Jabal al-Lughat

I finally got a chance to read Ramzi Rouighi's Inventing the Berbers recently; much food for thought. The book is primarily the histor...

Yesterday, H. Yahiaoui posted what might be the first continuous story written down in Korandje by a 1st-language speaker (translated from ...

" Nə-s-k-ibən " (2SG-NEG-anymore-appear) "You don't appear any more!" I heard this sentence several times during my...

In Arabic, triliteral verbs starting with w- often drop the w- in the imperfect ("present"), and in a few related forms like the v...

NB: Sorry, no tone marking today – might throw it in later. We’ve seen two productive plural allomorphs characterized by round vowels: BVC...

Yesterday we saw that the dominant plural type for CVC / CVVCV stems, CVVDvD , can be given a unified analysis. How does this generalize t...

(Attention conservation notice: Kind of technical...) NB: Updated with important corrections shortly after posting, following discussion w...

Mubi , an East Chadic language spoken in the Guera Mountains of eastern Chad, stands out even in Chadic for the sheer complexity of its plu...

Whether animals can talk is, above all, a question of definition. There are obviously important differences between human language and anim...

Kabyle Berber and (especially north-central) Algerian Arabic show the marks of massive convergence, often reflected in the use of phraseolog...

I'm posting these mostly so I don't forget them... Algerian Arabic jəḥmum جحموم "blackbird", and its Kabyle counterpart...

Two languages of the northwestern Sahara, spoken reasonably close to each other, have basic motion verbs derived from a word that originally...

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)...