Jabal al-Lughat

In the Middle Ages as today, Christians and Jews regularly called God "Allah" when speaking Arabic, just as Muslims did . It is ...

In English, "re-" is a moderately productive derivational prefix - reboot, remake, redo... In French, though, it seems more like ...

Even in English, you can sometimes get a laugh by inappropriately mixing high and low registers - gangster slang in blank verse*, or discuss...

Charlie Stross, a Scottish science fiction writer, recently posted some speculations on predictions for 2117 that touch rather heavily on t...

I haven't done much language teaching in my life, but as a person who likes learning new languages, I've seen a fair range of differ...

In English- and French-language discussions of the languages of Egypt, the Berber language of Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert is more and ...

A well-known Algerian proverb has it that: لي عندهٌ مية يقول يا ميتين li `andu mya yqul ya mitin who has hundred says oh two.hundred He wh...

A few days ago, two unarmed young engineers from India were shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas by a man yelling "Get out of my country!...

How does a language with a relatively small vowel system react to pressure from a language with a larger one? Most northern Berber varietie...

There are some kinds of questions and relative clauses that you just can't form without resorting to a resumptive pronoun, even in langu...

In 1609, 117 years after conquering Granada, the Spanish state decreed the expulsion of all "Moriscos" - that is, everyone descend...

In response to someone comparing "alternative facts" to science fiction, the eminent science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin recently...

There is some debate over the original pronunciation of the "emphatic" consonants (Arabic ط ض ظ ص ق) in Semitic and more generally...

I've been reading two novels in Arabic lately. Frankenstein in Baghdad , by Ahmad Saadawi, reimagines Baghdad's descent into chaos ...

In Algerian Arabic, this is a stilu ستيلو - a word instantly recognizable as a borrowing from French stylo : In Standard Arabic, on the ...

At four, my nephew speaks English (his dominant language) very well. He still shows some interesting divergences from the standard of those...

PISA 2015 is an OECD-run survey intended to evaluate education systems worldwide by giving the same test to (almost) all students of the sam...

Probably every language has a certain number of forms used especially for addressing animals, especially domestic animals. In response to a...

Looking through Corriente's etymological dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, I keep coming across explanations for obscure Dellys words whose...

I recently finished reading Four Months in Algeria , a travel diary by the English Rev. J. W. Blakesley published in 1859. It's mostly...