Jabal al-Lughat

I am glad to announce a new collaborative blog, in which I will be participating along with Marijn van Putten , Adam Benkato, and possibly o...

Back again :) I've often talked about why it's not enough for developing countries to use English or French as a working language f...

Via GNXP , I hear there's been a new study on North African genetics: Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrati...

If you speak Tashelhit (or, indeed, another Berber language) and feel like helping me test a hypothesis, I would really appreciate it if you...

In my hometown, the small port of Dellys in north-central Algeria (and probably elsewhere for all I know), older women traditionally throw w...

Libyco-Berber is the writing system used in pre-Roman and Roman times to write an apparently Berber language in North Africa – especially in...

A while back, Bulbul pointed out to me that in Maltese (the Arabic-derived language spoken in the EU member state of Malta) the plural of ...

In eastern Yemen and western Oman, there are spoken several South Arabian languages - Semitic, but more distantly related to Arabic than Ara...

In Zenaga (the Berber language of Mauritania), the word for "slave" is oʔḅḅäy . In the "Shelha" Berber spoken near Tou...

Following up on the previous post, my wife just sent me a link to Moncef Marzouki, the head of the centrist party that came second in the Tu...

A few posts ago, we saw Francophone objections to North African code-switching via Wikileaks . Now a story has come up illustrating Araboph...

Sorosoro have just put up a webpage by me, giving a general picture of the language of Tabelbala: Korandje . It's also available in Fre...

A link I've been meaning to post for a while: Amawal n Tiddukla Tadelsant Imedyazen . The guy behind it, Omar Mouffok, deserves credit ...

The Northern Songhay family is of some general interest, both for the study of language contact - all its members are astonishingly strongly...

Among the newly released Wikileaks US diplomatic cables is one from Algiers that presents a fairly uncritical review of Algerians' own w...

Following up on comments to the previous post, some readers may be interested in the following list of the top ten rarest typological featur...

Some readers may be interested in a talk I'll be giving at the end of this month in Paris, at LACITO on 30 September in a colloquium cal...

The Libyan conflict which currently appears to be winding down has had some interesting side effects. One of the more linguistically intere...

I am happy to announce (to any readers who may still be checking this) that I am blogging again, and happier to announce that I've gotte...

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 ...