Jabal al-Lughat

One of the oldest motivations for studying the history of language is to better study the fixed texts of holy books or classics. We try to ...

I've been working on my hopefully-forthcoming book about Siwi and thinking more about Berber laryngeals (see also Phoenix's recent p...

Berber normally has no glottal stops (ء = ʔ) – in fact, Chafik suggested that this was why North Africa favours the Warsh reading of the Q...

It is not that easy to find information on Tunisian Berber, so I was quite happy to come across this PhD thesis free online: Berber ethnicit...

The Interim Transitional National Council of Libya has a website up now, at which you can watch representatives of various towns declare the...

In Kabyle, the word for "sing" is šnu . No other Berber language is known to have a similar word for sing (see Nait-Zerrad, s.v. ...

The Digital South Asia Library at Chicago have just put online for the first time the gramophone recordings originally intended to supplemen...

A poem from western Libya in honour of the new revolution - in Berber, I think the Zuwara dialect - that sums it up nicely: Taẓiḍərt af a...

In his rather desperate speech today, Saif Al Islam Gaddafi opened with a sociolinguistically very interesting statement: əly ō m saatakalla...

What little spare time I have left over these days is mostly dedicated to figuring out the fantastic things going on in the Arab world. Two...

Unless you've been stuck on an iceberg in the Antarctic, you probably know that the Tunisian people have earned themselves imperishable ...

A couple of goodies for readers interested in North Africa / contact / the classical Mediterranean (if you fall into the first category, inc...

It's no great surprise to find words in another language that have no English equivalent, if what they refer to is an object that's ...

In the near future I plan to do some further travel in Algeria in the Sahara, to study more Kwarandzyey of course but also other languages o...

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...