The Handbook of Berber Linguistics

This handbook is the largest and most comprehensive publication on Berber linguistics to date, covering the variety of Berber dialects and related linguistics trends. Extensive and diverse at thematic and theoretical levels, with the aim of deepening students and scholars’ understanding of the workings of Berber as a linguistic phenomenon, it explores a multitude of angles through which the diachronic and synchronic intricacies of Berber varieties can be examined. It enables a better understanding of the issues in the various components of North African languages, as well as their theoretical and typological significance and implications. The work covers phonology and phonetics, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, socio-linguistics and dialectology, language teaching and psycholinguistics, lexicology, language contact and comparative linguistics, historical linguistics and etymology. Sub-themes explored include prosody, ideophones (and expressive language in general), morpho-syntactic categories, sociolinguistic variation and several other seminal interdisciplinary explorations. The chapters reflect the diversity of Berber varieties and include up-to-date scholarship by leading Berberists, with varieties including Figuig, Kabyle, Senhaja, Siwa, Standard Moroccan Amazigh, Tamazight, Tarifit, Tashlhit, Touareg, Tunisian Berber, Znaga, as well as Proto-Berber. A large geographical territory is covered, including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. With contributions from these Berber-speaking countries and their diaspora, there are also chapters from prominent Berber scholars from America, Australia and Europe. To this end, the volume includes perspectives and theories from different schools of linguistics. In including original French contributions and English translations of research from top scholars in the field, the book includes another vital dimension in terms ofthe resources, and sources. As a comprehensive reference, this work is of interest to North Africanists from various disciplines, including anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists, but particularly linguists interested in endangered languages, and those working on the historical and comparative study of the Afroasiatic language phylum.

Alireza Korangy received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His field of research is classical Persian and Arabic philology with a special emphasis on poetics, rhetoric, folklore and linguistics. He has done extensive research and published on Iranian and Persian linguistics. He has also published on Iranian folkloric traditions. Dr Korangy currently teaches in the Faculty of Humanities and Civilization Studies at the American University in Beirut. He has previously taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Colorado, and Harvard University.

Karim Bensoukas, Professeur de l’Enseignement Supérieur, is currently teaching in the Department of English at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. He holds a Doctorat d’Etat in linguistics (defended in 2001). He is a former Fulbright scholar (1999-2000 and 2005, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA). His research is centered on phonology, morphology and the phonology-morphology/ morphology-syntax interfaces. His authored and co-authored publications in these areas focus on Moroccan languages, mainly Amazigh and Moroccan Arabic. He has also edited and co-edited numerous collections of papers and translated a book on Amazigh sociolinguistics. His research interests extend to the sociology of language and university pedagogy, particularly the integration of ICT in teaching. Karim Bensoukas is the winner of the 2014 IRCAM Award for Research and Scientific Thinking.