Jabal al-Lughat

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād , Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn K...

Searching Shamela , I recently realised that the earliest references to a language of (al-)Barbar in Arabic go back further than I had assu...

When I wrote my paper on the Arabic dialect of Dellys a couple of decades ago, I described it as using the participle "going (to)"...

While Spengler is better known for his efforts (in Decline of the West ) to establish a historical morphology of cultures, he also briefly b...

In an episode of "Chadian Wisdom and Proverbs" , Yaqub Muhammad Musa discusses three Mubi proverbs, providing the Mubi versions al...

I recently finished Pozdniakov's Proto-Fula-Sereer , freely available through Language Science Press. This is obviously a very welcome a...

Any educated English speaker nowadays is likely to be familiar with the idea that comedy should punch up, not punch down: i.e., that it'...

A friend in Tabelbala just posted a translation of some lines from Abu'l-Atahiya into Korandje. Given the general unreliability of Face...

In Algerian Arabic, ngər نڨر means "to perish, to die out, to become extinct", used primarily of patrilineal families; nəgru نڨر...

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music , an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family's memoirs. I...

The modern borders of Algeria had no existence or meaning in the Roman era, but for any potential Algerian classicists, it may be interestin...

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: ...