Jabal al-Lughat

There were two more talks at Leiden that I should have mentioned, on a subject I've always been interested in - Berber writing systems. ...

I've spent the past couple of days at the Berberologie colloquium in Leiden , and it's been great fun. There were plenty of very in...

Machine translation between languages is hard, obviously. There are all sorts of reasons why just looking words up and constructing syntact...

...from an Algerian here in London: kanu supplying- lna they.were supplying- to.us You have a non-finite English form ("supplying...

Linguistics, with its regular sound shifts, unidirectional grammaticalisation processes, and tree diagrams, is perhaps the most satisfyingly...

If you're an Arabic speaker from the right part of southwestern Algeria, you probably call the smooth-skinned sand-burrowing lizard refe...

In a grammar I was looking at lately, I came across the following sentences: "Nouns may be verbalized, or verbs nominalized, simply by ...

Qatar is of course one of the most multicultural places on earth - citizens are only a small minority of the population, and even they inclu...

Sorry about the infrequent posting, everyone - I've been burying myself in transcribing a few of my field recordings. There's plent...

As I just learned from a comment on Awal nu Shawi , Algeria's High Commission for Amazighity , the government body set up in 1995 in res...

In Qur'anic Arabic (this is hardly ever applied in Modern Standard), at least in presentative contexts, the word "that" agrees...

Checking through the 11th-century geographer al-Bakri for information on the linguistic history of Siwa, I was not surprised to see that he...

I imagine pretty much all English speakers agree on the grammaticality of the following sentence: * It is a sin to eat pork. But looking aro...

Most languages probably have a few words used especially for addressing babies. However, Siwi seems to have a lot more than I know from Eng...

I remember coming back to Algeria after a year or so in America at the age of six. I had completely forgotten the Arabic I had known, and r...

...and I bet that got your attention, if you're the sort of person who reads this blog. Ulwa is a language native to the eastern highlan...

In response to mild popular demand, here's the original of the poem I translated in the last post , in Kabyle orthography for convenienc...

No, not in the political sense, in the psychological one... Just thought I'd share a piece of an excellent Siwi poem that struck me as ...

Hi everybody! I'm in Siwa, and things are going well. The oasis is so much bigger and more prosperous than Tabelbala it seems almost d...

Not everyone welcomes language revitalisation efforts. Apart from anything else, it often implies that a major decision taken by you or you...