Jabal al-Lughat

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 ...

A scan of much of the manuscript MS Leiden Or. 14.052 is available online. The main text of this manuscript is in a rather poor Arabic. T...

Thank you very much for your responses, everybody! (If you haven't answered yet and want to, please do it before reading the rest of th...

I've been reading an old Chomsky book, Language and Mind , lately. As usual, the moment he starts discussing what would eventually be c...

A major collection of early Tashelhiyt manuscripts from the 16th century onwards has gone online: Manuscrits arabes et berbères du Fonds Rou...

I shouldn't really be blogging at this stage of my thesis-writing, but this I had to share: the World Loanword Database has come online...

I recently found a forum for the town of Igli, about 150 km north of Tabelbala as the crow flies. Igli's traditional language is a Berb...

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

It turns out that the earliest and most extensive published source on Kwarandzyey (Korandje), the language of Tabelbala in southwestern Alge...

Over the dinner mentioned in the last post I was also shown a Siwi poem sent as a text message - it's a rather below average example of ...

Just back from a nice evening with the Siwi community of Qatar. A Kabyle friend came along (hello if you're reading this!), giving me a...

Following up on the preceding post, I've been looking at Greenberg's (1966) Nilo-Saharan comparisons - specifically, the 29 ones inv...

Ehret 2001 (or see Nostratic.ru ) looks at first sight like an astonishingly detailed reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan, with nice binary spli...

In the Qur'ān, 74:51, an interesting word occurs: { كَأَنَّهُمْ حُمُرٌ مُّسْتَنفِرَةٌ } * { فَرَّتْ مِن قَسْوَرَةٍ } ka'annahum ħumu...

I just found a full translation online of the fifth chapter of Ibn Hazm's 11th-century work Iħkām fī Uṣūl al-Aħkām , discussed previous...

A couple of people have forwarded me this BBC article: Trail-blazing for Morocco's Berber speakers . It's a rare instance of Anglop...

A memorable line from a talk by Ewa Dabrowska that I went to recently: "It is generally agreed that the representations assumed by gen...

Via Language Log/John Cowan : Dan Everett's finally gotten around to publishing a few more examples of his claims about Piraha - notabl...

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