Jabal al-Lughat

In Niamey, where I went last week for a workshop on Songhay as a cross-border language, the crows do something I've never seen them do i...

Going east of Algiers along the coast, the names of two little port towns stand out. Their inhabitants know them as جنّات /d͡ʒənnat/ (somet...

There's an article by Nathan Robinson that's been going around recently titled " Jordan Peterson: The Intellectual We Deserve ...

A long time ago, I posted some rather speculative musings on the minor mystery of the allegedly Ethiopic word qaswarah قسورة in the Qur...

Two years ago, the Algerian state finally decided to make Tamazight (Berber) an official language . In practice, this has not by any means ...

In the course of the recent media furore in France sparked by Mennel Ibtissem 's rendition of "Hallelujah", a TV journalist n...

The Algerian government recently decided to make the Amazigh New Year (really the Julian New Year) - coming up tomorrow - an official holid...

So Taleb has jumped back on his hobbyhorse with yet another post on Lebanese not being Arabic ; see my previous posts Why "Levantine...

In Oran (Algeria) when I was there a few days ago, political party posters were everywhere, advertising the recent local elections. Oran is...

Jerusalem stands out among Arab cities today not only culturally and religiously, but morphologically as well. In Modern Standard Arabic, t...

The order of the Latin alphabet we use is a matter of historical chance; if it ever made sense, the reasons behind it were lost millennia ag...

Chomsky's barb about butterfly-collecting has echoed in the ears of descriptive linguists for decades, and is sometimes blamed for the w...

I am not a big fan of Wikipedia, despite its usefulness. To contribute good material to it - and there is a lot of wonderful material there...

The proto-Songhay word for "(pair of) shoes, sandals" is *tàgmú ( Zarma tà:mú , Kandi tà:mú , Gao taam-i , Hombori tà:m...

Not too long ago I finished reading Lotfi Sayahi's Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa . The ...

In "Mathematics in the streets and in schools" (Carraher et al. 1985), child street vendors were given a paper and pencil and ask...

American English was born in the clearing of the eastern woodlands, where British settlers encountered native Americans mostly speaking Algo...

In the Algerian Arabic dialect I grew up speaking, "what's wrong with him?" is waš bi-h? واش بيه. (Further west, in Oran and...

I was rather flabberghasted to read an otherwise good post on Language Log seriously suggesting that racial slurs are so painful they shoul...

In the Western world over the past few years, freedom of speech seems to be becoming a matter not just of human rights but of cultural ident...