Lameen Souag
Biographic Data
| ID | 701559 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lameen Souag |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lameen |
| FAMILY NAME | Souag |
| SIGNATURE | SOUAG L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1233-6137 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
L’origine des termes de parenté matrilinéaires en touareg
Le touareg se distingue du reste du berbère par l’usage de quatre termes de parenté, sans cognat ailleurs, qui expriment des rôles qui sont importants dans un système matrilinéaire. Cet article développe l’argument de Souag (2022) pour montrer que ce système constitue une innovation du touareg plutôt qu’un trait archaïque. Certains de ces mots ont été créés à partir de racines héritées, mais d’autres ont été empruntés d’une langue apparentée au s…
Deliberate Language Alternation in Northwest African Folk Tales and Its Origins
Folk tales told in a wide range of minority languages across much of Africa systematically shift into the dominant language at certain points in the narrative. The motivation for such shifts has rarely been examined in the literature. Based on folk tale corpora in Korandje, a Songhay language of Algeria, and Senhaja, a Berber language of Morocco, this article analyses the function and history of language alternation in such narratives, distinguis…
Linguistique berbère
Programme de l’année 2023-2024 : Le contact et l’histoire du berbère
A note on Jaradat, A. (2024) From nominal source to demonstrative: A case of grammaticalization in Standard Arabic
Article A note on Jaradat, A. (2024) From nominal source to demonstrative: a case of grammaticalization in Standard Arabic was published on November 1, 2024 in the journal STUF - Language Typology and Universals (volume 77, issue 4)
Argan as a substratum word
International audience
Nefusi as a result of intra-Berber contact
International audience
Korandje as a Songhay Language Island
Among the many language islands produced by the expansion of Songhay out of the middle Niger valley, Korandje stands out for its geographical isolation and linguistic divergence. Confined since perhaps 1200 CE to a single Algerian oasis well over a thousand kilometres from any other Songhay-speaking community, its speakers have extensively reshaped their language and identity under the influence of North African norms, while nevertheless keeping …
H. Ekkehard Wolff, A historical phonology of Central Chadic: Prosodies and lexical reconstruction
Chadic is a highly diverse family of nearly 200 languages spoken in West Central Africa, with a distribution centred on Lake Chad. It constitutes a primary branch of Afroasiatic, along with Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew), Berber (Amazigh), Egyptian, Cushitic (e.g. Oromo, Somali), and arguably Omotic in southwestern Ethiopia. The best-known Chadic language is Hausa, a widespread, rapidly expanding, and well-studied lingua franca spoken by probably …
How a West African language becomes North African, and vice versa
Updating the methodology of Hayward, Richard J. 1991. A propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian language area. In Daniela Mendel & Ulrike Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afroorientalischen Kontext. Special issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere , 139–156. Cologne: Institute of African Studies, using the concept of colexification (François, Alexandre. 2008. Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks ac…
Pour une histoire de la langue berbère dans sa diversité et sa complexité
Le berbère est une langue vivante pratiquée dans le nord de l’Afrique ; elle a fait l’objet de travaux linguistiques remarquables. Cependant comparativement aux études portant sur la langue actuelle, les états anciens de la langue en ont beaucoup moins bénéficié, pas plus qu’on n’ait tenté une approche historique globale du berbère d’une manière approfondie. Dans le but de rétablir un équilibre et de pallier une lacune, nous avons proposé courant…
Jonathan Moodie & Rosey Billington, A grammar of Lopit: An Eastern Nilotic language of South Sudan
Lopit (or Lodongie) is spoken by some 50,000 people in the Lopit Mountains in the Eastern Equatoria province of South Sudan, near Torit, not far from the border with Uganda. Along with relatives such as Maasai and Turkana, it belongs to Eastern Nilotic, and at a much greater remove to Eastern Sudanic (commonly classified, following Greenberg [1963], as part of the Nilo-Saharan macrophylum). Like the rest of South Sudan, the Lopit people have suff…
Proto-Berber Kinship Terms and Their Implications for Early Amazigh Society
In consanguineal kinship terminology, Berber (Amazigh) displays a sharp divide between a patrilineal, Sudanese north and a bilineal, Iroquois south, provoking much speculation on original matrilineality. This divide extends to affines, where the patrilocal joint families of the north contrast with the flexible encampments of the south. Both systems show clear evidence of expansion and reconfiguration through internal coinages and borrowing; the w…
Astronomy among the Ayt Xebbac of Tabelbala
Les verbes korandjé d’origine berbère (Songhay de Tabelbala, Algérie)
International audience
When is templatic morphology borrowed: On the spread of the Arabic elative
Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures
Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into…
Sokna: Sociolinguistique
The origin of mid vowels in Siwi
Recent documentation has established that the Siwi language of western Egypt, unlike most other Berber languages, has two phonemic mid vowels appearing not only in Arabic loanwords but also in inherited vocabulary: /e/ and /o/. This article examines their origin. Proto-Berber originally had a single mid vowel *e, which appears to have been retained in Siwi only before word-final /n/. In all other environments the contrast between *i and *e has be…
Werner Diem: Negation in Arabic: A Study in Linguistic History
Casajus, Dominique: L'alphabet touareg. Histoire d'un vieil alphabet africain
Anthropos , Seite 243 - 244
Attrition and revival in Awjila BerberFacebook posts as a new data source for an endangered Berber language
Awjila Berber is a highly endangered Berber variety spoken in eastern Libya. The minimal material available on it reveals that the language is in some respects very archaic and in others grammatically unique, and as such is of particular comparative and historical interest. Fieldwork has been impossible for decades due to the political situation. Recently, however, several inhabitants of Awjila have set up a Facebook group Ašal=ənnax (“our villag…
Explaining Korandjé: Language contact, plantations, and the trans-Saharan trade
The intense Berber-Songhay language contact that produced Northern Songhay cannot be understood adequately without taking into account the existence of a Northern Songhay language outside the Azawagh valley — Korandjé, in Algeria — showing few, if any, signs of Tuareg contact. This article proposes a new explanation based on linguistic, epigraphic, and historical data: Western Berber-speaking Masūfa, present throughout northern Mali around 1200, …
Non-Tuareg Berber and the genesis of nomadic Northern Songhay
With massive borrowing resulting in systematic suppletion, the nomadic Northern Songhay languages, Tadaksahak and Tagdal, are some of the most striking products of intense language contact in Africa. While the importance of Berber in their formation is obvious, published comparisons have focused almost exclusively on Tuareg, the currently dominant Berber language of the region. This paper, however, demonstrates that Tuareg-Songhay contact alone c…
Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara
Berber in the Sahara and southern Morocco, and several West African languages including Soninké, Mandinka and Songhay, all refer to the five Islamic daily prayers using terms not derived from their usual Arabic names, and showing striking mutual similarities. The motivation behind these names has not hitherto been explained. An examination of Islamic sources reveals that many correspond to terms attested within Arabic from an early period but whi…
Syntactically conditioned code-switching? The syntax of numerals in Beni-Snous Berber
Aims and objectives: Grammatical rules in one language that induce the speaker to switch to another language (Matras’ ‘bilingual suppletion’) are reported for two languages: Beni-Snous Berber (as described in Destaing’s 1907 work Etude sur le dialecte berbère des Beni-Snous), and Jerusalem Domari (as described in Matras’s 2012 work A grammar of Domari). Few details are available, yet the two cases show greater similarities than expected if any gr…
Explaining Korandjé: Language contact, plantations, and the trans-Saharan trade
The intense Berber-Songhay language contact that produced Northern Songhay cannot be understood adequately without taking into account the existence of a Northern Songhay language outside the Azawagh valley — Korandjé, in Algeria — showing few, if any, signs of Tuareg contact. This article proposes a new explanation based on linguistic, epigraphic, and historical data: Western Berber-speaking Masūfa, present throughout northern Mali around 1200, …
When is templatic morphology borrowed: On the spread of the Arabic elative
Non-Tuareg Berber and the genesis of nomadic Northern Songhay
With massive borrowing resulting in systematic suppletion, the nomadic Northern Songhay languages, Tadaksahak and Tagdal, are some of the most striking products of intense language contact in Africa. While the importance of Berber in their formation is obvious, published comparisons have focused almost exclusively on Tuareg, the currently dominant Berber language of the region. This paper, however, demonstrates that Tuareg-Songhay contact alone c…
Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology
Siwi, a Berber language of Egypt, shows gender/number agreement of medial demonstratives with the addressee. Such phenomena are crosslinguistically very rarely reported, and are not discussed in major surveys of the typology of demonstratives (Diessel 1999; Imai 2003). However, within person-oriented demonstrative systems, such marking amounts to an iconic representation of addressee anchoring. The pragmatics of Siwi demonstratives thus cast ligh…
Syntactically conditioned code-switching? The syntax of numerals in Beni-Snous Berber
Aims and objectives: Grammatical rules in one language that induce the speaker to switch to another language (Matras’ ‘bilingual suppletion’) are reported for two languages: Beni-Snous Berber (as described in Destaing’s 1907 work Etude sur le dialecte berbère des Beni-Snous), and Jerusalem Domari (as described in Matras’s 2012 work A grammar of Domari). Few details are available, yet the two cases show greater similarities than expected if any gr…
The development of addressee agreement on demonstratives
The person-oriented nature of a demonstrative system can be marked explicitly by incorporating person markers into demonstratives. When these distinguish gender or number, this can lead to an unusual type of allocutivity: addressee agreement on medials. The latter development is cross-linguistically rarely reported, but is attested in Siwi Berber, Quranic and Rāziħ Arabic and arguably Imperial Aramaic. Examination of these and other languages sho…
Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology
Siwi, a Berber language of Egypt, shows gender/number agreement of medial demonstratives with the addressee. Such phenomena are crosslinguistically very rarely reported, and are not discussed in major surveys of the typology of demonstratives (Diessel 1999; Imai 2003). However, within person-oriented demonstrative systems, such marking amounts to an iconic representation of addressee anchoring. The pragmatics of Siwi demonstratives thus cast ligh…
Attrition and revival in Awjila BerberFacebook posts as a new data source for an endangered Berber language
Awjila Berber is a highly endangered Berber variety spoken in eastern Libya. The minimal material available on it reveals that the language is in some respects very archaic and in others grammatically unique, and as such is of particular comparative and historical interest. Fieldwork has been impossible for decades due to the political situation. Recently, however, several inhabitants of Awjila have set up a Facebook group Ašal=ənnax (“our villag…
Explaining Korandjé: Language contact, plantations, and the trans-Saharan trade
The intense Berber-Songhay language contact that produced Northern Songhay cannot be understood adequately without taking into account the existence of a Northern Songhay language outside the Azawagh valley — Korandjé, in Algeria — showing few, if any, signs of Tuareg contact. This article proposes a new explanation based on linguistic, epigraphic, and historical data: Western Berber-speaking Masūfa, present throughout northern Mali around 1200, …
Non-Tuareg Berber and the genesis of nomadic Northern Songhay
With massive borrowing resulting in systematic suppletion, the nomadic Northern Songhay languages, Tadaksahak and Tagdal, are some of the most striking products of intense language contact in Africa. While the importance of Berber in their formation is obvious, published comparisons have focused almost exclusively on Tuareg, the currently dominant Berber language of the region. This paper, however, demonstrates that Tuareg-Songhay contact alone c…
Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara
Berber in the Sahara and southern Morocco, and several West African languages including Soninké, Mandinka and Songhay, all refer to the five Islamic daily prayers using terms not derived from their usual Arabic names, and showing striking mutual similarities. The motivation behind these names has not hitherto been explained. An examination of Islamic sources reveals that many correspond to terms attested within Arabic from an early period but whi…
The origin of mid vowels in Siwi
Recent documentation has established that the Siwi language of western Egypt, unlike most other Berber languages, has two phonemic mid vowels appearing not only in Arabic loanwords but also in inherited vocabulary: /e/ and /o/. This article examines their origin. Proto-Berber originally had a single mid vowel *e, which appears to have been retained in Siwi only before word-final /n/. In all other environments the contrast between *i and *e has be…
Werner Diem: Negation in Arabic: A Study in Linguistic History
Casajus, Dominique: L'alphabet touareg. Histoire d'un vieil alphabet africain
Anthropos , Seite 243 - 244
Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic script in 12 manuscript cultures
Manuscript cultures based on Arabic script feature various tendencies in standardisation of orthography, script types and layout. Unlike previous studies, this book steps outside disciplinary and regional boundaries and provides a typological cross-cultural comparison of standardisation processes in twelve Arabic-influenced writing traditions where different cultures, languages and scripts interact. A wide range of case studies give insights into…
Sokna: Sociolinguistique
Astronomy among the Ayt Xebbac of Tabelbala
Les verbes korandjé d’origine berbère (Songhay de Tabelbala, Algérie)
International audience
When is templatic morphology borrowed: On the spread of the Arabic elative
How a West African language becomes North African, and vice versa
Updating the methodology of Hayward, Richard J. 1991. A propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian language area. In Daniela Mendel & Ulrike Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afroorientalischen Kontext. Special issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere , 139–156. Cologne: Institute of African Studies, using the concept of colexification (François, Alexandre. 2008. Semantic maps and the typology of colexification: Intertwining polysemous networks ac…
Pour une histoire de la langue berbère dans sa diversité et sa complexité
Le berbère est une langue vivante pratiquée dans le nord de l’Afrique ; elle a fait l’objet de travaux linguistiques remarquables. Cependant comparativement aux études portant sur la langue actuelle, les états anciens de la langue en ont beaucoup moins bénéficié, pas plus qu’on n’ait tenté une approche historique globale du berbère d’une manière approfondie. Dans le but de rétablir un équilibre et de pallier une lacune, nous avons proposé courant…
Jonathan Moodie & Rosey Billington, A grammar of Lopit: An Eastern Nilotic language of South Sudan
Lopit (or Lodongie) is spoken by some 50,000 people in the Lopit Mountains in the Eastern Equatoria province of South Sudan, near Torit, not far from the border with Uganda. Along with relatives such as Maasai and Turkana, it belongs to Eastern Nilotic, and at a much greater remove to Eastern Sudanic (commonly classified, following Greenberg [1963], as part of the Nilo-Saharan macrophylum). Like the rest of South Sudan, the Lopit people have suff…
Proto-Berber Kinship Terms and Their Implications for Early Amazigh Society
In consanguineal kinship terminology, Berber (Amazigh) displays a sharp divide between a patrilineal, Sudanese north and a bilineal, Iroquois south, provoking much speculation on original matrilineality. This divide extends to affines, where the patrilocal joint families of the north contrast with the flexible encampments of the south. Both systems show clear evidence of expansion and reconfiguration through internal coinages and borrowing; the w…
H. Ekkehard Wolff, A historical phonology of Central Chadic: Prosodies and lexical reconstruction
Chadic is a highly diverse family of nearly 200 languages spoken in West Central Africa, with a distribution centred on Lake Chad. It constitutes a primary branch of Afroasiatic, along with Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew), Berber (Amazigh), Egyptian, Cushitic (e.g. Oromo, Somali), and arguably Omotic in southwestern Ethiopia. The best-known Chadic language is Hausa, a widespread, rapidly expanding, and well-studied lingua franca spoken by probably …
A note on Jaradat, A. (2024) From nominal source to demonstrative: A case of grammaticalization in Standard Arabic
Article A note on Jaradat, A. (2024) From nominal source to demonstrative: a case of grammaticalization in Standard Arabic was published on November 1, 2024 in the journal STUF - Language Typology and Universals (volume 77, issue 4)
Argan as a substratum word
International audience
Nefusi as a result of intra-Berber contact
International audience
Korandje as a Songhay Language Island
Among the many language islands produced by the expansion of Songhay out of the middle Niger valley, Korandje stands out for its geographical isolation and linguistic divergence. Confined since perhaps 1200 CE to a single Algerian oasis well over a thousand kilometres from any other Songhay-speaking community, its speakers have extensively reshaped their language and identity under the influence of North African norms, while nevertheless keeping …
Linguistique berbère
Programme de l’année 2023-2024 : Le contact et l’histoire du berbère
Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis (23 works) · Linguistics (16 works) · History (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · African Studies and Geopolitics (8 works) · Arabic (8 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies (6 works)