Jabal al-Lughat

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt , impf. ti-dubu-t ). There are no compelling cog...

A small part of the Siwi corpus I gathered during PhD and postdoctoral fieldwork is now publicly accessible online, with more planned. Desp...

In Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using ra-...-i (the final -i is dropped after sonorants and semi...

Seeing as you can't turn on the news in France these days without hearing a certain more-French-than-thou provocateur fulminating agains...

Following a recent message from Mohomodou Houssouba, I was wondering where the names of cardinal points come from across Northern Songhay. T...

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria , on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis , a dialect of Arabic has been sp...

In 2019, a new alphabet was invented for Songhay , joining a long list of West African script creation efforts from the 19th century onwards...

Mt. Băgzăn, at the heart of the predominantly Tuareg-speaking Air massif in Niger, bears a not very Tuareg-looking name. The only Berber mea...

Back in 2017, I published an article on " Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic " ( ZAL 66 , pp. 45-70), arguing that the various ...

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...