My name is Lameen Souag (EN: [lˠəˈmiːn ˈsuwɑːg], AR: [læːˈmiːn sˤuwˈwaːg]). I am a linguist, with a particular interest in language description and historical linguistics. My principal areal focus is on North Africa, the Sahara, and the Sahel. I work as a researcher at the LACITO (CNRS) laboratory in France (promoted to CR1 level in 2016); from September 2018 to June 2019, I was the lab’s interim director. Until I joined LACITO in October 2012, I was based mainly in the UK. You can email me at [my first name] at gmail.com, or read my occasional musings on linguistics at my blog Jabal al-Lughat (or via Twitter).
My interest in linguistics started as a child growing up in a multilingual environment, when I found my mother’s old articulatory phonetics textbook and started trying to produce implosives and clicks. For many years, linguistics competed for my attention with a range of rather different subjects – I got my BA in Mathematics at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (which I represented all the way to the final round of University Challenge in 2004.) After finishing my BA, however, I got a chance to explore the world of languages in greater depth, becoming Curator of the San Francisco-based Rosetta Project for two years. This convinced me to try an MA in Linguistics at SOAS (University of London).
One thing led to another, and in August 2010 I finished a PhD at SOAS, funded by the AHRC, on the grammatical effects of contact (mainly with Arabic and Berber) on two languages of the Sahara. In order to accomplish this, I spent most of October 2007 through May 2008 in the Sahara documenting Korandje (a Songhay language of southwestern Algeria) and Siwi (a Berber language of western Egypt); I remain grateful to the speakers I worked with for their generosity and good nature.
After a year spent teaching linguistics at SOAS and working at its Endangered Language Archives, I became a British Academy postdoctoral fellow (2011-12) there, working on the development of agreement in Berber, with a particular focus on the typologically unusual phenomenon of indirect object agreement. While the fellowship was for a term of three years, by the end of its first year the CNRS had offered me a permanent post, and I moved to Paris to take up my current position.
Lameen Souag 