Lameen Souag
Overview
- Name:
- Lameen Souag
- Email address:
- ls37@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title:
- Grammatical Contact in the Sahara: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa
- Website:
- http://sites.google.com/site/lameen/
Internal Supervisors
Biography
Before coming to SOAS, Lameen did a BA in Mathematics, followed by a couple of years working at the Rosetta Project in San Francisco. His PhD was supported by funding from the AHRC. His viva took place in August 2010, and his thesis was passed subject to minor amendments.
PhD Research
Lameen's thesis describes "Grammatical Contact in the Sahara: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa". Kwarandzyey, the language of Tabelbala, is spoken by about 3000 people in southwestern Algeria, and is the northernmost Songhay language by nearly 1000 km; it is seriously endangered. Siwi, the easternmost Berber language, is spoken by less than 15,000 people in western Egypt. Lameen's thesis examines how isolation from related languages and contact with surrounding populations over many centuries has changed the morphology and syntax of these two languages, notably through the borrowing of functional morphemes and of paradigmatic sets of words or phrases containing them. In the process the thesis provides the first detailed description of Kwarandzyey, and uncovers evidence for early contact between Kwarandzyey and a language whose closest relative, Zenaga, is now spoken more than 1500 km away.
