Jabal al-Lughat

Prescriptivism - it's what linguists love to hate, and not without reason. So much of it is just a thin veil stretched over social prej...

It was a frustrating experience reading Poplack's Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar . On the one hand, it...

I recently came across a poem in praise of the oasis of Awjila in eastern Libya , attributed to its patron saint, the 15th-century Moroccan ...

I recently came across a video, apparently from the little town of Souani near Tlemcen, of a poet, one Mohamed Tlemceni, performing a public...

My favourite 4-year-old is doing something very interesting these days with final consonant clusters in his French. Many word-final consona...

Among the many responses to recent events in Algeria circulating on Facebook, a particularly linguistically interesting one caught my eye: ...

One of the great understudied subjects in North African linguistics is Berber-Arabic codeswitching (unlike French-Arabic and French-Berber c...

The most sociolinguistically interesting protest song that I've come across since the last post is also among the earliest (28 February)...

This little clip, of sociolinguistic as well as non-linguistic interest, has gone viral in the Algerian online world (via Twitter ): The...

A whole bunch more protest songs are emerging, as singers ride the wave. I don't think any of them have the kind of reach that La Casa ...

What's going on right now in Algeria is fascinating - and difficult to get a full sense of from abroad even if you speak Arabic and Fren...

While I was doing my PhD at SOAS, I found myself one term helping teach a field methods class focusing on Uyghur , a Turkic language closely...

On a recent trip to Tamanrasset, Algeria's southernmost significant city, I was not surprised to see lots of signs in Arabic and French,...

Algerian Arabic (or at least Dellys Arabic) has a verb for "be related to" (as family): kul كول, taking the dative, as in waš y-k...

As we reached the stop by the supermarket the other day, I told my son in English "Now we're getting off the bus." This caugh...

According to Glottolog , the least documented language in Algeria is neither Korandje nor some Berber variety, but rather one that might not...

I really don't have the time to post these days, but I couldn't resist letting you all know about a strong contender for the most ri...

Azeb Amha recently directed my attention to a very interesting passage in Kofi Yakpo's grammar of Pichi , the English-based creole spoke...

A strong contender for the most obviously ridiculous etymology in Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary of The Quran is his attempt to deriv...

The Qur'ān is not intended as an account of events. Rather than being organised around narratives, it typically brings up apparently fa...