Jabal al-Lughat

In Arabic as in English, social networks have a constantly flowing undercurrent of poorly sourced, manipulative stories being shared and res...

For decades, Algeria has been characterised by a divide between "Arabophone" and "Francophone" intellectuals . The divi...

"Write what you know" is what they tell aspiring writers. If you're an English speaker who made it through high school, you s...

When I was six years old, I started first grade in a small Algerian city, right after having done kindergarten in the US and forgotten most ...

Recently I came across Accros du Roc , a French translation by Patrick Couton of Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy Soul Music . In the or...

One of the few characteristics of Algerian Arabic that are genuinely unique to Algeria is kaš كاش "some, any". At first sight, t...

Recently, the detection of gravitational waves made headlines all over the world. These waves were only hypothesised a century ago, and hav...

There are a rather large number of words in Songhay, the language of the Niger River valley between Timbuktu and southern Niger, which are a...

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...