Jabal al-Lughat

With only 30,000-odd inhabitants, and fairly poor road connections, Dellys is a reasonably small and out-of-the-way place. In summer it bri...

An article of mine that's been in the pipeline for almost four years has finally come out: " Writing 'Shelha' in new media:...

Back again :) I've often talked about why it's not enough for developing countries to use English or French as a working language f...

Via GNXP , I hear there's been a new study on North African genetics: Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrati...

I finally got my hands on an article I had been looking for for a while about the "Kouriya" language of Gourara (around Timimoun, ...

In Djenné Chiini, the Western Songhay dialect of Djenné in Mali, the word for "manatee" is ayuumaa . This is clearly a compound ...

The World Loanword Database is a great resource, and the Hausa/Kanuri team deserve congratulations for undertaking the Herculean labour of ...

The Boston Globe has an article today about Ajami , the tradition of transcribing African languages in the Arabic script. It focuses partic...

I finally got around to borrowing Bechhaus-Gerst's Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen in Niltal . It's toug...

Anyone acquainted with West African history will be aware of the remarkable extent of the Fulani diaspora, stretching from their original h...

Checking through the 11th-century geographer al-Bakri for information on the linguistic history of Siwa, I was not surprised to see that he...

I'm just back from a conference at Leiden , and heading off to take a holiday in Algeria very soon; here's my interim report to tide...

Omotic, a small group of non-Cushitic, non-Semitic languages spoken in the highlands of Ethiopia, has always been the odd one out in Afroasi...

The BBC has recently reported that "Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais - a mixture of French, English...

Looking through Jeffrey Heath's 1998 dictionary of Koyra Chiini, the Songhay language spoken in and around Timbuktu, I was struck by the...

Sheng is the 'Slanguage' of the Future offers plenty of food for sociolinguistic thought: here we have a columnist at once decrying...

I'm finishing up my thesis, so don't expect a posting for the next week, but in the meantime here's a couple of links: LinguaMon...

A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie i...

Some interesting news this week from the Beja, an ethnic group of the Red Sea coast of Sudan and Egypt. It's unclear whether this rebe...

With apologies for the long hiatus in my postings, I would like to present another topic in West African writing: the surprisingly formalize...