Jabal al-Lughat

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer , freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome a...

It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat , namaz , wudu , s...

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and med...

Mt. Băgzăn, at the heart of the predominantly Tuareg-speaking Air massif in Niger, bears a not very Tuareg-looking name. The only Berber mea...

Back in 2017, I published an article on " Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic " ( ZAL 66 , pp. 45-70), arguing that the various ...

Mubi , an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera Mountains of eastern Chad, stands out even in Chadic for the sheer complexity of its plu...

Kabyle Berber and (especially north-central) Algerian Arabic show the marks of massive convergence, often reflected in the use of phraseolog...

Two languages of the northwestern Sahara, spoken reasonably close to each other, have basic motion verbs derived from a word that originally...

It was a frustrating experience reading Poplack's Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar . On the one hand, it...

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...

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...

Azeb Amha recently directed my attention to a very interesting passage in Kofi Yakpo's grammar of Pichi , the English-based creole spoke...

The Proto-Chadic word for "go out" was reconstructed by Newman and Ma (1966) as *p-t- , with attested reflexes in all primary sub...

Almost every attested Songhay variety (Tasawaq is perhaps the only exception) has a reflex of the proto-Songhay word * gúrú "draw wa...

In Dellys, Berber nouns borrowed into Arabic are not very common, and ones that preserve the Berber nominal affixes are even rarer, so I...

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

With only 30,000-odd inhabitants, and fairly poor road connections, Dellys is a reasonably small and out-of-the-way place. In summer it bri...

I am very happy to announce the publication of my freely accessible overview of Language Contact in the Sahara , written for the Oxford Rese...

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