I'm doing a PhD on the grammatical effects of contact (mainly with Arabic and Berber) on two languages of the Sahara, Kwarandzyəy or Korandje (a Songhay language of southwestern Algeria) and Siwi (a Berber language of western Egypt), at SOAS (University of London). My core chapter was on comparative Kwarandzyəy nominal morphosyntax. 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; more recently I have been 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:
- "Siwa and its significance for Arabic dialectology" (pre-review version), to appear in Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik.
- "The Typology of Number Borrowing in Berber", CamLing 2007 Proceedings, Cambridge 2007 (first presented at CamLing 2007)
- Explorations in the Syntactic Cartography of Algerian Arabic, MA thesis (SOAS 2006).
- "Notes on the Algerian Arabic Dialect of Dellys" - Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí, 2005.
- "Broken Plurals – or Infixes?: The Case of the Algerian Arabic of Dellys" - Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí, 2002.
Conferences at which I've presented:
- 28-29 November 2008: 5000 Jahre Schrift in Afrika, Köln, on "Ajami in West Africa"
- 8-11 October 2008: 5th International Colloquium on Berber Languages and Linguistics, Leiden, on "Kwarandzyey, the language of Tabelbala, and what it tells us about the history of Berber"
- 28-31 August 2008: AIDA 8, Colchester, about "Siwi and its significance for Arabic dialectology"
- 24-28 September 2007: ALT 7, Paris, where I spoke at the Typology of African Languages Workshop about "The Decay of Clitic Attraction across Berber: A Typological Overview"
- 27-29 August 2007: CALL 37, Leiden, about "Tondi Songway Kiini and the subclassification of Songhay"
- 20-21 March 2007: CamLing 2007, Cambridge, about "The Typology of Number Borrowing in Berber" (see above)
- 8-9 April 2005: CELCNA, Salt Lake City, where I gave a joint presentation with Laura Buszard-Welcher on "Building Virtual Speech Communities for Endangered Languages: The E-MELD Query Room"
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:
- Kwarandzyəy numbers summarised
- A cartographic bibliography of the Berber language family in Tunisia (Google Earth KMZ file), and how to make others like it
- Reduplication in Siouan (an MA essay)
- Ibn Hazm (11th cent.) on historical linguistics, language endangerment, and conlanging: 1, 2, 3 (and original text)
- Ibn Quraysh on Semitic (10th cent.) - and Ibn Quraysh's introduction
- A dire attempt to translate some of Alfiyyat Ibn Malik
- Observations about the grammar of Mpre (Ghana)
- My experience of N'Ko (Mali)
- Oropom Etymological Lexicon - a philological analysis in some depth of what unfortunately turned out to be a very dubious wordlist, allegedly of an extinct Ugandan language.
- An overview of Berber Qur'an translations
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.