A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Lameen Souag Starts a Blog on Algerian Darja (Colloquial Arabic)

I've linked several times to Lameen Souag's Jabal al-Lughat linguistics blog; Souag is the Algerian SOAS-trained language specialist who studies Berber and other Saharan/Sahelian languages and often discusses them in conjunction with Arabic. So who better to start a blog on the origins of Algerian darja (colloquial Algerian Arabic)? It's called   الأصول التاريخية للدارجة الجزائرية  (The historical sources of Algerian Darja) and is primarily in Arabic; only two posts so far. He explains at Jabal al-Lughat:
I've often talked about why it's not enough for developing countries to use English or French as a working language for research and leave the majority of their own citizens in the dark. So I'm putting my money where my mouth is (so to speak) and starting a blog in Arabic focused on dialect etymology, a subject rife with popular misconceptions: الأصول التاريخية للدارجة الجزائرية (Historical Origins of the Algerian Dialect). Some of this blog's readers may be interested.
Since diglossia and dialects are a frequent subject here, so may some of this blog's.

And at least a few of you may well find his other links of interest:
I've written up a finding first posted here - Songhay words in El-Jadida, Morocco - as part of a recently submitted article on sub-Saharan loanwords into North African Arabic. (There aren't many, but more than you might think: one of them, شطة šaṭṭa "Cayenne pepper" from Hausa cìttā, has even made it into Modern Standard Arabic via Egyptian dialect, and another, كابوية kābūya "pumpkin" from Hausa kàbēwā̀, is quite widespread in Algeria.)

MNAMON have posted a video of my talk about Libyco-Berber at Pisa - if you can stand the poor delivery, the content may be interesting. Among other things, I discuss the question of where LB fits into the Berber family tree.
He's amply demonstrated his linguistic qualification to blog on Algerian darja. It should be interesting, especially if he can post frequently.

1 comment:

benhamouda salah said...

oday Arabic is spoken throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania

but in algeria we speaker in franche English