Jabal al-Lughat

My favourite 4-year-old is doing something very interesting these days with final consonant clusters in his French. Many word-final consona...

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...

Ever since she got interviewed on TV ten days ago, the 19-year-old president of the student union at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Maryam Pouge...

American English was born in the clearing of the eastern woodlands, where British settlers encountered native Americans mostly speaking Algo...

In the Western world over the past few years, freedom of speech seems to be becoming a matter not just of human rights but of cultural ident...

In English, "re-" is a moderately productive derivational prefix - reboot, remake, redo... In French, though, it seems more like ...

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

A lot of languages - Indonesian, for instance - make a rather useful distinction between two 1st person plural pronouns: "we (including...

Recently I came across Accros du Roc , a French translation by Patrick Couton of Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy Soul Music . In the or...

It's not unusual to hear sentences like the following from middle-class Algerian adults, especially women: عندنا ان تيليفيزيون كبير ʕə...

I recently finished reading Claude Hagège's Combat pour le français au nom de la diversité des langues et cultures (2006). For any Alg...

Attention conservation notice: The story below is probably being promoted as a distraction, to keep Algerians talking about language instead...

As we have seen, research and common sense both confirm that students learn better if you teach them non-language subjects in their first la...

Même si j'écris généralement en anglais, je suis sûr que ce blog a quelques lecteurs algériens qui sont bilingues arabe/français. Si vo...

For some time, I've been hearing rumours (from Arabs, of course) that Arabic has the largest number of words of any language. Recently ...

In general, I tend to think that conflating Modern Standard Arabic with Classical Arabic is fairly harmless, since they differ far less from...

The nice thing about French, from an English speaker's perspective, is that its lexical structure is so much like that of English that y...

I just finished reading Benmayouf's (2009) La question linguistique en Algérie . It was... interesting. The narrative this book presen...

A few posts ago, we saw Francophone objections to North African code-switching via Wikileaks . Now a story has come up illustrating Araboph...

Among the newly released Wikileaks US diplomatic cables is one from Algiers that presents a fairly uncritical review of Algerians' own w...