Jabal al-Lughat

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...

Following up on the preceding post, I've been looking at Greenberg's (1966) Nilo-Saharan comparisons - specifically, the 29 ones inv...

Ehret 2001 (or see Nostratic.ru ) looks at first sight like an astonishingly detailed reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, with nice binary spli...

In the Qur'ān, 74:51, an interesting word occurs: { كَأَنَّهُمْ حُمُرٌ مُّسْتَنفِرَةٌ } * { فَرَّتْ مِن قَسْوَرَةٍ } ka'annahum ħumu...

I just found a full translation online of the fifth chapter of Ibn Hazm's 11th-century work Iħkām fī Uṣūl al-Aħkām , discussed previous...

A couple of people have forwarded me this BBC article: Trail-blazing for Morocco's Berber speakers . It's a rare instance of Anglop...

A memorable line from a talk by Ewa Dabrowska that I went to recently: "It is generally agreed that the representations assumed by gen...

Via Language Log/John Cowan : Dan Everett's finally gotten around to publishing a few more examples of his claims about Piraha - notabl...

I finally got around to borrowing Bechhaus-Gerst's Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen in Niltal . It's toug...

Songhay's lexical economy - the way it keeps its lexicon rather smaller than its neighbours' by using a single word to fulfill the f...

What would you say if, in some science-fiction novel, you read of a language where the situations that in English would be described as ...

A few more old online books in lieu of a proper post (coming soon): Märchen der Berbern von Tamazratt in Südtunisien (1900) (to just downlo...

Some digitised Eastern Berber vocabularies from the first half of the 18th 19th century for your perusal, if you're into that sort of t...

Zenaga is the barely surviving Berber language of southwestern Mauritania around Boutilimit. Here are a few words I think are found only i...

The key issue in Algerian linguistic politics - substantially overshadowing the question of the role of Berber - is what should be the langu...

We all know that placebos can be surprisingly effective. But - though it's not exactly surprising - I hadn't realised that there is...

An interesting paper: Political complexity predicts the spread of ethnolinguistic groups . Two basically unsurprising claims that it's ...

Anyone acquainted with West African history will be aware of the remarkable extent of the Fulani diaspora, stretching from their original h...

In a recent discussion , the question came up of whether a language's vocabulary could be tallied (briefly addressed at Language Log a ...

(Warning: this post contains no significant linguistic content.) The results are in: Bouteflika has been “re-elected” as President of Algeri...