Jabal al-Lughat

It's not too hard to think of words that are characteristically used in English almost exclusively by Muslims - salat , namaz , wudu , s...

According to Ethnologue - or even to the HCA - Chenoua (Tacenwit) is one of the larger Berber/Amazigh languages of Algeria, spoken west o...

Back in the late 1990s as human genetic data started piling up, it became increasingly clear that there were a lot of language families wher...

The first time I read this quote from Richard Feynman, I was quite convinced by it: The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work...

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...