Jabal al-Lughat

The metaphorical identification of heads with gourds is probably obvious enough to arise spontaneously anywhere that gourds are in regular u...

Today I heard nsəhhlu? “Shall we head off?” The verb səhhəl expresses two rather different meanings: transitive “make easy” and intransiti...

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

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...

A well-known Algerian proverb has it that: لي عندهٌ مية يقول يا ميتين li `andu mya yqul ya mitin who has hundred says oh two.hundred He wh...

Oath complementisers In North Africa, the oath wəḷḷah والله, literally "by God", is used so frequently to emphasize statements...

In a recent article on RFI , I'm quoted as saying that Darja (Algerian dialectal Arabic) was already used in education before the coloni...

Today seems to be a good week for comparative Berber linguistics - the day's haul is worth sharing: Maarten Kossmann has uploaded his p...

In the previous post, we looked at how hard Egyptian Arabic was for an Algerian to understand (answer: not that hard) and how it diverges fr...

I've been taking advantage of being in Paris to attend some Kabyle classes. However, the classes are in French - as are all the textboo...

A link I've been meaning to post for a while: Amawal n Tiddukla Tadelsant Imedyazen . The guy behind it, Omar Mouffok, deserves credit ...

In Kabyle, the word for "sing" is šnu . No other Berber language is known to have a similar word for sing (see Nait-Zerrad, s.v. ...

Just back from a nice evening with the Siwi community of Qatar. A Kabyle friend came along (hello if you're reading this!), giving me a...

I went to Tizi-Ouzou today, where I bought a few Kabyle-related books. The smallest, a tiny little handbook entitled Cahier d'écriture ...

Looking through Jeffrey Heath's 1998 dictionary of Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language spoken in and around Timbuktu, I was struck by the...

Recently I came across A. Basset's Etudes de Geographie Linguistique en Kabylie (1929) - an interesting if incomplete work mapping the ...

Dissertation all over, submitted, etc. - just enrolling for PhD... On a different note, I just found a spot-on cartoon about Tamazight (Berb...