Jabal al-Lughat

Every time I go to Algeria, I come back with some linguistic observations that are new to me (if not necessarily to anyone else.) Here are t...

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West ) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly b...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

In English, "re-" is a moderately productive derivational prefix - reboot, remake, redo... In French, though, it seems more like ...

Oath complementisers In North Africa, the oath wəḷḷah والله, literally "by God", is used so frequently to emphasize statements...

I'm back in Algeria, and, as usual on such trips, finding matters of linguistic interest all around. Here are a couple, with more to fo...

In central Algerian Arabic, feminine nouns are usually marked by a suffix -a , which becomes -ət when possessed. Pronominal possessors are...

In honour of the month - and of the harmonious coexistence in Algeria of different branches of Islam, threatened in recent years - here...

In Algerian Arabic (here, Dellys dialect), the feminine singular form of an adjective is formed just by adding a suffix -a , with almost no ...

Korandje, the language of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, requires the comitative preposition "with" to agree in person and num...

After about two years in the pipeline, an article summarising the results of my British Academy research on agreement in Berber has just co...