A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Friday, January 8, 2010

Don't Leave Me Hanging . . .

I've linked a couple of times to the linguistics blog Jabal al-Lughat, by the Algerian linquist st SOAS Lameen Souag, who's a specialist on Berber and some other Saharan languages. His December 31 and January 2 posts are about Siwi, the Berber language still spoken in Egypt's western Siwa Oasis. That's obscure enough, but he tantalizingly opens his December 31 post with the line: "Just back from a nice evening with the Siwi community of Qatar. A Kabyle friend came along . . ." The post is about the unintelligbility between Egyptian Siwi Berber and Algerian Kabyle Berber, but whoa, did he just say "the Siwi community of Qatar"? Berber speakers from the Siwa oasis are a large enough number in Qatar to constitute a community? Wikipedia and Google fail me, and so does the language reference Ethnologue: at least in English, Siwi and Qatar together only bring up Lameen's posts. I haven't searched in Arabic (and can't search in Siwi), but I've posted a comment asking for info. [He's answered at the comments thread on his post: "Oh, 20-odd people."] I know Qatar may be the most diverse and multinational country in the Arab world, but I didn't know there was a "Siwi community" there. See what you can learn from bloggers?

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