Jabal al-Lughat

Across North Africa, small groups dominated by descendants of slaves brought from the Sahel preserve musical traditions, with ritual and med...

(Not linguistics, just history - possibly self-indulgent at that.) Quite a few years ago in Dellys, I was allowed to photograph a bundle of...

Along the southwestern fringes of the Sahara, in the Ennedi and Biltine regions of northeastern Chad and the Darfur region of western Sudan,...

I got my hands on a copy of a recent dictionary of the Berber variety of Ouargla: Muʕjam al-mufradāt zanātī-ʕarabī ʕarabī-zanātī : Warqalah,...

These may or may not be of interest to anyone but myself; I'm posting them essentially so I don't forget them. A couple of idioms: ...

While most Berber varieties use an Arabic loanword for "apple", several are reported to preserve a non-Arabic word: Jerbi a-ḏəffu...

Today I heard nsəhhlu? “Shall we head off?” The verb səhhəl expresses two rather different meanings: transitive “make easy” and intransiti...

With Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platfor...

Throughout In most Tuareg varieties, the verb 'be able' is dub-ət (pf. yă-ddob-ăt , impf. ti-dubu-t ). There are no compelling cog...

A small part of the Siwi corpus I gathered during PhD and postdoctoral fieldwork is now publicly accessible online, with more planned. Desp...

In Dholuo (a West Nilotic language of Kenya), instrument nouns are formed using ra-...-i (the final -i is dropped after sonorants and semi...

Seeing as you can't turn on the news in France these days without hearing a certain more-French-than-thou provocateur fulminating agains...

Following a recent message from Mohomodou Houssouba, I was wondering where the names of cardinal points come from across Northern Songhay. T...

In the western ports of the continent of Lemuria , on the old trade route to Uqbar and thence to Atlantis , a dialect of Arabic has been sp...

In 2019, a new alphabet was invented for Songhay , joining a long list of West African script creation efforts from the 19th century onwards...

Mt. Băgzăn, at the heart of the predominantly Tuareg-speaking Air massif in Niger, bears a not very Tuareg-looking name. The only Berber mea...

Back in 2017, I published an article on " Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic " ( ZAL 66 , pp. 45-70), arguing that the various ...

I finally got a chance to read Ramzi Rouighi's Inventing the Berbers recently; much food for thought. The book is primarily the histor...

Yesterday, H. Yahiaoui posted what might be the first continuous story written down in Korandje by a 1st-language speaker (translated from ...

" Nə-s-k-ibən " (2SG-NEG-anymore-appear) "You don't appear any more!" I heard this sentence several times during my...