Lameen SOUAG 
Associate Researcher at CNRS
Acting director of LACITO (from 2024/01/01 to 2024/08/31)
Research topics
- Historical linguistics, in particular:
— Deducing grammaticalisation paths from synchronic typology;
— The development of agreement with atypical targets, and its relationship with information structure;
— Language contact and the relationship between lexical and grammatical borrowing;
— The formal and functional development of reduplication;
— Identifying substrata through lexical comparison;
— Using cladistics to infer aspects of history.
- Language description, in particular the morphology, syntax, and lexicon of:
— Korandjé, the endangered Songhay language of Tabelbala (SW Algeria);
— Siwi, the Berber language of Siwa (NW Egypt);
— Algerian Arabic and other Arabic varieties.
- Vernacular literacy in primarily oral languages, notably in the Tifinagh and Arabic (Ajami) scripts, with a focus on the emergence of orthographic conventions and the factors affecting written language choice.
Ongoing research projects
– Opérations de recherche au Lacito
• Langues afro-asiatiques / chamito-sémitiques
— Programmes du Labex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL)
• Long-term typological changes in language
— British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (SOAS, 2011-2012)
Keywords
historical linguistics / لسانيات تاريخية – Typology / تصنيف أنواع اللغات – language contact / احتكاك لغوي – loanwords / كلمات دخيلة – agreement / تطابق – clitic doubling / ازدواج المتصل – reduplication / تكرير – Maghreb / المغرب الكبير – Sahara / الصحراء – Afro-Asiatic / أفروآسيوية
Siwi / سيوية – Korandje / بلبالية – Maghrebi Arabic / عربية مغاربية – Classical Arabic / عربية فصحى
Siwi – Korandje – Maghrebi Arabic – Classical Arabic
Main publications
On Academia.edu
Book and journal editing
Book :
— 2014, Berber and Arabic in Siwa (Egypt): A Study in Linguistic Contact. Berber Studies Vol. 37. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 296 p.
Journal editing :
— 2019 (Bondarev, Dmitry, Alessandro Gori, and Lameen Souag, eds.). Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic Script in 12 Manuscript Cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter, 326 p.
Articles in scientific journals
— (To be published), “Berber languages”, dans Anthony Grant (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
— (To be published), Explaining Korandjé: Language contact, plantations, and the trans-Saharan trade, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics.
— (To be published), Songhay languages. In : R. Vossen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of African Languages. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
— 2019, “Kabyle in Arabic Script: A History without Standardisation”. In Bondarev, Dmitry, Alessandro Gori, and Lameen Souag (eds.), Creating Standards: Interactions with Arabic Script in 12 Manuscript Cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, 273-296.
— 2018, “Arabic-Berber contact and the grammaticalisation of “thing””. In ed. Stefano Manfredi, Mauro Tosco. Arabic in Contact. Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2018.
— 2018, “Berber Etymologies in Maltese“. International Journal of Arabic Linguistics 4:1, 2018, 190-223.
— 2017 [paru en 2018], “Deux emprunts puniques liés aux raisins en berbère oriental”. Etudes et Documents Berbères 38, 219-222.
— 2017 [paru en 2018], “Le parler berbère de Sokna (Libye) à la lumière de nouvelles données”. Etudes et Documents Berbères 38, 147-157.
— 2017 [paru en 2018], “La diffusion en berbère : Reconcilier les modèles”. In Diffusion, implantation, convergence. Mémoires de la Société Linguistique de Paris (nouvelle série) 24. Louvain : Peeters, pp. 83-107.
— 2017, “Clitic Doubling and Contact in Arabic”. Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 66, 45-70. 2017.
— 2017, “Syllable weight and morphophonologically induced resyllabification in Maghrebi Arabic”. In ed. Paul Newman, Syllable Weight in African Languages. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 338. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017, pp. 49-68. DOI: 10.1075/cilt.338.03sou.
— 2016, “The origin of mid vowels in Siwi“, with Marijn van Putten. Studies in African Linguistics. 45:1&2, pp. 189-208, 2016.
— 2016, (Lameen Souag, Fatma Kherbache), Syntactically conditioned code-switching? The syntax of numerals in Beni-Snous Berber International Journal of Bilingualism 20 (2) : 97-115. [1ère mise en ligne en 2014 ici] — 2015,” Non-Tuareg Berber and the Genesis of Nomadic Northern Songhay”. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 36:1, pp. 121-143, 2015.
— 2015, “How to make a comitative preposition agree it-with its external argument: Songhay and the typology of conjunction and agreement”. In Paul Widmer, Jürg Fleischer, and Elisabeth Rieken (eds.), Agreement from a diachronic perspective, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 75-100, 2015.
— 2015, “Archaic and innovative Islamic prayer names around the Sahara“. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78:2, pp. 357-374, 2015.
— 2014, “The development of addressee agreement on demonstratives”. Diachronica 31.4, pp. 535-563, 2014.
— 2014, The development of dative agreement in Berber: Beyond nominal hierarchies, Transactions of the Philological Society. (édition en ligne ici, en attendant la publication sur papier)
— 2014, Siwi addressee agreement and demonstrative typology, STUF 67(1):35-45.
— 2014, Writing ‘Shelha’ in new media: Emergent non-Arabic literacy in Southwestern Algeria. In : Meikal Mumin et Kees Versteegh (eds.) The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies on the Usage of a Writing System. Leiden : Brill.
— 2013, Sub-Saharan lexical influence in North African Arabic and Berber. In : Mena Lafkioui (ed.), African Arabic: Approaches to Dialectology. Trends in Linguistics n° 258. Berlin : De Gruyter.
— 2013, The Subclassification of Songhay and its historical Implications. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 33(2):181-213.
— 2009, Siwa and its significance for Arabic dialectology. Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik 51.
— 2007, The Typology of Number Borrowing in Berber. ed. N. Hilton, R. Arscott, K. Barden, A. Krishna, S. Shah, M. Zellers. CamLing 2007: Proceedings of the Fifth Cambridge Postgraduate Conference in Language Research. Cambridge : Cambridge Institute of Language Research. URL.
— 2005, Notes on the Algerian Arabic Dialect of Dellys. Estudios de Dialectología Norteafricana y Andalusí 9.
Publications available in HAL
