This paper deals with the role of morphology in the reconstruction of lexical meaning. It focuses on the case of the Arabic Form VIII verbs in order to illustrate the challenge that morpho-semantics presents for historical lexicographers assuming the unity of a language throughout a long period of its use. In this connection, the paper attempts to show that, although Form VIII verbs have been in use since the early stages of Arabic, it is likely that users assigned them different meanings according to whether Form VIII morpho-semantics was transparent or opaque. Three factors have been identified that increase the opacity of this category: allomorphy, polysemy and frequency of the derivation base. 529 items were culled from a bilingual dictionary for the purposes of the study, and allomorphy was found to contribute about 12% to morphological opacity, and more than 70% of the verbs had a non-prototypical sense. Many of the extended senses seem to have lost all kinds of semantic relation to the prototypical sense, thus resulting in less transparency in the semantics of the derived forms. The study also argues that the less frequent the base of the derivation is, the more opaque Form VIII will be. The paper concludes that, given the lack of rich data from the early stages of Arabic, it is likely that a satisfactory reconstruction of the meaning of derived forms will probably never be achieved.

Review: Carmen Dagostino, Marianne Mithun, and Karen Rice (eds.) 2023 (vol. 1), 2024 (vol. 2). The languages and linguistics of indigenous North America: A comprehensive guide, Volume 1; Volume 2. (The World of Linguistics 13.1-2). Berlin – Boston: De Gruyter Mouton . Pp. LII (front matter) + 1-715 + separate enlarged map insert (vol. 1), and + pp. XII (front matter) + [987] 717-1702 (vol. 2)

The purpose of this article is to analyse some Hittite adjectives, to discuss the different options concerning their morphological parsing – and, if available, their etymology – and to clarify the issues behind the productivity of some specific suffixes.

This paper examines how ancient and Byzantine scholars may have conceptualised a “dialectal” lexicon of Greek, with particular attention to the problem of linguistic normativity. It offers a comparative discussion of two markedly different sources: Gregory of Corinth’s Περὶ Αἰολίδος and the anonymous lexicographical compilation Γλῶσσαι κατὰ πόλεις (Urb. Gr. 157). Both works seek to illustrate dialectal variation primarily through lexical material, yet they do so within distinct scholarly frameworks and with differing assumptions about linguistic correctness. The analysis draws on criteria developed in modern Ancient Greek dialectology (notably by García Ramón) in order to assess how far the lexical items presented in these sources can be regarded as genuinely dialect specific. Given the secondary nature of the evidence, these criteria cannot be applied mechanically; rather, they serve as a heuristic tool for evaluating the internal logic and reliability of the lexicographical traditions under consideration. Particular attention is paid to the role of literary language, poetic diction, and interdialectal influence in shaping what ancient scholars classified as “dialectal”. The study shows that Gregory of Corinth operates with an implicit normative baseline, ultimately rooted in Attic and the learned tradition, against which other dialects are evaluated, whereas the Γλῶσσαι κατὰ πόλεις lack any explicit reference to a standard variety and instead reflect classificatory practices derived largely from literary authority. In both cases, dialectal normativity emerges as prescriptive and scholarly rather than descriptive of vernacular usage. The findings underline the difficulty of defining a “dialectal” lexicon for Ancient Greek and suggest that modern lexicographical approaches must take greater account of the literary, chronological, and scholarly filters through which dialectal material has been transmitted.

This study focuses on a corpus-based description of the process of linguistic adaptation of nominal English loanwords in Russian containing the deverbal suffix -ING, transliterated into Russian as инг /ɪng/. 89 loanword items were analyzed in terms of their linguistic characteristics, such as morphological structure and frequency of occurrence in the corpus. The study discusses the complex nature of the lexical items that are transferred from one language into another through ongoing language contact. The corpus-based analysis included such procedures as the search for any relevant items within a given time frame in a selected corpus, the identification and assigning of language-related characteristics to the items elicited from the corpus, and the statistical procedure that aimed to determine and describe the relationships that exist, or are likely to exist, between different types of characteristics of the loanwords.

In this paper we explore the interaction between Maghrebi Darijas and Romance languages from the perspective of both historical and contemporary evidence. As Caubet 2002, following Lahlou 1991 argues, among contemporary educated populations in urban centres across the Maghreb, bilingual/multilingual interaction is the norm not the exception. Historical evidence tells us this was also the case in 11th century al-Andalus, though it is of course impossible down the centuries to reconstruct the actual interaction. We will however argue that certain surviving texts can provide an indication when analysed in terms of the constraints on conversational codeswitching such as is provided by Aabi. We start from the position that Maghrebi Darija is a special case of linguistic permeability due to its politico-geographic location on the frontier and given its thousand year history of close contact with Romance. To investigate this phenomenon in both its historical and contemporary manifestations we draw on the current construct of translanguaging, an alternative perspective on multilingual interaction to code switching as expounded in Baynham & Lee (2018) and the notion of convivencia as elaborated by Bossong in his study of linguistic conviviality and coexistence in mediaeval Andalusian poetry (Bossong 2010). We then go on to analyze this in two time slices: examining evidence of the productive convivencia/coexistence of romance and dialectal Arabic i) in the kharjas of 11th century al-Andalus as discussed by Bossong and others and ii) in the modern Maghreb music and performance scene (cf. Caubet 2002; Baynham & Gintsburg 2022). We do this here through analysis of a song by the Algerian singer Talyani and a performance of the Moroccan comedian Hanane el-Fadhili, using in both time slices translanguaging and Bossong’s notion of convivencia in our analysis. We then conclude by arguing as Heath (2020) does that for effective research into such varieties as Maghrebi Arabic, both currently and historically, it is necessary for cross disciplinary work between researchers in Arabic and its Romance contact languages, in order to fully address its sociolinguistics. We understand this as a form of disciplinary translanguaging to be undertaken in order to establish the dynamics of the convivencia/coexistence of Arabic and Romance elements in this type of data.

Processing text across different scripts presents significant hurdles in natural language processing, especially when dealing with non-standardized orthographies and informal writing systems common in low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce Sawtone, an integrated framework designed to enable consistent cross-script phonetic alignment and text normalization. At its heart is an architecture built for interoperability, combining a unified phonological feature space rooted in linguistic principles with modular, language-specific adapters. This structure allows for robust mapping and comparison between any pair of scripts. Crucially, it enables diverse adapters—developed using different methods or data—to work together cohesively for cross-language tasks. The framework readily supports alloglottographic text and is designed to function with minimal resource requirements. We demonstrate its practicality through implementations for transliteration, cross-script sequence alignment, and text normalization, further illustrated by a case study on preprocessing Moroccan Arabic data for Large Language Model (LLM) training. Initial results are encouraging: transliteration reached an 88% BLEU score, phonetic-based text sequence alignment achieved 87-95% accuracy across various language and script pairs, and text normalization significantly reduced variations in spelling. Sawtone offers a structured, interoperable foundation for advancing phonetic-aware NLP across linguistic boundaries.

The present study investigates how Darija, within a complex multilingual and digital context, is reshaping the roles of traditionally dominant languages like Standard Arabic and French. It highlights a shift towards a more symmetrical sociolinguistic system, where local interactions redefine linguistic functions. The research also explores how Darija interacts with the Tamazight languages in the global digital sphere, addressing conflicts and competitions. It delves further into the concept of ‘Darijation’, an unintended result of North African language policies, and reveals that Darija is increasingly displacing other languages, creating a new linguistic landscape.

The outputs of the contact due to the presence and interaction of multiple languages in Morocco have been tackled by numerous sociolinguistic studies over the years (Ennaji 2002, Chekayri 2006, Caubet 2017b). This research attempts to illustrate the way this complex linguistic landscape affected the language of oral and written Moroccan advertising, wherein the alternation of registers and the functional expansion of the dārija became more detectable. To this end, in this study I aim to explore the correlation between language use and target audience, after providing a general overview of the first advertising materials disseminated in Morocco since the beginning of the 20th century. The discussion on linguistic innovations in this field will be accompanied by an analysis of commercials that have been aired on 2M, Morocco’s most popular television channel, since the 1960s-70s. This focus will allow us to emphasise the peculiarities of mostly oral advertising messages based on the target audience they seem to address. Further, the second part of the paper will be devoted to the reflection on the orthographic representation strategies used by speakers of Moroccan Arabic, by means of the analysis of billboards, which represent the so-called ‘outdoor advertising’. Furthermore, such billboards, whose pictures have been captured in various parts of Morocco, provide us with an opportunity to observe contact phenomena of alternation, insertion, and code-mixing (Appel & Muysken 1987), and to evaluate their role in the effectiveness of the advertising message, as well as to provide some observations in their orthographic treatment.

The present study summarizes the forms of numerals of the first decade in more than 200 Central Chadic languages and their varieties, including their sources, to analyze their internal structure and external relations, in both genetic and areal plans.