Jabal al-Lughat

It's a bit last minute, but I'm glad to announce that I will be giving two talks in Oran over the next few days: "Le contact li...

My article " Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology " has just been published, in STUF 67:1 . In this article, I dis...

Continuing the Darja theme of my previous posts, I learned a new word today, from a speaker of the traditional dialect of Algiers: تشوينة čw...

I’m just back from Algeria, with plenty of work to get to – but before they fade from my memory, here are a few more miscellaneous observat...

I'm currently on a short break in Dellys, which is providing many incidental opportunities for linguistic observation. Here are a few, ...

How is it possible that, in Algeria – a state normally obsessed with the need to combat divisive ideas – openly sectarian slogans like ...

I am very happy to announce here (a couple of days late) that my book Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt) has now come out. The oasis of Si...

In the early 1950s, the French anthropologist Dominique Champault made a number of sound recordings in Tabelbala. Champault’s recordings h...

As regular readers will know, for some years I've been working on the only language of Algeria that's neither Arabic nor Berber – Ko...

By far the most distant Berber variety from the rest – a separate language by even the most generous standards, as the lines quoted below wi...

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

Aljazeera's documentary Orphans of the Sahara is worth watching for anyone interested in Tuareg language, as well as Tuareg politics – ...

Aseggas ameggaz! Today (12 January), many Algerians are celebrating Yennayer, the start of the Berber New Year. Nowadays this seems like a...

For some time, I've been hearing rumours (from Arabs, of course) that Arabic has the largest number of words of any language. Recently ...

Tadaksahak, a heavily Berber-influenced Northern Songhay language spoken in northern Mali and Niger and closely related to Korandjé, is a r...

There's a curious feature I recently noticed about the Arabic of Dellys in Algeria (I can't imagine what took me so long, since it...

A while ago, I posted about the earliest European source for Songhay . Shuichiro Nakao , who's been doing some interesting work on the ...

I try my best to avoid reading products of the propaganda wars currently raging in the Middle East, but today I found that they had managed ...

Any readers interested in pidgins, creoles, or mixed languages (one of those things is not like the others!) will want to know that the data...

Mi star trovato un bonu libro sopra il sabir: Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque . Avanti l'attaca del Fransis, l...