Jabal al-Lughat

People tend to enter their first linguistics classes with a vague but strongly felt idea, instilled by English teachers or by society at lar...

Kamal Nait-Zerrad's 2001 article " Esquisse d'une classification linguistique des parlers berbères " presents a good deal ...

After about two years in the pipeline, an article summarising the results of my British Academy research on agreement in Berber has just co...

Today, just for fun, I'd like to invite you to discuss a topic a little off the beaten track for this blog: how much linguistics should ...

I'm almost three-quarters of the way through Heath's Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali) . The main interest lies in its efforts t...

Today seems to be a good week for comparative Berber linguistics - the day's haul is worth sharing: Maarten Kossmann has uploaded his p...

Going through Brahim and Bekir Abdessalam's brief grammar of Tumzabt Berber ( الوجيز في قواعد الكتابة والنحو الأمازيغية "المزابية...

(experimentally posting in French - opinions?) Très tard, j'ai commencé cet été à mieux organiser mes notes léxicographiques sur le berb...

Similarities between different languages are data. It's easy to come up with any of several wildly different measures of such similarit...

Everything I've been saying for the past 3 posts is basic textbook stuff, reflecting a stable consensus among Semitic historical linguis...

We've seen that historical linguists decide which languages share a more recent common ancestor on the basis of shared innovations (or t...

Last time , I promised to look at the " ratio of content ⊂ Arabic & ⊄ Aramaic ". To do that, we need two things: data on the ...

Following in a long tradition of people imagining that knowing a few languages or a bit of mathematics implies they already know linguistics...

Même si j'écris généralement en anglais, je suis sûr que ce blog a quelques lecteurs algériens qui sont bilingues arabe/français. Si vo...

From Morocco to Oman, there is a long tradition of imagining that the Berbers of North Africa and the Mehris of South Arabia speak the same ...

For most of the past decade, while first the rest of Iraq and then Syria (150,000 dead, 2.5 million refugees) have burned, Northern Iraq has...

Linguistically, the northern and southern shores of the Sahara have remained surprisingly distinct, and most Saharan groups are easily ident...

Sahha Ramdankoum صحّة رمضانكم!‍ ‍This Darja phrase, which might be rendered as "happy Ramadan!", is familiar to any Algerian. It...

The number of good Berber descriptive dictionaries has been slowly but steadily increasing in recent years, but Hassane Benamara's new D...

Recently I came across a popular article, Where Did Yiddish Come From? , discussing Paul Wexler's eccentric claim that Yiddish is a ...