Jabal al-Lughat

My description of Khalaf's reading in the previous post applies to all readings transmitted from Ḥamzah ibn Ḥabīb al-Taymī of Kūfa: K...

(Warning: This post assumes some knowledge of Arabic, although you should be able to follow the argument even without it.) Everyone knows ...

If Mohammed Hanif's account of growing up in Pakistan below doesn't ring any bells, then congratulations: you're from one of the...

This link needs posting: Talking Dictionaries , which does what it says on the tin. Included are comparative Celtic (Breton, Welsh, Cornish...

Many languages make some sort of distinction between "alienable" and "inalienable" possession . The exact factors vary ...

I recently arrived in Siwa – a pleasant experience as always, quite unaffected by the political turbulence of Cairo – and since getting here...

I am glad to announce a new collaborative blog, in which I will be participating along with Marijn van Putten , Adam Benkato, and possibly o...

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...

If you speak Tashelhit (or, indeed, another Berber language) and feel like helping me test a hypothesis, I would really appreciate it if you...

In my hometown, the small port of Dellys in north-central Algeria (and probably elsewhere for all I know), older women traditionally throw w...

Libyco-Berber is the writing system used in pre-Roman and Roman times to write an apparently Berber language in North Africa – especially in...

A while back, Bulbul pointed out to me that in Maltese (the Arabic-derived language spoken in the EU member state of Malta) the plural of ...

In eastern Yemen and western Oman, there are spoken several South Arabian languages - Semitic, but more distantly related to Arabic than Ara...

In Zenaga (the Berber language of Mauritania), the word for "slave" is oʔḅḅäy . In the "Shelha" Berber spoken near Tou...

Following up on the previous post, my wife just sent me a link to Moncef Marzouki, the head of the centrist party that came second in the Tu...

A few posts ago, we saw Francophone objections to North African code-switching via Wikileaks . Now a story has come up illustrating Araboph...

Sorosoro have just put up a webpage by me, giving a general picture of the language of Tabelbala: Korandje . It's also available in Fre...

A link I've been meaning to post for a while: Amawal n Tiddukla Tadelsant Imedyazen . The guy behind it, Omar Mouffok, deserves credit ...

The Northern Songhay family is of some general interest, both for the study of language contact - all its members are astonishingly strongly...