Jabal al-Lughat

Aseggas ameggaz! Today (12 January), many Algerians are celebrating Yennayer, the start of the Berber New Year. Nowadays this seems like a...

For some time, I've been hearing rumours (from Arabs, of course) that Arabic has the largest number of words of any language. Recently ...

Tadaksahak, a heavily Berber-influenced Northern Songhay language spoken in northern Mali and Niger and closely related to Korandjé, is a r...

There's a curious feature I recently noticed about the Arabic of Dellys in Algeria (I can't imagine what took me so long, since it...

A while ago, I posted about the earliest European source for Songhay . Shuichiro Nakao , who's been doing some interesting work on the ...

I try my best to avoid reading products of the propaganda wars currently raging in the Middle East, but today I found that they had managed ...

Any readers interested in pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (one of those things is not like the others!) will want to know that the data...

Mi star trovato un bonu libro sopra il sabir: Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque . Avanti l'attaca del Fransis, l...

I was happy to learn of a new, if still rather small, corpus of audio files for North Africa: CORVAM . There is a good deal of Moroccan Ara...

Following up on my last post , what should a chapter on "Language policy and Islam" have looked like? It's not exactly my fie...

( Attention conservation notice : This post is probably only of interest if you're reading The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy .) ...

In 1896, Cambridge bought a huge archive of documents from a synagogue in Cairo, starting as early as the 11th century: the Genizah collecti...

I read a fascinating and depressing article recently ( The Strangers ) - in which a linguist plays a lead role - about the worsening situati...

The Societas Linguistica Europae's annual conference finished today. The plethora of parallel sessions forced me to miss a lot of pote...

In general, I tend to think that conflating Modern Standard Arabic with Classical Arabic is fairly harmless, since they differ far less from...

The other day I finally came across an easy-to-follow comparative presentation of North African genetic data, on Wikipedia of all things: Y-...

In 1713, the memorably named Jezreel Jones wrote a letter describing the Shilha Berber language of southern Morocco, giving an extensive voc...

Back in high school, my physics teacher once told us that people who touched an ordinary strip of metal and called it "cold", as a...

The nice thing about French, from an English speaker's perspective, is that its lexical structure is so much like that of English that y...

In Dellys a few years ago, local writer A. Chabani was kind enough to show me the following manuscript page, all that was left of a larger w...