Professor, Linguistics/Middle East Studies
About
Current research interests:
My work straddles the Sahara from Morocco to Burkina Faso. I began with several projects on Moroccan Arabic beginning around 1978. That work led me to Timbuktu in 1986, which in turn led to a long fieldwork association with northern and central Mali: Hassaniya Arabic, several Songhay languages, Tamashek (Tuareg), about fifteen Dogon languages, and the language isolate Bangime. I have also worked in recent years on endangered languages of SW Burkina Faso (Tiefo, Jalkunan) and Côte d’Ivoire (Pere). I am currently developing a project on Bozo languages of Central Mali.
My three books on Moroccan Arabic a) modeled its morphophonology, especially of ablaut; b) described how Spanish, French, English, and literary Arabic forms are being and have been borrowed, paying attention to chronological layering and hybridization; and c) documented basic features and vocabulary of some 50 Muslim and Jewish Moroccan varieties based on fieldwork in Morocco and Israel. For Timbuktu-area Hassaniya Arabic I have published a text collection and a short dictionary.
Current projects:
Recently I have taken a controversial position (in the journals Diachronica and Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik) that archaic Moroccan Arabic was the result of language shift from Late Latin to a contact Arabic spoken by Berber troops. The main traces of this are the D-possessives (di, dyal etc.) and the phonetic merger of long and short vowels. I am perennially interested in the debate about (nonexistent) Arabic “roots”.
Teaching Interests:
morphology, cognitive linguistics, African linguistics, historical linguistics, humor
