Jabal al-Lughat

Chomsky's barb about butterfly-collecting has echoed in the ears of descriptive linguists for decades, and is sometimes blamed for the w...

I am not a big fan of Wikipedia, despite its usefulness. To contribute good material to it - and there is a lot of wonderful material there...

The proto-Songhay word for "(pair of) shoes, sandals" is *tàgmú ( Zarma tà:mú , Kandi tà:mú , Gao taam-i , Hombori tà:m...

Not too long ago I finished reading Lotfi Sayahi's Diglossia and Language Contact: Language Variation and Change in North Africa . The ...

In "Mathematics in the streets and in schools" (Carraher et al. 1985), child street vendors were given a paper and pencil and ask...

American English was born in the clearing of the eastern woodlands, where British settlers encountered native Americans mostly speaking Algo...

In the Algerian Arabic dialect I grew up speaking, "what's wrong with him?" is waš bi-h? واش بيه. (Further west, in Oran and...

I was rather flabberghasted to read an otherwise good post on Language Log seriously suggesting that racial slurs are so painful they shoul...

In the Western world over the past few years, freedom of speech seems to be becoming a matter not just of human rights but of cultural ident...

In the Middle Ages as today, Christians and Jews regularly called God "Allah" when speaking Arabic, just as Muslims did . It is ...

In English, "re-" is a moderately productive derivational prefix - reboot, remake, redo... In French, though, it seems more like ...

Even in English, you can sometimes get a laugh by inappropriately mixing high and low registers - gangster slang in blank verse*, or discuss...

Charlie Stross, a Scottish science fiction writer, recently posted some speculations on predictions for 2117 that touch rather heavily on t...

I haven't done much language teaching in my life, but as a person who likes learning new languages, I've seen a fair range of differ...

In English- and French-language discussions of the languages of Egypt, the Berber language of Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert is more and ...

A well-known Algerian proverb has it that: لي عندهٌ مية يقول يا ميتين li `andu mya yqul ya mitin who has hundred says oh two.hundred He wh...

A few days ago, two unarmed young engineers from India were shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas by a man yelling "Get out of my country!...

How does a language with a relatively small vowel system react to pressure from a language with a larger one? Most northern Berber varietie...

There are some kinds of questions and relative clauses that you just can't form without resorting to a resumptive pronoun, even in langu...

In 1609, 117 years after conquering Granada, the Spanish state decreed the expulsion of all "Moriscos" - that is, everyone descend...