Jabal al-Lughat

Phoenix has started posting a rather interesting series on the orthography of the Qur'an and the linguistic features it reflects . Such...

The media was strangely slow to report the shameful and horrible events of New Year's Day in Cologne, in which organised groups of drunk...

Algeria's political parties are gradually responding to the proposed constitutional text. I've mocked their powerlessness and irrel...

Yesterday, Ouyahia made an announcement with momentous implications for Algerian language policy : the revised constitution that they've...

This year marks the end of Jabal al-Lughat's first decade. Hard to believe I've been doing this for ten years - when I wrote my fir...

Most Berber varieties have borrowed the word for "raisin" from Arabic, eg Kabyle azbib , or use a compound "dried grapes...

Recently, a geography teacher in Augusta County, Virginia named Cheryl LaPorte set her students the following homework assignment : "C...

I've now read quite a few Lunja stories , enough to say that there is in fact a core Lunja story which is virtually identical in the mou...

One of the classic characters of north African folklore is Lundja or Nuja, a girl who... well, a girl, anyway. The name is widespread, but ...

In many parts of the Arabic-speaking world, different religious groups in the same town or region speak different dialects. Morocco is one ...

For English speakers, it is mysterious and highly debatable whether we have souls, but obvious except to the odd philosopher that we have bo...

Animacy - human or animal or object - often makes a big difference in grammar. However, what counts as animate, and when, is not always str...

Advance warning: 1. I am no expert on Hebrew, nor for that matter on semantics. 2. Comments relating to word usage are welcome below; attemp...

Americans of a certain age probably remember the " chupacabra " (goat-sucker), a nonexistent reptilian monster supposed to suck th...

The Berber-speaking oasis of Siwa in western Egypt, where I did doctoral fieldwork, has a rather extensive poetic tradition embodied in song...

It's not unusual to hear sentences like the following from middle-class Algerian adults, especially women: عندنا ان تيليفيزيون كبير ʕə...

Korandje, the seriously endangered Songhay language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, is a longstanding research interest of mine. As f...

In most of the Arabic dialects of the Algerian Sahara that I've encountered, Berber influence is rather inconspicuous. Loanwords exist,...

I recently finished reading Claude Hagège's Combat pour le français au nom de la diversité des langues et cultures (2006). For any Alg...

Attention conservation notice: The story below is probably being promoted as a distraction, to keep Algerians talking about language instead...