Jabal al-Lughat

As unfortunately foreshadowed by my last post, violence broke out again in Ghardaia recently between Chaamba and Mozabites. At least 22 wer...

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...

A key document in Native American philology which has been circulating in samizdat form for decades is finally online and searchable: the mu...

I recently came across a nice little study of language attitudes among Kabyles in Oran, inheriting Kabyle from their parents and kin but liv...

An article published this year (Al-Jallad and Al-Manaser 2015) reveals the oldest known fully vocalised Arabic inscription by far - written ...

In all the debate around "Whorfian" effects of language on cognition, one relatively well-known case has received oddly little att...

A reader of this blog, Julian Jarosch, wrote in to announce a collaborative project that will very likely interest some other readers: Th...

Just a quick alert: my article about Islamic prayer time names that I discussed here almost two years ago ( post ) is finally out! If your ...

Valentina Schiattarella, who recently finished her PhD thesis on some aspects of Siwi grammar, has gathered the first serious collection of ...

In a natural segue from Ibn Khaldun, I've been reading Ernest Gellner - specifically, Words and Things , his attack on Linguistic Philos...

Lately the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - that the language you speak influences the way you think - has had a bit of a revival; investigators suc...

In Part 39 of the Muqaddimah , written in 1377, Ibn Khaldun discusses Arabic dialectology and language contact, reaching substantially corre...

In the latest issue of the International Journal of American Linguistics , Cecil Brown, Soren Wichmann, and David Beck announce a rather int...

People tend to enter their first linguistics classes with a vague but strongly felt idea, instilled by English teachers or by society at lar...

Kamal Nait-Zerrad's 2001 article " Esquisse d'une classification linguistique des parlers berbères " presents a good deal ...

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

Today, just for fun, I'd like to invite you to discuss a topic a little off the beaten track for this blog: how much linguistics should ...

I'm almost three-quarters of the way through Heath's Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali) . The main interest lies in its efforts t...