the Spanish state decreed the expulsion of all "Moriscos" - that is, everyone descend...

In Algerian Arabic, this is a stilu ستيلو - a word instantly recognizable as a borrowing from French stylo : In Standard Arabic, on the ...

Looking through Corriente's etymological dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, I keep coming across explanations for obscure Dellys words whose...

I recently finished reading Four Months in Algeria , a travel diary by the English Rev. J. W. Blakesley published in 1859. It's mostly...