Hausa in Tamanrasset

On a recent trip to Tamanrasset, Algeria's southernmost significant city, I was not surprised to see lots of signs in Arabic and French, and not too surprised to see a significant minority of signs with Tamahaq (Tuareg) content; if I have the time I'll post later on the Tifinagh alphabet they used, closer to traditional Tifinagh than the version used in the north but still quite conspicuously modernised. But I hadn't fully appreciated how much immigration Tamanrasset attracts from the south these days, and even allowing for that I wasn't expecting to see Hausa signs as well. There was much more Hausa spoken than written, of course - on our brief trip through Tafsit market, I heard probably as much Hausa as Arabic, and even in the upmarket souvenir shops Hausa music was playing some of the time. But one Hausa expression had clearly made its way into the visual linguistic landscape of the town: over and over again, I saw little unpretentious-looking restaurants labelled with various spellings, in both Latin and Arabic script, of the Hausa phrase mai nama, "meat owner" (ie meat seller). Most of my pictures were blurry, but one came out - here it is.

Language Contact in the Sahara: An overview

I am very happy to announce the publication of my freely accessible overview of Language Contact in the Sahara, written for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Apart from being the first introduction to this topic to cover both sides of the Sahara, it encapsulates a good deal of my research program over the past few years, and gives some idea of what remains to be done in this domain. Here's the abstract; if it sounds interesting, go read it!

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.