Jabal al-Lughat

At four, my nephew speaks English (his dominant language) very well. He still shows some interesting divergences from the standard of those...

PISA 2015 is an OECD-run survey intended to evaluate education systems worldwide by giving the same test to (almost) all students of the sam...

Probably every language has a certain number of forms used especially for addressing animals, especially domestic animals. In response to a...

Looking through Corriente's etymological dictionary of Andalusi Arabic, I keep coming across explanations for obscure Dellys words whose...

I recently finished reading Four Months in Algeria , a travel diary by the English Rev. J. W. Blakesley published in 1859. It's mostly...

In Algerian Arabic, as in any other Arabic variety, adjectives follow the noun. However, there is one exception to this rule: invariant quj...

There are plenty of factors that one naturally expects to condition linguistic variation: age, sex, location, class, ethnicity, religion - i...

In Dellys, Berber nouns borrowed into Arabic are not very common, and ones that preserve the Berber nominal affixes are even rarer, so I...

Just about every parent I've spoken to in Dellys is concerned one way or another about the direction the educational system has been goi...

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

With only 30,000-odd inhabitants, and fairly poor road connections, Dellys is a reasonably small and out-of-the-way place. In summer it bri...

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...

I am very happy to announce the publication of my freely accessible overview of Language Contact in the Sahara , written for the Oxford Rese...

A lot of languages - Indonesian, for instance - make a rather useful distinction between two 1st person plural pronouns: "we (including...

(Regular readers be warned: this post has nothing to do with linguistics; it's justified only by a tenuous link to my fieldwork.) New ...

One of my son's first words is [x:::], "yuck!" - his attempt to pronounce the Algerian Arabic baby-talk item kəxx(i) كخّ ...

In Arabic as in English, social networks have a constantly flowing undercurrent of poorly sourced, manipulative stories being shared and res...

For decades, Algeria has been characterised by a divide between "Arabophone" and "Francophone" intellectuals . The divi...

"Write what you know" is what they tell aspiring writers. If you're an English speaker who made it through high school, you s...

When I was six years old, I started first grade in a small Algerian city, right after having done kindergarten in the US and forgotten most ...