Dr. Lameen Souag

Page d'accueil du Dr. Lameen Souag                                                                              موقع د. الأمين سواق

Since September 2011 I have been a British Academy postdoctoral fellow based at SOAS (University of London), currently working on the development of agreement in Berber, with a particular focus on the typologically unusual phenomenon of indirect object agreement.  In August 2010 I finished a PhD on the grammatical effects of contact (mainly with Arabic and Berber) on two languages of the Sahara, Kwarandzyəy or Korandjé (a Songhay language of southwestern Algeria) and Siwi (a Berber language of western Egypt) at SOAS.  I spent most of October 2007 through May 2008 in the Sahara documenting these two languages, whose speakers I would like to thank for their amazing generosity and good nature.  I also thank the AHRC for funding my research.

Before starting my MA, I was Curator of the Rosetta Project for two years; during my studies at SOAS I spent some time working at the SOAS Endangered Language Archives, where I built the bilingual language documentation link library OREL.  My BA was in Mathematics at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge; while I haven't used it directly much, the resulting analytical and programming skills have often come in handy.  I reached the finals in University Challenge in 2004, which turned out to be good fun. I keep a linguistics blog,  Jabal al-Lughat, and occasionally update a page on my hometown, Dellys.  You can email me at [my first name] at gmail.com.

My publications:

  • "The Subclassification of Songhay and its Historical Implications".  Forthcoming in Journal of African Languages and Linguistics.
    This article shows, based on shared arbitrary innovations, that the Northern Songhay (NS) languages of the Sahara form a valid subfamily, and that Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (WS) together form a valid subfamily, Northwestern Songhay (NWS). The speakers of PNS practised cultivation and permanent architecture, but were unfamiliar with date palms; those of PNWS were already in contact with Berber and Arabic, and lived along the Niger river.  This is compatible with two scenarios for the northerly spread of Songhay: A. NS spread out from an oasis north-east of Gao, and PNWS had been spoken in areas west of Gao which now speak Eastern Songhay; or B. NS spread from the Timbuktu region, and WS derives from heavy “de-creolising” influence by Eastern Songhay on an originally Northern Songhay language.

  • "Writing 'Shelha' in new media: Emergent non-Arabic literacy in Southwestern Algeria".  Forthcoming in ed. Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh, Proceedings of TASIA.
    This article examines the transcription choices and social purposes involved in the writing of non-Arabic local languages ("Shelha") in southwestern Algeria, including several Berber varieties and Korandjé, in the Arabic script, mainly online.  Examination of the transcription choices suggests that 'Ajami' writing is a natural side effect of Arabic literacy, which can show significant homogeneity across individuals and languages without the practice itself ever having been institutionally taught. The contexts and purposes of the examples confirm that, in public contexts, Arabic remains the default choice, with 'Shelha' reserved almost exclusively for presenting language-specific form rather than translatable meaning; in private messages, however, 'Shelha' may still be used to emphasise solidarity, paralleling its oral sociolinguistic status.

  • Grammatical Contact in the Sahara: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa, PhD thesis, 2010.
    This thesis examines the effects of contact on the grammars of the languages of two Saharan oases, Siwa and Tabelbala. These share similar linguistic ecologies in many respects, and can be regarded as among the most extreme representatives of a language contact situation ongoing for centuries across the oases of the northern Sahara. This work identifies and argues for contact effects across a wide range of core morphology and syntax, using these both to shed new light on regional history and to test claims about the limits on, and expected outcomes of, contact. While reaffirming the ubiquity of pattern copying, the results encourage an expanded understanding of the role of material borrowing in grammatical contact, showing that the borrowing of functional morphemes and of paradigmatic sets of words or phrases containing them can lead to grammatical change. More generally, it confirms the uniformitarian principle that diachronic change arises through the long-term application of processes observable in synchronic language contact situations. The similarity of the sociolinguistic situations provides a close approximation to a natural controlled experiment, allowing us to pinpoint cases where differences in the original structure of the recipient language appear to have influenced its receptivity to external influence in those aspects of structure.

  • "The Western Berber Stratum in Kwarandzyey", in ed. D. Ibriszimow, M. Kossmann, H. Stroomer, R. Vossen, Études berbères V – Essais sur des variations dialectales et autres articles.  Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2010.
    By examining regular correspondences and vocabulary distribution, this article demonstrates that many of the Berber loans in Kwarandzyey (Korandjé) derive neither from the Berber varieties currently spoken near the oasis nor from Tuareg, but rather from the highly divergent Western subfamily of Berber to which Zenaga and Tetserrét belong.  These loans are particularly conspicuous in the domains of herding, marriage, and religion.  Their presence implies that Western Berber must once have been far more widely spoken, including areas near at least one of Tabelbala or the Niger bend.  The principal sound changes that have affected Kwarandzyey are also examined.

  • "Ajami in West Africa", Afrikanistik Online 2010.
    This article examines the practice of adapting the Arabic script to write non-Arabic languages in West Africa, a form of literacy known as Ajami which remains widespread despite little or no government support.  Among the methods found to be used to transcribe non-Arabic sounds, the "ajami diacritic" of Senegal and Guinea is of particular interest, appearing unmotivated from a narrowly linguistic perspective but readily explicable as a rational adaptation to the parallel educational system in which Ajami is typically learned.

  • "Siwa and its significance for Arabic dialectology" (pre-review version), Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 51, 2009.
    Siwi is best known for being the easternmost Berber language, but includes a very substantial Arabic stratum. The q reflex of qāf and the final ʾimāla of -ā to -ī in loanwords alone suffice to establish that most of this influence derives neither from Bedouin dialects nor from the main Nile Valley dialects; instead, these link Siwa to other Egyptian oases. Some borrowed grammatical elements, notably lā "not" and qət ̣t ̣"ever", the actor noun formation a-CəCCēCī, and demonstrative agreement with the addressee, underline Siwi’s archaism relative to almost all modern Arabic dialects. The depth of Arabic influence on Siwi suggests very close social contact, and historical sources indicate an Arab presence in the oasis alongside Berber in the 12th century. The Arabic element of Siwi thus provides a new source of evidence on sedentary Arabic dialects that reached the region independently of the Banī Sulaym and probably prior to their 11th century arrival.
    (Erratum: on p. 56, the phrases "    in the aorist and intensive" and "and -ā in the perfect" should be deleted.)

  • "The Typology of Number Borrowing in Berber", CamLing 2007 Proceedings, Cambridge 2007 (first presented at CamLing 2007).
    In Berber, numerals are commonly loanwords from Arabic; some languages retain as few as one or two non-Arabic numerals, while others preserve a complete inventory. Closer examination reveals differences in intensity of borrowing even within single languages, depending on the numbers' functional usage. The languages in question are closely related to one another and are all influenced by varieties of Arabic, allowing what amounts to a controlled experiment, with similar contact situations in different areas yielding a spectrum of possible outcomes. Careful examination of this spectrum allows us to set up a typology of numeral borrowing in Arabic-Berber contact, showing how linguistic, social, and cognitive factors all affect the process of number borrowing and how synonymy may emerge as a transitional stage in the adoption of a new system.

  •  Explorations in the Syntactic Cartography of Algerian Arabic, MA thesis (SOAS 2006).
    Using original data from the Dellys dialect, this thesis presents a preliminary map of some important points in the syntactic cartography of Algerian Arabic, mapping out some of the multiple DP-related functional positions to reveal a surface situation bearing strong similarities to those postulated by Beghelli and Stowell (1997) and Rizzi (1997). In both Algerian and Classical Arabic this structure is subject to a basic dichotomy that justifies some version of the traditional CP/IP distinction: positions below FocP are accessible to movement, while positions above it can be accessed only through the use of resumptive pronouns. A functional hierarchy of minimally six positions is required to account for the observed facts in a cartographical framework; these may be labelled as follows: TopP FocP AgrSP NegP NeutP VP.

  • "Notes on the Algerian Arabic Dialect of Dellys" - Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí, 2005.
    The Arabic dialect of Dellys belongs to the little-documented urban north-central Algeria dialect group, and - like most such dialects - it displays traits unusual in pre-Hilalian dialects, in particular the retention of interdentals. Berber, Andalusi, and later Bedouin influence are all observable in its lexicon, and occasionally in its grammar. Lexically, the Dellys dialect is particularly noteworthy for its extensive retention of precolonial vocabulary relating to fishing and sea creatures, largely replaced by French loanwords in other towns of the region. This paper summarizes points of dialectological interest in a framework loosely based on Caubet (2001).

  • "Broken Plurals – or Infixes?: The Case of the Algerian Arabic of Dellys"  - Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí, 2002.
    This paper, written before I started the formal study of linguistics, presents an alternative analysis of broken plurals in Algerian Arabic in terms of infixation, combined with a description of the system for the Dellys dialect.
    Erratum: Further investigation revealed that ṭəms (p. 33) refers to a rare type of fish rather than a seal.

Conferences at which I've presented:

My fieldwork:

  • Oct. 2007 - Feb. 2008: Tabelbala, Algeria - working on Kwaṛandzyəy (Songhay, arguably Nilo-Saharan)
  • Mar. 2008 - May 2008: Siwa, Egypt - working on Siwi (Berber, Afroasiatic)

Book reviews:

Miscellaneous linguistic stuff I've done:

You can see an archive of my former homepage - notably including a Grammar of Algerian Arabic and a page on the various methods of Writing Berber Languages - on the Wayback Machine.  Both contain some minor errors, and one has an inadequate bibliography; I haven't had time lately to bring them up to my current academic standards, but hope that they may nonetheless be useful to learners.

 

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