Jabal al-Lughat

Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz has died at the age of 94. Literature will be the poorer without him. His best-known ...

In light of the interest attracted by the previous post, and of several discussions I've had about this topic in real life lately, I...

Reuters and Al Jazeera English are both carrying a story about Algerian Arabic, apparently written by Algeria's El Khabar journalist L...

I recently came across a forgotten poem by Milton addressing his mother tongue (as you do!), written to open the English section of a day o...

The Economist reports on a Peruvian Congresswoman trying to raise the social status of Quechua by only speaking Quechua to Congress, forcin...

Gaza , Arabic غزّة ghazzah , is another extremely old city of the eastern Mediterranean, having been in existence for at least three millen...

Sumerian Grammatical Texts available online! The title is a misnomer - most of the texts given are early Sumerian-Akkadian lexica arranged...

Found a telling first-hand account of language shift . I had no idea the last decade or two had made such a difference. until the end of 19...

Lebanon's cities and villages, tragically now in the news , have some interesting etymologies. I always used to wonder about the dif...

I'm recently back from Algeria (hence the blog gap), so I thought I'd post some more meditations on Algerian Arabic... Q: Which of t...

I used to live in the Bay Area for a while, so naturally I tried to find out about its pre-colonial language group, Ohlone. This turned out...

Amazing things turn up at the University of Western Sydney: a complete thesis online offering An outline of the Shilha (Berber) vernacular o...

MoorishGirl has an interesting post on an article on a round-table debate on Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, as "a medium of cultural expr...

Algerian football fans (that is to say, probably most of the population) are up in arms about not being able to watch the World Cup unless t...

Two random interesting bits thrown up by my current research: Nandi, a Nilotic language of Kenya with VSO order, would appear to allow you t...

I recently came across a nice book (in English for once!) on the Algerian folk poet Muhammad ben Tayeb el-Alili, The Graying of the Raven . ...

A great Omaha language site: Omaha Language Curriculum Development (hat tip to Mark Awakuni-Swetland.) I particularly like the cookbook. ...

Algerians are rightly renowned for their code-switching wherever they go (or should be). I disapprove of it in general - it often reflects ...

Lately I've been reading some of John Hawkins' A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency , which puts forwards some very appeal...

As you may have heard on Language Log , on May 17th-18th, the US Senate approved not one but two amendments - one Republican , one Democrat...