 Today's talk will take us to North Africa, to Algeria and into the world of historical linguistics. Although in this case, unlike a lot of historical linguistics, the work that's been done here is without the help of a long and established written record of the language, so it's quite challenging and perhaps even more interesting in that regard. The speaker is Lameen Suag, he's a researcher at CNRS Lasito, and about 10 years ago actually Lameen had the same position I have now. He was a British Academy post-sectorate fellow at SOAS University of London, so it's essential in which I feel like I'm walking in his footsteps or at least hope I am, maybe in 10 years I'll be where he's at now. Lameen got to start as an expert in Berber languages, but he also writes quite a lot about Arabic and Chatic languages, and his interest in Chatic languages is where I sort of met Lameen online since I worked on one Chatic language and it's rare to say anyone writing anything about Chatic, so that sparked my interest. So in that sense, Lameen's becoming an expert in all things Afro-Aziatic, but particular language he's going to talk about today in fact is not an Afro-Aziatic language, and that's perhaps what makes this an interesting and intriguing story. So with that perhaps I should stop talking and let the expert actually tell the story. Before I hand over to Lameen, let me just say we'll leave some time for questions at the end after a 30 or 40 minute talk, and since we're a fairly large group we'll just ask you to put your questions into the chat, and you can do that at any time during the talk if you have a question, write it out and put it in the chat, and at the end I'll try to get as many of your questions as possible. So thanks everyone for coming, thanks especially to Lameen for drawing it, so we look forward to your presentation. Okay, well thanks for inviting me, let me just set up the screen share, okay, can you see my, can you see the presentation? I don't have it yet, hang on, oh hang on, oh I see this, but no, looks good, correct, okay, so yeah, so thanks for the invitation, and today as discussed I'm going to be discussing the historical linguistics of Qur'an, properly speaking, Qur'an jih, now the first question people usually ask me is what is this language? Well it's spoken in a small oasis of western Algeria called Tabel Balla, so you can get some idea of the setting from the picture here which is taken at the top of the mountain that overlooks the town, you see one of the four buildings in the foreground, behind it some gardens, behind that the trails of underground canals that used to bring water to the gardens, and off in the distance the dune, the whole inhabited area is squeezed between this mountain chain and the dune in the distance, it's a very isolated region, so the nearest hospital is about 280 kilometers drive, equivalent of London to Swansea, so us, the population is around about a bit over 5,000, nevertheless it stands out not just within Algeria but within North Africa as a whole, as the only oasis whose traditional language is neither Arabic, the dominant language of Northern Africa, nor Berber, the indigenous language family of Northern Africa, but rather belongs to another family altogether as we'll see, so when you start working on Qur'an jih, the first thing that strikes you is it's obvious on inspection that this language belongs to the Songhai language family which is marked in grey on the map in this slide, these languages are mostly spoken in the Niger valley as you see in the Mali in Niger, so this is already astonishing enough because Songhai is a good 1,400 kilometers away minimum, it's not very close by, but when you delve into the details of which Songhai varieties Qur'an jih is most closely related to, the puzzle only deepens, it turns out that the most closely related varieties are not those spoken in Timbuktu which is the closest Songhai speaking town to Tabl Bala and the one with which it's known to have had historical trade links, but rather to those spoken in Northern Niger in the Azawar region, so notably the example here is for the town of Ingal which is considerably further away and with far fewer known historical ties to Tabl Bala, so that raises the question of how that happened and to figure this out we need to delve a little more deeply into the lexical stratification of Qur'an jih, now we classify languages not on the basis of the vocabulary as a whole but on the basis of their core grammar and core most frequent vocabulary, so in Qur'an jih the core grammar and about 400 words of basic vocabulary including almost all of the most frequent ones in pronouns, demonstratives and so on are clearly derived from Songhai, they're marked in red in the text here, but most of the content lexemes beyond the most basic are borrowed from other languages of Northern Africa, so first from Berber marked in black here and later on from Arabic marked in yellow, so if you look at a normal Qur'an jih discourse or text you'll see that most of the morphemes are of Songhai origin, this is a by token count, but by type count you get a very different picture, most of the more specific items like tray here or tea or cross legged, so it will not be from Songhai, now the Songhai core accounts for almost 80% of the 100 word swadish list to give you some comparative idea and the impression that when we already get simply by comparing word lists is compared when it is confirmed when you look at shared innovations, it turns out that the Qur'an jih shares a number of innovations specifically with the Northern Songhai languages spoken in Northern Niger and a bit across the border in Mali, like grey here and Agades, Ingal, and a few more with those languages plus the variety of Timbuktu and Jene, the so-called western Songhai, so both phonological innovations like the shift of k to qo and morphological and functional ones like the split of the genitive particle and its syntax to confirm that Qur'an jih is most closely related to these northern Niger languages. The Berber layer is not quite as central to the language, but also goes very deep. It accounts for about 10% of the 100 word swadish list, so well over 50 verbs, probably many more to begin with. Quite a lot of body parts, mostly secondary ones, there's a finger rather than hand, forehead rather than head, lung rather than chest and so forth. A certain number of reasonably important grammatical elements, much of the focus system including the particles used, markers for plurality and natural gender on many nouns. So it seems that while the role of Berber in the emergence of Qur'an jih was not quite as central as Songhai, it nevertheless must have played a formative role in its emergence as a distinct language, especially because many of these Berber elements are not shared with the rest of northern Songhai. So this raised the question of what kind of context did Qur'an jih emerge as a distinct language in? Now one way of approaching this is to look at the vocabulary related to ways of subsistence. So if for example Qur'an jih had been spoken in or some Songhai variety had been spoken in northern Sahara since time in memorial, one would expect it to have an extensive vocabulary before parts of the natural world related to hunting and gathering subsistence. If on the other hand Songhai was a new introduction to this northern Saharan context, one would expect vocabulary for that to be largely borrowed from Berber or if we're late enough Arabic. What we find is very much the latter. Every important animal that was traditionally eaten as a wild animal that was traditionally eaten in Tabl al-Bada has a Berber name as illustrated here. So likewise the most important plants that were traditionally gathered in times of famine or in regular times just as a supplement. Almost all have Berber names. A couple of them have Arabic names but none of them have Songhai names. This is about as strong as we could wish for that the Songhai speakers involved in formation of Qur'an jih were not indigenous to the northern Sahara but rather came from the south just as one would expect on the basis of the distribution of Songhai alone. Now if we turn our attention to historically more recent as a mode of subsistence, the farming vocabulary is more is more split. There's a number of core concepts like a garden, grain, hoe and so a few more come from Songhai. But if we look at the specific crops involved in northern Saharan agriculture and many of the tools as well and technology as well, we find a much larger ponderance of Berber the words. Here we have big dates and cucumber and irrigation channel. So which suggests that while the Songhai speakers involved in formation of Qur'an jih were indeed so familiar with some kind of agriculture, it was more it was most likely an agriculture associated with with water climates rather and so with and not so much with northern Sahara per se, whereas the Berber speakers involved presumably were familiar with northern Saharan agriculture to some extent. A particularly interesting case for this is the key species in northern Saharan agriculture. So the date palm. In Qur'an jih, most of the words associated with dates are Berber loans but date palm itself is a Songhai inheritance. But the Songhai term does not mean date palm. It's consistently tested all across the Songhai range as doom palm, which is a different species, not so much less used in agriculture, which unlike the date palm grows very well in the Sahel. So the date palm in the Sahel is a relatively recent introduction at the southern limit of its range. So this suggests that so that they were that whatever form of cultivation the Songhai speakers involved practiced it was not centered on date palms, but that they were familiar with other palm species. Particularly instructive as a source of data beyond subsistence is the vocabulary for social hierarchy and kinship. The basic terminology for master and mistress and slave is all inherited from Songhai. Confirming that these social categorizations were conspicuous from at least from the period of Qur'an jih's emergence. Among kinship terms, we find that the Songhai survivals are restricted exclusively to equals your brother and your sister or hierarchical inferiors. You're a son near your daughter. With the isolated exception of stepfather, which involves a compound with Songhai more being fumu, meaning step or literally stinky. This term is felt as somewhat disrespectful by speakers today and I suspect it was felt much the same way in the past. Otherwise, your older relatives, those to whom you have greater respect and deference, are all given terms from Berber or in some cases from Arabic. This suggests that in the contact situation that saw the birth of Qur'an jih, Berber was preferred for marking respect and deference. This tells us something about the relative sociolinguistic statuses involved. So, bringing these threads together and a few more, it seems that the formation of Qur'an jih involved bringing together Songhai-speaking farmers coming from far to the south. Berber speaking groups practicing farming and hunting and as we'll see later, herding as well and much more familiar with northern Saharan contexts. Indigenous is perhaps controversial term here but certainly more familiar with the local environment in a context where the master-slave relation was highly salient. We should not necessarily assume that that was neatly distributed along ethnic lines. Nothing linguistically indicates that but we can safely say that it was salient. And all this in a context where Songhai must have remained the usual home language, otherwise it wouldn't have survived but where Berber was preferred for certain kinds of deferential interaction. This is already highly suggestive so it gives us a picture of somewhat reminiscent of plantation societies in a number of colonial contexts. But what turns out to complicate the picture considerably and what brings us to the second puzzle is the question of which kind of Berber was involved in this process. Now Berber is not a language but a language family. At least if you include the southern varieties such as Tuareg and Zanaka, they're clear cases of where mutual intelligibility is absent. There are enough non-trivial sound correspondences across this family that if we look closely and look at the right words, we can distinguish to some extent which variety of Berber a given word came from. Now many words, unsurprisingly, turn out to come from the varieties of the Moroccan atlas, Tamazirt and Terifit, and so marked in dark green here, or from these nati varieties and so forth marked in light green on this map. This is unsurprising because these are the closest Berber-speaking populations to Tabl-Balla today. They all have known historic and present-day interactions with Tabl-Balla and so finding such long words is exactly what we should expect. It's more difficult to identify Tuareg long words positively but there are a couple of those too and these again are not terribly surprising. Given that the Songhai component of Tabl-Balla seems to correspond to northern Songhai, to the varieties of northern Niger, where Tuareg is the most widely spoken language which is heavily influenced all these northern Songhai varieties. The trouble is a significant number of the Berber long words come from none of the above. They come from a branch which following Aiton-Balt, a label Western Berber, and so Southwestern might be a better term, which shows a quite a number of distinctive sound changes and which at present is spoken nowhere near Tabl-Balla. To give you some idea, here's a map of these two surviving Western Berber languages today. There's Naga in southwestern Mauritania, near the Atlantic, and Titsavet in central Niger. It's not quite in the northern Songhai region but not too far from it. Both are heavily endangered and so both have no wider prestige of the present day and are very unlikely sources for loan words in the current socio-linguistic context. Of course we should not project that back onto the past. We have good reason to know and to believe that Naga in particular was spoken across most of Mauritania at one point. So it's basically the language that Hassania Arabic replaced. So Titsavet is more of a puzzle but even there some reason to believe that it was least more widely spoken within the subgroups that currently speak it. Nevertheless, even projecting that back into the past doesn't bring us very close to Tabl-Balla a priori. So what's going on here? If we look at the specific words borrowed, we find first of all quite a strong concentration in the domain of pastoralism. There are some words like she camel, there's a male and female donkey, there's a goat and also a billy goat and kid goat, there's a colostrum. So basically a lot of the more detailed and more specific terms in pastoralism come from some western Berber language. The generic ones are still generally obtained from some but the specific one is not so much. We also find significant number of loan words which for one is a better term can be considered as related to identity. In the domain of religion for example, a lot of the Islamic term specifically Islamic terminology is borrowed from Berber and some of it is unambiguously borrowed from western Berber, notably the noon prayer one. So we find one of the out of the four villages of Tabl-Balla, one has a name of western Berber origin, Yami which in Tanshikh's dictionary of Zanagas in fact lost a sedentary village especially of black Africans which probably tells us more about the southern more Italian context than anything else. But at any rate, it shows the shift of the correspondence in the rest of Berber to a glottal stop or later lost in western Berber. So we have a somewhat derogatory term for a Hassania speaking Bedouin group. We have a verb for to veil one's face which as illustrated by the image to the side was the trademark of the of the of the Berber of the Berber groups of the Sahel specifically, the Zanhaja and the Tuareg throughout the Middle Ages. But beyond specific semantic domains, we also find a lot of western Berber vocabulary that's unambiguously made its way into the core of the language. So their influence is on morphology, the away particle suffix the verb and there's a couple of internal plural types which show an innovation specific to Zanaga, not even two tits of it. We have some body parts like thigh or finger, the colors like yellow, yellow, so basic spatial terms like middle. So this level of contact which is not so easy to prove for the northern Berber varieties suggests that the specific Berber variety that was mostly most heavily involved in the formation of Quaranzi was not one spoken in the north, nor one spoken in Niger, but rather was once spoken somewhere in the southwestern Sahara. So this brings us back to the problem. The Songai core of the Quaranzi is a clear match for northern Niger which has an area with a very low population and so the traditional explanation for the emergence of Quaranzi has been brought by slaves along the caravan routes. That doesn't really make sense in and of itself. If you're just looking for slaves to work in gardens then quite apart from the question of why they would retain their language, there's no reason why they should all come from northern Niger and the Berber data confirms this further. It compounds the problem I should say. It clearly ties into the southwestern Sahara and so much less to Niger and not all to northern Sahara in terms of the varieties involved in the formation of Quaranzi. To make sense of all this we need to look at the historical context in which Tabalbala was not necessarily founded but at least emerged as a place known to the rest of the world as a part of the economic map of the medieval world. The first mention of Tabalbala in a written source comes curiously enough not from North Africa or West Africa but from Spain, from Catalonia. The polymath and the writer, Mr Raymond Lule, writing a rather curious work of religious fiction in about 1285. He talks about a fictional cardinal sending an emissary south to find a vast caravan leaving from a town named Tabalbala for essentially the Niger Valley. This is consistent with every other mention of Tabalbala in medieval sources, all of which allude to it in the context of trade between North Africa and more specifically, usually, Sigil Masa and the Sahel, the Niger River Valley in general, and notably Timbakte. The date that this suggests is independently confirmed by archaeological data. Unfortunately, there's been no archaeological survey of Tabalbala but there are a number of tombstones surviving in Tabalbala, some of the two of which are dated. The Judeo-Arabic tombstone here is dated to 1322. The Arabic one to 1422, which gives us some idea of the period of Tabalbala's greatest flourishing. In between them you have a tombstone probably from a similar period, which features what appears to be a western Berber woman's name, Tazil, meaning literally hen, comparable to the more familiar name for Roja. Around about this period, 1200 to 1400, shall we say. It looks like 1200 to 1500, if you want to be more optimistic. Tabalbala seems to have been relatively important to trans-harm trade. It shows up in number of sources. It was present on the world map. The reason for this appears to relate to the shifting terminus of the trans-harm trade. Up to about 1250, caravans going south from Morocco generally headed towards the more Italian town of Odost, as you can see in this map. After that, Odost essentially disappears from history and trade shifts westward, first towards Iwalata in the time and later towards Timbuktu. On this map we see the route taken by Ibn Buput, the most famous traveler of this period, who went from Sijilmassa south through Tarraza to Iwalata and later to Timbuktu. Interestingly for our purposes, he describes a landscape as being a trans-harm economic landscape in flocks where one particular group, the messoufa, seemed to be playing a crucial role. His guide from Sijilmassa south was hired from the messoufa at an enormous price. On his way he passed the salt mines of Tarraza, which he states were owned by the messoufa and worked by their slaves. When he later makes it to Timbuktu, he again notes the dominance of the messoufa, suggesting that this newly emerging western route was, to some extent, controlled or at least significantly dominated by this originally Sahile and Berber group. Essentially, the scenario this suggests is one of the nomads of this region, taking advantage of their knowledge of largely unpopulated terrain to promote travel and commercial travel, trans-harm trade on the one hand and the exploitation of mineral resources on the other in both cases to their profit, of course. Further east, he said in Mbuktu visits Azalik, the town most closely associated with the emergence of Northern Solnai. So where he describes a different Sahile and Berber group, what he calls the Buridama, which is corresponding to the Tuareg, as having become enormously rich through their domination of the copper mines, from which they sold copper to an enormous area stretching across northern Nigeria and Chad. He finally returns to Sijilmasa. All the places in red here, Tabelbala, Tuat, Tarrasa, Timbuktu and Azalik, their first recorded written mentions date to this period. So we can safely say that the west central Sahara was effectively being developed in this period. It was entering a global economy with significant effects on the jargon of settlement, among other things. Now if we look at the specific commodities involved, we finally see what the connection between Tabelbala and Northern Niger could be. Now there's, when we talk about the trans-harm trade, usually we talk about salt and gold, salt heading south and gold heading north from the mines of Mali and ultimately of Ghana. But other commodities were involved and one of the most important of them was copper. During this period, copper was so valuable in West Africa that it was worth, found commercially viable to export it from Europe through to Limsan across the Sahara over land. We've already seen from Ibn Battot's account how rich the copper mines of Azalik made their owners. In this context, one would naturally expect a group seeking to develop the emerging trade routes between Sijilmasa and Wallata and Timbuktu to not only try to promote agriculture in any way, sees on the way, such as Tabelbala, but also to try and promote the mining of any copper resources that might be found within that domain. And sure enough, about 50 kilometers from Tabelbala, we find a medieval copper mine at the mountain of Bintlajin. It's currently currently disused, but known to have been used in the medieval period. So in this context, we can more easily understand why all these elements could have come together. The founders, the linguistic founders of Quanzhi must have included both Berber speaking nomads with southwestern Saharan roots, seeking to improve the routes between Sijilmasa and Wallata and Timbuktu that they controlled by making supplies along the way easier. And Songhai speaking workers from the Azalik region who are familiar not only with the ways of agriculture, but also with copper mining specifically. This greater skill would have translated into a position of greater autonomy in this context as well, which could help explain why they kept their language and so what allowed them to keep their language. So during this period of about 1200 to 1500, it looks very much as if Tabelbala was functioning effectively as a plantation if you like. It's much like Cape Verde later on, a place useful simultaneously for trade as a way stop for traders and as a resource colony, but one run from the south, not from the north. This state of affairs would change drastically after about 1500 when the rise of oceanic trade effectively sent the trans-harm trade into a long-term decline. But I don't think we have time to cover that at the moment, so I'm very happy to take questions on that if you'd like to hear more. And sorry. Okay, great. It's great. Thank you so much. I mean, really interesting to hear that story and see this language, yeah, not just as one more context situation, but sort of a living monument to this complex history behind there, all the traces left behind, what's going on. Yeah, really a massive history behind what's going on in this particular language. If you have any questions for Lameen or anything you want to follow up on, please do share that in the chat. While we wait for those questions to come in, Leen, do you want to go ahead and elaborate a bit more on what you were just talking about on the screen? Okay, sure. Let me see. I suppose in that case I'd better share the screen again. Okay, so basically, from about 1500 on, we see cleared signs of decline and tabloid up. So the Leo Africanus 1550 describes them as most miserably and miserable and beckoning people, which hardly corresponds to what we see in earlier periods. We see clear signs of a political reorientation. So the figures of the only well-known, so the value of this period, seems to have cultivated strong ties on both sides of the Sahara, but in particular, made an effort to cultivate ties with the Moroccan government of the period. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be sufficient, in particular, after the Trans-Saharan trade was enormously disrupted in 1591 by the Moroccan invasion of the Songhai Empire, which ended up bringing the Moroccan Sadian dynasty down as well. And as a side effect, apparently, one of the villages in Tabl Bala found that it couldn't pay its customary tribute anymore, and its male population got massacred as a result. The refugees fled to another oasis, and the surviving population of the oasis was effectively left with very little resident elite. In this context, what seemed to have happened is a sort of process of elite replacement, where the currently dominant families in Tabl Bala are the Iti Ahia and Itzfoul. The former are descended from a trader and holy man, Sid Al-Arab ibn Yahya, who came from the north, probably somewhere from the northeast, in the late 18th century, and dominate the village under one of the largest families in the village of Quara. The latter, Itzfoul, come from a branch of the Moroccan Eta Alta alliance, who largely speak Tamazirt, which was expanding its power in the region throughout the 19th century, into which Tabl Bala was paying tribute in much of that period. So to understand how this works, however, it's important to understand that we're dealing with that in the Sahara, in the region more generally, only patrilineal descent counts. So you have these two groups defined by patrilineal descent as belonging to wider families with connections all across the north, in this all across northern Algeria and central Morocco and so forth, but who've evidently married extensively into the families that were already there. So if we adopt a less strictly patrilineal perspective than would locally be customary, we can view this as essentially a way of changing the family affiliation of the people already resident in the Oasis, in order to give them a much better bargaining position in this new context where the southern trade no longer gets them very far and relations with their northern neighbors are essential for security. So since the 20th century, of course, all this has changed again, and we have a progressive shift towards Arabic. The French conquest introduced, in 1908, introduced a new Arabic-speaking center that grew up around the fortress and began the very slow process of freedom for former slaves who in general shifted directly to Arabic rather than to quarantine, further promoting Arabic. Ever since independence, the Oasis has increasingly been integrated into a modern economy where most people seek employment rather than working on their farms and in this context Arabic is, of course, essential. They also have extensive immigration and immigration, both of which act to promote Arabic. However, we shouldn't be naive and look just at the pull factors. There are also some less pleasant push factors, namely a clear and widespread prejudice against the local languages that aren't Arabic. Approximately everybody I ever discussed the question with in the region at some point came out with the proverb, that is, quarenzy or berber is no more proper speech than oil's animal fat. So the idea being that it's essentially associated with poverty and insufficient prestige and hospitality and so forth, we can go into that in more detail if you want. But what really seems to have tipped the balance is the introduction of universal education. The teachers who came to the Oasis have found that they could communicate easily with the Arabic-speaking children, but not with quarenzy-speaking children. They told the parents, you can't stop speaking Arabic to start speaking Arabic to your kids instead of quarenzy so that they'll be able to understand us. One of the villagers actually got together and voted to do that. The other gradually followed suit piecemeal. But the upshot is that as of last time I spent a long period in the Oasis, most people my age or younger hardly speak quarenzy in one of the villages. In the other one they still speak it, but generally by picking it up in their teen years, up until about the age of 12 they're very hesitant to speak it and default to Arabic. For them their first language is Arabic today and not quarenzy. So this might change. There are some signs of a more flexible attitude towards regional languages, sometimes even of taking pride in quarenzy, but there's very little prospect of giving it any kind of effective official recognition. So it's prospects are currently quite uncertain. Just to conclude with some wider generalizations, what all this suggests to me is that first of all I'd like to advise everyone doing linguistic fieldwork to give lexicon do attention. It often has greater cross disciplinary relevance than the syntactic or morphological details that we tend to focus on as linguists. And if you're doing historical linguistics to avoid the temptation of thinking in terms of expanding and contracting blobs on the map and think more widely to other disciplines like economic history. Okay, so well thank you once again for listening and I guess it looks like the questions are piling up. Yeah that was really great, really interesting and that was going to be my question about the current state of the language where I mean obviously once it was very prestigious, but today it's declining, but it seems like maybe at some point there wasn't a stabilized point in history where it declined but then kind of reached some stabilization or has it been in steady decline do you think since a couple centuries? I would say that I mean that's an interesting question. I mean quarenzy well the oasis has been declined since about 1500 I suppose economically. But yeah, but the the language on the other hand doesn't it doesn't seem to have been affected by this in terms of its prospects for survival until about I would say you know the mid 20th century or so I mean so until I'm basically anybody who immigrated to tablo bella for about 1950 ended up speaking quarenzy. So it was a it may have it may not have been any use anywhere else, but that doesn't matter much when the when the nearest place is three days anyway. You have to adjust to the environment you're in and it's essentially up until the up until the 1950s or so tablo bella imposed its own speech norms on anybody who came here. So from about the 1980s or so you have a clear you have a clear shift whereby local speech norms become less relevant and global or even national national or at least provincial speech norms become much more relevant essentially displacing the norm that you have to speak quarenzy and tablo bella. Let's try to give us some of these questions. First compliment from Peter Austin. This was a masterclass in historical linguistic research. Do you see the origins as similar to or different from creoles in other locations? Ah, I was hoping somebody would I would mention that. Well, thanks. Thanks first of all. That's so I really appreciate that. And I would say that the historical circumstances of the formation of tablo of quarenzy are strikingly reminiscent of those that led to the formation of creoles in other contexts in the Caribbean, for example, which is so which makes it very which makes it all the more interesting that the result doesn't look much like our like, you know, to use a very dubious concept that our creole prototypes at all. Nobody looking at quarenzy will be tempted to describe it as a prototypical creole. It's it's it's a structure in many ways more complicated than any of it. So then then it's primary lexifier. And on top of that, it differs the you have the obvious difference from the Caribbean from creoles, which is that the lexifier is not the super straight language. It's it's it's the language it's seems to be the language of the majority of the speech community that produced it. So so I think that so I think that quarenzy is an interesting makes an interesting contrast in that respect tells us something about what happens in these kinds of situations of massive labor migration. But what it tells us is that the is that the result doesn't have to look like what we see in in the Caribbean, or so or in or in Cape Verde or so or Southern Sudan, for example. Yeah. And the typical case being all of the lexicon from these other certain whatever languages are then a different syntax on the substrate being the prototypical case. Well, the the yeah, I mean, the well, you know, the most lexicon coming from this, you know, this super straight lexifier is certainly prototypical, the source of the syntax is more disputable in that there's usually not just one substrate, but a whole bunch of them. And, you know, the idea of pinning down features to languages of the Atlantic coast of Africa is quite a generalization. Another question here about Western Berber. Do we have evidence of Western Berber varieties, such as the Naga being more widespread further north and east in the past. So you mentioned there's obviously a connection with the other linguistic evidence for how widespread this this like these varieties were. There is a bit the so in turn in in terms of the of its Eastern spread, an important an important piece of data actually comes from another Northern Songai language. Now Northern Songai in general does not proto Northern Songai does not have a reconstructable Western Berber elements far as I can tell. So, but one Northern Songai language to Daxahak does have an enormous contribution from Western Berber aside from Quaranji. And interestingly, it seems to be a different contribution. A lot of the a lot of the Western Berber words that you find most of the Western Berber words you find in Quaran in the to Daxahak are not shared with Quaranji, suggesting a separate contact event. So, we have some reason to believe that a Western Berber variety was more widespread in somewhere around somewhere in the northeastern Niger at some point. And further to the north, my default hypothesis would be that that I said that Hassania essentially replaced Zanaga. So, the borders Hassania today are probably a good indication of where the borders of Western Berber were in the past in that area. But that's that remains to be verified. So, you'd really need a lot more data on Northern Hassania to confirm that we have right now, at least than I have right now. There's another question and perhaps in a sense getting back to the Creole issue, but we can ask it was a very interesting presentation given the mixed nature of the Quaranji language. How do we classify it? I would classify it as a Songai language on the basis that the core is Songai, that the vast majority of any given text by token count will reflect Songai origins. However, it's at the same time, I can also see the argument that this is one of those cases that show the limitations of a monogenetic model to some extent. Songai is clearly the main source for Quaranji in a reasonably unambiguous way, but at the same time, the influence of Berber is not something peripheral. It's also part of the core, even if it's a lesser part of the core. So, I wouldn't call it a mixed language myself, but I can understand people who would. Sorry, I got a lot of questions coming in all of a sudden, so let me scroll through a bit. I had a question about the social aspects of what's going on here. I think you mentioned this briefly, but was there intermarriage between Songai and Berbers in the Middle Ages or were those the communities socially separate in the past? Well, okay. I mean, well, first of all, I'm not sure that either of those is, well, community is always a term I'm a bit leery about. I don't think that either Songai or Berber really refers to a community until recent times. For my purposes, they're linguistic entities. How people, how speakers viewed those is a different question. But of course, there was intermarriage. So, it's not something that I've looked into in detail, but we know that there's a, but I mean, we have, so there's some interesting, there's some interesting texts that Paolo Morais-Parias has drawn attention to in this regard. So talking about the, talking about some, some leading groups in the, among the Berber speakers of the Sahel, changing their color, which of course, which in his interpretation, of course, which in his interpretation is due to the, you know, to the influence of the sun. But it's a, but most likely it simply reflects intermarriage, which is exactly what you'd expect. There's, there's some evidence that the, that the al-Murab, that the founders, that one of the founders, founders of the al-Murabid movement, for example, so had, had, had in-laws among the, among the, among the aristocracy of medieval Ghana, which is in, which of course, which is not a, which is not modern Ghana. It's in roughly the Suninke area. And so, so of course, there was intermarriage. I mean, why wouldn't there be? But see if I get to one or two more questions. This might be more straightforward. How is the name Quran Jih derived? Do you know what that's from? Oh, yes. It's a, well, Quara means town or village. So Jih means speech or word. So, and is the, is the gender marker. So Quran Jih is speech of the village. So, or speech of, speech of the hometown, if you like. Yeah. Maybe as last question, one person asked, what are your, your current plans with the Quran Jih research? Do you have work in the pipeline or what direction is this going? Well, the current COVID situations obviously raised all sorts of questions as to possibility for future field work. But I would like to, but I am, among other things, I am continuing work, work on Quran Jih. And so I've been, this year, I've been working on transcribing some of the texts that I've recorded earlier and trying to, and trying to expand the dictionary and my hope is eventually to publish some kind of reference grammar and ideally an etymological lexicon. But yeah, I mean, the current situation means that any kind of fieldwork plans are up near. Well, thank you so much for being here with us. Of course, these online webinars are in part consequence of COVID too, but there's a bit of a silver lining and that so many people from all over the world get to join. And yeah, we thank you for making this really interesting and insightful and meaningful time and wish you the best of luck in your future research as well. Whether the doors, yeah, those doors, the fieldwork will open soon for you and we'll be able to continue to learn more about this really interesting place and language. Okay. Well, well, thank you so much for inviting me and thank you all for listening. It's been a very interesting talk. I'm sorry, it looks like there's a number of questions I haven't had the opportunity. I guess if people want to follow up, they could find you on Twitter perhaps. Is that the easiest thing? Sure. You can find me on Twitter or you can email me at lemene at gmail.com. I don't guarantee a quick reply. I'm actually technically I'm on a haul there right now, but I will try to respond. Yeah, and you also have a great website people can search for and find a lot of background information as well, so I encourage people who are interested to do that also. Yeah, so especially thanks for taking time out of your holiday to do this. I hope the rest of your holiday is an actual break from your work and a relaxing and enjoyable time. Okay, well, well, thank you so much. Thanks everyone for joining and being here and for all your encouraging words as well. Thanks everyone. Okay. Bye all.