Jabal al-Lughat

In the unlikely event that you've heard of Azer, a northern dialect of Soninke formerly spoken in the now Arabic-speaking region of Tich...

Turning on the BBC yesterday, I was surprised to hear a descriptive linguistics story, about the "discovery" by linguists on the E...

In Guy Deutscher's new book The Language Glass (which I'll be reviewing on this blog sometime soon) he claims (p. 110) that "L...

I finally got my hands on an article I had been looking for for a while about the "Kouriya" language of Gourara (around Timimoun, ...

Recently Language Hat asked for informed reactions to a BBC report claiming that Reading Arabic 'hard for brain' . The papers unde...

Eid Mubarak everyone! I am now Dr. Souag. (As of a couple of weeks ago, actually, but I've been doing other stuff instead of being onl...

Looking through Richardson's (1850) vocabulary of Sokna Berber today, I came across a wonderful little piece of sociolinguistic history....

The fact that Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and Chadic all belong to a single family - Afroasiatic - is fairly secure, based on strik...

A long-standing tradition in North Africa, convincingly rejected by Ibn Khaldūn but perpetuated by poets and curricula alike, claims that so...

Thank you SOAS library - I finally got a copy of Il dialetto berbero di Sokna ! Sokna (they even have a Facebook group ) is a small oasis ...

A well-known weapon in the arsenal deployed by educational systems the world over against local languages was what in the UK used to be call...

Aljazeera English is doing an interesting series on language endangerment and revitalisation: * Language on the brink , talking with the las...

In Djenné Chiini, the Western Songhay dialect of Djenné in Mali, the word for "manatee" is ayuumaa . This is clearly a compound ...

The World Loanword Database is a great resource, and the Hausa/Kanuri team deserve congratulations for undertaking the Herculean labour of ...

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. T...

Thank you very much for your responses, everybody! (If you haven't answered yet and want to, please do it before reading the rest of th...

I've been reading an old Chomsky book, Language and Mind , lately. As usual, the moment he starts discussing what would eventually be c...

A major collection of early Tashelhiyt manuscripts from the 16th century onwards has gone online: Manuscrits arabes et berbères du Fonds Rou...

I shouldn't really be blogging at this stage of my thesis-writing, but this I had to share: the World Loanword Database has come online...

I recently found a forum for the town of Igli, about 150 km north of Tabelbala as the crow flies. Igli's traditional language is a Berb...