TY - JOUR AB - Mena Lafkioui and Vermondo Brugnatelli (eds.): Berber in Contact: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. (Berber Studies vol. 22). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 2008. 231 pp. EUR 39.80. Berber offers great opportunities for the student of language contact. After 1400 years, Berber is everywhere influenced by Arabic, while Arabic dialects from Mauritania to western Egypt show the effects of a Berber substratum. Contact with Romance has had a similarly long history, usually less intimate but intensified in the colonial era; education perpetuates a flow of loanwords and even code-mixing, while emigration to Europe has provided a new pathway for rather more intense contact. Less conspicuous but in need of more research are Berber contact with sub-Saharan languages and, not least, intraBerber contact between different varieties. It was thus with high expectations that I opened Berber in Contact: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. The long history of Arabic-Berber contact is underlined by two papers focusing on early Arabic-script sources. Nait-Zerrad’s “Notes sur des termes berbères dans le Nuzhat al-mušt¯ q d’El-Idrisi” places some of the Berber terms a found in this twelfth-century geography in a comparative perspective. De Felipe’s “Medieval linguistic contacts: Berber language through Arab eyes” discusses how Arabic-language medieval authors talked TI - Book Reviews JF - Journal of African Languages and Linguistics DO - 10.1515/JALL.2009.011 DA - 2009-12-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/book-reviews-00e3vOpRt6 SP - 263 EP - 268 VL - 30 IS - 2 DP - DeepDyve ER -